yeeha bob – Mkingdon's Blog

The Anniversary Adventure 2026 Part Two Sponsored by Tylenol – Day Three September 12th

18/10/202625/10/2026 by mkingdon, posted in The Anniversary Adventure 2026 Part Two Sponsored by Tylenol

Over the years I have not been shy to lecture folks on all kinds of WDW related subjects and how they should do it my way rather than the wrong way. This kind of unbending dogmatic preaching is quite endearing I’m sure.

One of those gems was that day two should *always* be a rest day. The long travel day, the jet lag and the post adrenaline crash after the excitement of the first park day (and that has to be Magic Kingdom of course) can lead to a grumpy and unsatisfactory day two.

Anyway, today we were completely ignoring my own advice as we needed a rest day tomorrow as we planned to do some drinking this evening.

Amazingly I had slept from 9 to 5, what a way to make a living. Everyone was tired this morning so we lazed around for a while and didn’t leave the house until 8.20am. Today we took Sherberth Road and discovered that Mikey cannot say that word without sounding like Christian Slater in Austin Powers.

We were all laughing a lot at this as we got to the top of Sherberth and then all of a sudden the hilarity stopped as I realised I had left my attractive bum bag on the chest of drawers in our bedroom.

There was a brief amount of time whilst I calculated if we could do without it before deciding we could not and turning around. Credit cards are pretty vital in this neck of the woods. I apologised to the group for my incompetence and spent the drive home silently berating myself for ruining the whole day, and holiday and next ten holidays. I’m not one to over react.

It cost us forty minutes in total and as we arrived at the gates of Animal Kingdom, it was rammed. This would be a theme of this trip for reasons we never really fathomed. It would often take ten to fifteen minutes to pay them $35 for parking!

As we queued today, some idiot cut us up very badly adding to my already sunny disposition. It would seem it might be one of those mornings.

We parked in Dinosaur.

As we made it to the top of the row a full tram was just pulling away. Sigh. So we took up a position at the front of the poles that denoted where the tram would pull up. A few moments later it did, but the end of the tram was about ten feet past us, leaving us with no tram to get onto.

We did manage to find some seats which allowed me to seethe a little more as we headed toward some Disney magic.

I felt guilty about the delayed start to the day so bought Lightning Lanes for the day. Our first hastily made LL was Festival of the Lion King at 10.30.

Knowing we would now have LLs today, I felt less pressured to charge around and allowed us to take onboard some breakfast. We did this at Starbucks and sat on a wall opposite the kiosk that sells that viral ice cream sandwich thing. It didn’t open until 10.30 but the queue started to form at 10.15 and from what we saw through the day never went away.

After eating we wandered towards Lion King and even took in a couple of shops before entering the queue. We would be Elephants.

As I always do I attempted and failed to take some impressive scenery shots.

This show never fails to impress, no matter how many times we have seen it, and we have seen it a lot!

Whilst in this show I also invested in some LLs for Flight of Passage. This was likely to be our one day at Animal Kingdom and the wait time was offensive. I had to do a lot of refreshing to get a time we could do and eventually one popped up for 11.30 rather than the 6pms I’d been seeing and we’d be out of the park by then.

Once the show ended we walked over to FOP via a restroom, and undertook the longest preshow on property, surely?

Again, an experience that impresses every time. There was a brief shower of rain as we exited the ride. We sheltered whilst Emily and Mikey had their Crocodile Sandwich thing as they had only had coffees earlier.

We were Everest bound for another LL.

We were off at 10.50 and being in this part of the park it seemed obvious to go and do the Nemo show that started at 11am. There were some members of the party not overly keen to do so, but I am the map, so off we went.

We sat right down at the front and everyone enjoyed it.

This song was of course the highlight.

We walked over towards Tusker House and got a couple of beers and two waters from the bar there. We had a brief sit down before heading off towards what will always be known to us as Birds of Flight for the upcoming show time. Some idiot had got the show time wrong so instead we spent twenty minutes or so watching these guys.

They were excellent.

The next bird show was now happening so we took our seats.

Despite all of our burning rage that It’s Tough To Be A Bug was no more, we were now about to witness the new Zootopia thing for the first time. Look, I know I am not the target audience for this and granted I don’t think I’ve ever seen Zootopia but this was not for me.

It just seemed like a lot of shouting and chaos without any of the charm of the old thing. I’m sure kids will love it, or younger parents with some form of connection with the film, but this feels like a downgrade.

We browsed a couple more shops before doing the safari just as the rain started.

Our driver was great and I would recommend the front seats if you can get them. The rain stopped by the time we got off. Maybe the Gods don’t hate me today after all.

It was now time to head out of the park, recognising we hadn’t done a lot of things on offer here. Alas, we had plans to see two of our favourite piano players this evening and the first of those would be in Grand Floridian lobby. We drove over to Magic Kingdom and parked in Simba. A tram and a monorail got us over to Grand Floridian, nicely circumventing the “you off site scum cannot visit resorts any more” rule.

We found some seats that were not ideal and got a drink.

This resort oozes class.

I cannot explain the dinosaur.

Michael (our fave from the Jellyrolls days) began to play shortly afterwards.

Luckily some seats opened up and Louise pounced on them like Steven Segal.

We spent a lovely couple of hours listening and having a couple of drinks.

Just before we had to leave I requested he played Wishes, which fully broke Emily, who was in floods of tears, to the extent that he came over and asked if she was OK. I think he understood.

A Lyft was summoned to take us over to Port Orleans now as we had a date with Yeeha Bob! The Lyft was a Tesla with a human in it but, as I observed being sat in the front, the whole trip was done in self drive mode. It was only mildly stressful.

At resort security it seems any kind of ride share gets you can immediate wave through and we were in. There were no seats initially but some loitering and patience saw us gradually obtain and improve our seating over the next hour or so.

We ordered some food as we were all hungry now.

It was as good as it looks and we destroyed it.

Eventually our seats were this good.

It turned out that I had left my credit card in the card reader at the bar when I got our first round of drinks when we had no table. Luckily the server spotted me as she was leaving and said she’d left it at reception. Honestly I am beginning to worry myself. I wandered over and picked it up. I wasn’t even drinking!!!

Everyone else was and they were all pretty worse for wear by the end of the night. I ordered another Lyft at 12 to take us back to the TTC. A tram got us back to the car and I got us home in one piece by about 12.40. I told you we’d need a rest day tomorrow.

In the end, this was a great day. We got a decent amount done, albeit at some expense at Animal Kingdom despite the delayed start and early departure, but the evening was really lovely. We all thought it was one of the highlights of our trip. Right now though I was very sober and very tired, so sleep was welcome.

Till the next time……

The Coats, Boats and Little Scrotes Tour 2023 – Day Four Thursday 12th January

19/02/2023 by mkingdon, posted in The Coats, Boats and Little Scrotes Tour 2023

Thursday 12th January

I won’t go on about how I was awake at 2.40am. I’ll just mention it once. Nobody wants to hear about my interrupted sleep pattern, do they? Granted, that was very early, but I should just crack on and not linger on this boring detail. Especially as, after a pee, I slept on until 5. Yeah, best not to mention it.

That was just my body clock naturally making sure I was awake in time to undertake all the admin required on the Disney app to try and get on some rides. When the relevant time slots came around I bagged a boarding group for Guardians and bought Genie+ again. Disney, you robbing bar stewards.

We were all ready and out of the door by 7.45 and did the short drive to Epcot. We were one of the first to arrive and parked right down at the front. There was, it may not shock you to learn, a decent queue at the “turnstiles” so we picked a line that would naturally move slower than all the others.

Our ability to select the line that sees the party ahead of us have issues with their tickets, fingers, magic bands and competence levels is top-notch. At one point the CM was taking photos of them all with their iPad thing, hopefully, to go on their criminal record for holding us up. We used an alternative scanner thing, leaving them there. I still don’t think they are in the park.

We arrived at the front, scanned a band, laid a finger down, and were in.

Early entry time again so we waited about ten minutes for a rope to drop and headed, at a brisk walking pace, to the Land with Soarin’ on our minds. This chap was on the scrim boarding near the rope drop.

Despite hordes of folks heading the same way as us, very few actually turned into The Land which surprised me. Where were they headed? Probably up to O Canada to wait for it to open at 11, right?

Despite knowing by this stage that we would be able to just walk on to Soarin’, the urge to walk faster was almost irresistible for me. Louise loves that.

We did indeed walk straight on and after a briefing from Patrick, we took our seats.

Join us as we ride Soarin’.

I allowed breakfast now. We went to the only just opened food court in The Land and got three breakfast sandwiches, one without Ham for Emily and I had some overnight oats. I’m sure CVS have a cream for that though. $38.

With Genie+ in the bag and a feeling that today wasn’t going to be that busy, we went on Living With The Land for the first time in about two decades. It was very interesting and much better than we remembered.

It would turn out that our Genie+ purchase today wasn’t essential. The only queues all day looked to be Remy and Test Track. We walked down to Spaceship Earth next and tolerated a fifteen-minute wait to board. There should be a refund option by a certain time of the day in these situations.

Restrooms next for Louise so Emily and I went into Club Cool and tried a couple of weird sodas.

Once we had Louise back we walked over to the Seas and rode Nemo. That’s the sequel you won’t see on Disney+.

A ten-minute wait for the shells. We disem-shelled and didn’t do anything else in there as we normally might as our LL for Test Track was now imminent. On our journey over there we could see the progress on the build of the “Moana thing”. It’s this level of detail that you read this crap for, right?

and whatever this will be.

I also booked another LL as we walked, this time for Mission Space, for “now” so we could ride that immediately after Test Track.

We didn’t bypass too much of a standby wait before joining the main queue to design our car.

Once that was done we spilt out of that room into the next part of the queue which is a real mess. All the doors dump you into a corridor where you have to jostle for position and everyone tries and fails to keep their parties together whilst not wanting to appear rude.

After enjoying the ride we made the short trip across to Mission Space where it was absolutely fine that Emily chose the Orange side and not the Green, honestly.

I still miss Gary Sinise’s hair in the old briefing, to be honest, but I was just glad to enjoy the ride and not feel like I wanted to revisit my breakfast afterwards. We got a couple of coffees and a water and had a sit down for a bit near Guardians and did some people watching for about forty minutes. We were just killing time until our boarding group came up and that happened at 1.25. It took about half an hour to get through the queue and pre-shows. Having ridden it once before we knew that it’s better to be over on the right in the pre-show room as that is where the door opens.

What I had forgotten was that there are two pre-show rooms. In another episode of “you couldn’t write it”, I was standing up against the door on the right in what turned out to be the first of two rooms (I had forgotten that fact from our one previous ride). As that show came to an end, literally to the second, behind me the doors opened and I turned ready to Dad walk to the ride. Turns out that a CM just happened to be coming in through that door at that exact time and said, politely, “Where are you going?” as I tried to go into what was clearly a backstage area.

I assumed the same position in the next room and did manage to get us down to the ride ahead of 95% of the folks in our group. Top tip, stand to the right, but in the second room.

Anywho, the ride was tremendous again and we got Tears for Fears this time.

Having conquered most of Future World, I allowed us to walk up to World Showcase now. Being the Festival of the Arts, we wandered past a lot of art.

Breaking every rule in the book, we bypassed several countries and went to China. Louise needed food for her medication and the quick service in China seemed the best option based on the queues we saw in Mexico and there only being cakes in Norway. Today was not our official World Showcase day so it was almost OK to do things abnormally.

We were amazed to find zero vegetarian options for Emily other than a full meal of a veg stir-fry thing. Louise and I shared some pot stickers and egg rolls which allowed her to take her tablets. I may have over-ordered.

Conscious that Emily hadn’t eaten in at least a few hours, we left Louise to finish up and Emily and I speed-walked over to Italy with the intention of getting Emily a slice of pizza from the window at Via Napoli. It was of course closed. Onwards we marched, determined to find something that did not include meat. You can imagine that the BBQ place in America was not the one, but just past that Emily settled on a funnel cake as a nutritious way to fill a gap. I left her to buy that whilst I restroomed. I may have helped finish it off as we sat at a table outside the American pavilion and we messaged Louise to tell her where we were, which was not Italy as we had said. She didn’t reply for a worrying amount of time so we walked back to Italy hoping to find her there.

We did. She was oblivious to our search around the world for food, as her phone was in Ryan and he was on my back.

We went back to America again as the Voices of Liberty were due to start. We even managed to get a seat.

I did a Facebook live of this if you wanted to watch their show.

After watching this and the drummer folks in Japan, again this was starting to feel like “old WDW” may be returning in some ways.

We continued our wander around World Showcase.

We just browsed in most pavilions along the way.

before making our way down through the park to the exit.

We drove back to the resort for showers and readying and headed out for tea at Bahama Breeze. We were not starving it has to be said but we’re on holiday so who cares.

We were seated immediately and served by a Scottish chap called Euan who we struggled to understand so heaven help the Americans.

Cocktails for the ladies.

and a lovely Diet Coke for me.

No appetisers tonight, just straight to the mains.

Me – Chicken Tostada Salad (again).

Emily and Louise had the jerk pasta, one without chicken.

The bill was $119ish and we paid using the device on the table as we needed to be on our way. We were headed to Port Orleans to watch Yeeha’ Bob!

We were incredibly lucky to find just one table left in the bar as we arrived so we bagged that and ordered some drinks. Bob did his usual wander around the tables gathering information on where folks are from etc.

I had Pomegranate Lemonade, Louise, wine and various cocktails for Emily.

If you want to see videos of almost his entire show, head over to Louise on Facebook, as she posted them all there!

We loved the show and Emily enjoyed it for the first time.

We did witness some absolute shithousery from a couple in front of us.

Not long into the show a table emptied and a couple came to claim it. It was a large table which could easily seat eight people. It was in fact two tables pushed together. Not long afterwards another lady wandered up and very politely asked the lady from the first couple if she minded if they took the other half of the table.

Well, the first lady did mind, very much, but couldn’t bring herself to say so. You could see her mind racing, looking for a reason to say no, but she could not. Instead, she just literally said “Whatever” and then proceeded to try and wrestle the two tables apart for about five minutes, failing miserably. She sat there with a face like a slapped arse.

Her partner returned to the table and they proceeded to look at the food menu. After quite some time and several chats with their server, the chef appeared. He had a long conversation with them, taking copious notes and nodding earnestly as this couple talked at him. He went way to construct what would no doubt be the world’s most complex meal, despite the menu only offering bar snacks.

Then their server brought their drinks. That order had taken about ten minutes too and the minute the drinks hit the table the man took one sniff (yes, sniff) of his drink and handed it back. The server showed him her pad where she had clearly written down his exacting request, but no, he was not having it.

“I never usually send things back,” he said as the server wandered away back to the bar.

Eventually, he was happy with his drink and their food arrived. What had been the result of their long consultation with the chef?

Wings.

Look, I know folks have allergies etc, but these two were bellends who just wanted to feel important. Their entire demeanour was horrible and there was just no need for it. It’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice, right?

Thankfully they buggered off soon after, leaving the other family on the table to enjoy the rest of the show.

Whilst that was an interesting diversion it did not stop us from enjoying Bob’s show and we left around 11pm. The drive home was thankfully short and sleep did not have trouble finding us.

Till the next time……

The No Parks and Recreation Tour 2022 – Day Six

20/11/2022 by mkingdon, posted in The No Parks and Recreation Tour 2022

Saturday 24th September

Today, we rest, after of course waking up at 6am.

We watched some coverage of incoming Ian, knowing by now that we’d suffer some disruption, but there was bugger all we could do about it so, as you should with all life’s problems, we ignored them and carried on with the holiday.

We dozed for a bit and must have fallen back asleep as we were not up and out until 10.45. We walked to the main building and found some breakfast in the River Market.

We both had the Mickey Waffle Bounty Platter.

Whilst it was indeed a platter of bounty, being fat bastards, I wandered off and found us a cake each too.

Next, a highlight of the trip, as we wandered the gift shop looking for plasters for Louise’s poorly feet. Living La Vida Loca indeed. We secured some and some “bits” and left to walk back to the quiet pool near our building.

It was and remained very quiet indeed for most of the day. I was in “kneed” of some R&R.

It was lovely and hot today, perfect for doing not a great deal around some water.

At various points, we dipped our hot bodies into the pool and then lay in the sun for a while. It is this sort of content that makes for a thrilling trip report. To remedy that here is an exhilarating photo of the laundry and restrooms by this pool.

At one point I ventured into that building to liberate two bottles of water from the vending machine. There have been briefer hostage negotiations, as the witchcraft and guile needed to supply the relevant bills and coins in the right order for the machine to cooperate were laughable. We needed and enjoyed the water though.

We’d had enough of this level of excitement by around 4pm and we went back to the room to get ready to go and eat. You will notice we had not eaten lunch today. This frankly was irresponsible.

Our hunger no doubt hurried our readying and we were back out and in the car by 5.30 headed for Bahama Breeze at Lake Buena Vista. I had reserved a table online for 6.30 but time was tight as we wanted to get Louise the traditional new pair of trainers in an effort to stop her feet from preventing any further walking this trip.

I was feeling the stress of the ticking clock. The traffic was horrific around the Premium Outlet Mall of course. Parking was equally challenging but we were fortunate to fluke a spot quickly as we happened across someone coming out. It was now 18.05.

We walked briskly to the shops and soon found an Adidas shop. We had about ten minutes to find something suitable and by some miracle we did it. The first pair Louise tried on were the ones so I quickly paid and we made our way back to the car. We were off again at 18.25 and we just needed to make the short journey back to Bahama Breeze. The queuing traffic was the only thing preventing us from being on time.

After all our rushing and my stressing we were checking in at 18.35 with no issues. We were seated immediately and kicked things off with some Guac and Chips.

I “only” had a salad. As ever, a salad in Florida turned up needing three people to carry it, and it was delicious and incredibly filling. The menu helpfully told me this was “only” 860 calories. I know the runners and riders in this competition are limited, but this could well be the best salad I had ever eaten. Sure it contained melted cheese, but shouldn’t every salad?

You may have already guessed that Louise had a pasta thing. This may be her favourite pasta thing in the world as she always has the Jerk Chicken Pasta here.

Louise had a Long Island Iced Tea and I of course had a few diet cokes. Altogether the bill was £75 plus a good tip. I paid using one of those new fandangled machines on the table and we left.

We were going to spend this evening in the company of Yeehaa Bob, so back at the resort, I dropped Louise off at the main building and then went back to our building to park the car. Louise bagged us a table whilst I did that and we ordered some drinks.

I started with an Octoberfest beer and Louise of course had red wine while we waited for the main man to arrive.

Being very full and unable to continue onboarding large quantities of liquid I moved on to Chocolate Martinis. Yes, plural.

They were delicious and based on their taste, had no alcohol whatsoever in them.

Somewhere in this time Bob had turned up and started to perform. I seem to have only taken photos of what I was drinking.

After a Mai Tai, I was onto a couple of Negretos.

Oh, there he is.

It was all very enjoyable and I say that as someone who abhors shows with audience participation. You can choose to be involved as little as you wish. There was a large group down by the stage who did a lot of “participating, ” allowing others to sit back and enjoy. A really good fun night out.

We were both, I believe the kids would say “buzzing” and we didn’t leave the bar until about 12.30. You probably know that I do not drink very often and after the amount and variety of stuff I had necked tonight, it was impressive that somehow I navigated our way back to the room avoiding a large body of water and an unintended swim and we probably went straight to sleep. Turns out we’d spent about $200 on drinks, so yes, we definitely went straight to sleep.

Till the next time……

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