WDW 2005 - Day 5

We were up and at 'em soon enough, and back in the Magic Kingdom by 4:45.   We rode the boat to the Contemporary since it was at the dock when we arrived. Up three escalators and onto the Monorail. We were first there and asked if it would be possible to sit up front.   They said they would check. As luck would have it, we did get ti sit up there. Very nice! We even got to stay all the way to the Magic Kingdom where each of us received our Monorail Pilot License. :-)

It was still brutally hot but the crowds going in were not too bad at this time.   We had all our Virtual Magic Kingdom sheets completed and headed into the theatre first thing. We turned in our sheets for Tomorrowland (printed online), Fantasyland, Adventureland and Frontierland! We got all the cards of prizes (quiet a stack!) and our green, glow in the dark VMK wristbands. And we have cards to sign up for the VMK tour. Hope we get a chance to do it this trip! We may have to work it in next week! Brinn really wants to do it and I'm sure it would be lots of fun!

We created some characters in the parks next. That took us up to the time when Cinderellabration was about to start. We headed to the Castle and found a spot to watch. Full sun, so it was a hot one, but a VERY accommodating cloud covered the sun from show start to finish. That helped more than you can imagine! The show was cute and the girls really enjoyed it. Seeing all the Princesses all dressed in new clothes and colors seemed to be a hit with them!

After the show we headed back to Tomorrowland for a Stitch Fast Pass and then over to the Plaza Restaurant for lunch. This place was GREAT! We have never tried it before, but we got right in, loved the food and ice cream and really enjoyed the cool break for dinner. Anything to get us closer to sundown! :-) To top it off the DDE card is good there, so we saved a few more bucks!

After a nice dinner we headed back to Tomorrowland. I grabbed Fastpasses for Buzz, and we headed into Stitch. I'm not thrilled with this attraction, but the girls thought it was OK. They weren't overly thrilled with it though and everyone including Kristen asked - is that it? Yes. Sorry to say that's it.   :-/   Unless its a walkon I doubt this show will be anything we try to hard for!

Still some time before the fast passes for Buzz are good, so we jumped on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority for a ride around Tomorrowland. Brinn was back to looking upon Space Mountain with disfavor. She had conquered the mountain, but was not too keen on the idea of a return trip! Luck (or lack of) it was in her favor - all fastpasses were gone for the day, and all night long the line was WAY too long to wait in. We'll wait for Fastpasses.

Now it was time for Buzz! (Gotta keep practicing!) We zipped through the Fast Pass line and were soon shooting our way to some good scores. I was riding with Maddy, and before we got through the first room with targets Maddy was informing me she was ahead! She had over 100,000 already! Wow - she found a big scorer... And I'm not sure which one! :-) But as we worked our way through I redeemed myself with 350,000.   :-)

After Buzz we headed over to the old Timekeeper building to get our EMH bracelets. Here they wanted everyone's resort ID as well. We were better prepared this time! Then we left Tomorrowland and found a spot on the bridge right under Tinkerbelle's flight path. Well, if Tinkerbelle had flown it would have been her flight path anyway! She seemed to be off tonight. The girls really missed her. But Wishes was a great fireworks show as always! Being on the bridge most fireworks are off to the right of the castle.   I'll have to get in front of the castle sometime to get some more centered fireworks shots. :-)

Now starts the Extra Magic Hours. Only, it seemed not too many people were actually leaving the park. There were MANY more people headed into Tomorrowland than out of it. We headed for Fantasyland and found that very busy as well. We were pretty hot, and only small world had a pretty short wait, so we jumped on that to cool down a bit. We decided it was time to head for Big Thunder Mountain to ride in the dark. That was fun, and it was a less than 20 minute wait. Splash Mountain was listed as 30 minutes, but the crowd looked pretty heavy. We decided to stay dry and bypass this one. Brinn will NOT ride it, and Maddy didn't mind waiting until our Last MK day next week to do this one.

Off to Frontierland. We did Pirates and Aladdin's carpets. Very reasonable waits on these. We also did the Jungle Cruise at night. This was fun and a bit different. Our captain even had a few new jokes and puns! And the timing seemed a bit off! We were in the front of the boat and we actually DID get squirted by the elephants! It was particularly funny because the skipper got the worst of it!

Back into Frontierland and decided to pass on Haunted Mansion. This still spooks Maddy out a bit, and she didn't want to do it since, as she told us, "Its too close to bedtime and dreaming". :-) I thought that was a pretty good answer for why she didn't want to ride at night! We thought about Mickey's Philharmagic, but it was getting fairly late and we were getting tired. We decided on one more attempt at Space Mountain but the line was still huge. So we headed on out of the park. There was a HUGE line of people waiting at the Wilderness Lodge boats and it took a Large, small and a second large boat before we made it on board! It was a bit after midnight by the time we got on board and the line behind us was at least 2 or 3 more large boats worth. VERY busy! I'm not really impressed with nighttime EMH at all. With everyone from all the resorts compressed in one park, its as busy as it is during the day, but there are NO fastpasses. Kind of disappointing and we will most likely work around late EMH hours next trip unless something changes.

As we returned to the resort, we had one last little glitch. They were painting or varnishing something in or near the elevator on the fifth floor where our room was JUST around the corner. It was ridiculously strong and they had masks and fans going. Problem was it wasn't ONLY in the hallways. Our room smelled terrible. Called the front desk and they didn't even know the work was going on. A manager called me back, and apologized, and said that they would have them stop ASAP. Thanks, but this smell is making everyone nauseous! They did offer to find us someplace else, but at 1 am that wasn't too appealing. We turned on the fans and the smell dissipated (or we got used to it) fairly soon after they stopped. The fans over the beds really helped.

So, off to bed. Tomorrow we check out and surprise the girls with the cruise!