{"id":413,"date":"2004-01-05T23:59:20","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T04:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/01\/05\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-19T20:42:12","modified_gmt":"2005-10-20T00:42:12","slug":"trip-day-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/01\/05\/trip-day-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Trip: Day 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Monday was the first day Bob and I were completely on our own. We missed the others, but, no offense to y’all, it was a relief to me to be able to walk at a normal pace again, instead of trying to walk slowly and still being twice as fast as everyone else. (Aside from family, E is the one who most consistently matches me for walking speed.) It made me feel bad, like I was trying to make you run, but I wasn’t. I was just walking.<\/p>\n

We went to the Magic Kingdom on Monday, and followed the traditional route, heading for Space Mountain directly. We did make a few detours into the shops on Main Street, the one claiming to have watches in particular — one of my goals for the week was to find a new watch, since the one I’d had for the past 4 years had finally given up the ghost in October. The watch shop was also the figurine shop, and also the Christmas ornament shop, which led to some browsing around. However, once I found the Dwarfslash ornament, we exited quickly and made haste to Tomorrowland.<\/p>\n

The park was slightly more full than Epcot had been the day before, but lines at Space Mountain were still very short — even though the front of the ride said 30 minutes, it was no more than 10 before we were on. (They’ve changed the cars since I was last there — it used to be 4 to a car, with 2 people sitting in each section, a la log flume, but now it’s 3 to a car, with individual seats and lap bars.) The speed of boarding was lovely, but the experience was marred by the presence in our train by one whom I can only call Screech Boy. He kept making a sort of yodel\/bird noise every 10 or 15 seconds, and words cannot express how annoying it was.<\/p>\n

From there we headed to the Carousel of Progress, which was as it always is. And then to the People Mover, or the Transit Authority, or whatever the hell they’re calling it now. We rode around Tomorrowland on it in any case, having just walked right on yet again, because there was no line. From there to the Timekeeper, and then, because there was an actual line at Buzz Lightyear, we did fastpass there and ate lunch until our time was ready. Bob, of course, beat me — but it didn’t matter! His score was still not in the next ranking section. Ha.<\/p>\n

There was nothing else in Tomorrowland, so we moved on to Fantasyland. Pooh was first, a ride which I hadn’t yet been on, as the last time I was there it was still Mr. Toad. Then we went to Small World. One of my two favorite rides in the Magic Kingdom. Yes, that’s right: <\/p>\n

I LOVE THOSE CUTE LITTLE SINGING CHILDREN.<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n

We ran into the traffic jam at the end of this ride, finding ourselves trapped in the Pacific room first of all, where we found that Australia is worthy of less little dolls than Hawaii. (Hawaii and the pacific islands had 7, Australia 1, and New Zealand 1.) What is it that Disney has against Australia? They didn’t get a country in the World Showcase, they get one sad little boomerang boy in Small World — it’s some sort of conspiracy.<\/p>\n

From Small World we considered the line at Peter Pan (my other favorite ride), but as the sign said 65 minutes, we instead went over to the 3D show, Mickey’s Philharmagic. There we looked to be stuck in a line for a while, but then a woman approached the end of the line with two fast pass tickets: Her son had fallen asleep, she said, and now she and her husband couldn’t use the tickets. Did anyone want them?<\/p>\n

Well duh! Bob and I walked right on in and were seated for the next show. We then came back out, and after browsing through the gift shop, boldly took our chances with the Peter Pan line. Our instincts were good — the time, as all the times at the Magic Kingdom that day, was a lie. The line was not 65 minutes long, it was 25 minutes. From there we continued our counterclockwise walk around the park, hitting the Haunted Mansion, which was — well, it was exactly the same as it always was. Good.<\/p>\n

At that point, it was midafternoon, still hot — a good time for Splash Mountain. So we headed over to find that it was closed for technical difficulties. So instead, like virtually everyone else trying to ride it, we went to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad instead. This line was long. It was long, but it was moving fast, so you didn’t have much time to get bored of standing.<\/p>\n

(J: In the line were these two guys with four little kids, and they totally made me think of Tristan and Xavier.)<\/p>\n

After the coaster, we went back for another dose of Peter Pan (we had a fast pass from earlier) and another trip through Small World. I also bought a bunch of Small World stuff — a hat, a facecloth and a big mug — before we made our way back toward Adventureland in search of new rides and some supper. We weren’t successful at finding supper immediately; the cafeteria in Adventureland was closed; so we instead went right on to Pirates of the Caribbean (how could we not?). The ride seemed even more different than I’d remembered from 10 years ago — at the time I was riding it, I remember thinking that certain things were missing, but now, a week later, I can’t remember exactly what they were. All I know is that it seemed much toned down. And yet they kept the woman auction? I’m confused.<\/p>\n

Pirates was the last ride, aside from Splash Mountain, that we really cared about in our limited time. We stopped at Main Street and had some hot dogs for dinner, then browsed through the candy store on our way out. I finally got the candy apple I’d been craving since the summertime, when I never managed to buy one at Six Flags.<\/p>\n

Since the park closed at 7, we were back at the hotel by 8, and since I’d read online before we left that some of the hotels now had wireless access in their public areas, we decided to take the laptop and go try it out. Bob called to make certain of which hotels had it, and we decided to go to the Contemporary, since it was on the Monorail system and we’d wanted to ride it. So we took a bus over to Epcot (since Magic Kingdom was closed and there were no further buses going there) and transferred over. It took quite a while, and when we got to the hotel, I found that the computer had not turned off, even though I’d told it to shut down. Not so much of a disaster as it could have been; was smart enough to bring the power cable with me, but necessitated an outlet hunt. We then spent 45 minutes attempting to get the wireless access point to let us through. The computer kept connecting, but the browser refused to redirect us to the registration page.<\/p>\n

After several calls to tech support, a location change and umpteen reboots, we abandoned shi–hotel. Instead we circled around the lake to the Grand Floridian, where we sat in the posh lobby and connected without difficulty. We checked our email, I checked in on the game, and we generally caught up for a couple of hours. But we were nervous about making it back to our hotel (turns out we needn’t have been — Pleasure Island was open until 2am even on a slow weeknight) so left around 11pm to head back and get some sleep.<\/p>\n

Of course, once we returned to the hotel, immediate sleep was abandoned in favor of watching TV-Japan. There was a strange (are there any other kind?) J-drama on, about a professor of Spanish who kept interfering in his students’ lives.<\/p>\n

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Monday was the first day Bob and I were completely on our own. We missed the others, but, no offense to y’all, it was a relief to me to be able to walk at a normal pace again, instead of trying to walk slowly and still being twice as fast as everyone else. (Aside from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}