The Den

For those who're familiar with Disneyland in California, the equivalent at Disney World is the Magic Kingdom, which is very similar, but bigger. It has a main street lined with 'in-character' shops, leading to a circle in front of Cinderella's Castle. Around the circle are the various "lands" - Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland. Each land can take half a day or more to explore. We started in Adventureland, where we wandered throught the Swiss Family Robinson's treehouse. Does anyone remember the Swiss Family Robinson? I had totally forgotten about them until we went there!

After that the Jungle Boat ride was way fun - an animatronic preview of the kind of stuff we'd see live over in the Animal Kingdom. And an added bonus was a very funny (and very cute :-)  pilot on our boat.  That ride was also my first intro to the long lines to get into all the attractions. I knew they'd be long, sometimes up to 2 hours, but what was interesting was the planning that goes into how and where the lines are spacially arranged. From outside, you never see much of a line - it's all inside the entrance of each ride. Once you're in, you see the queue and take your place. You look head, and see the queue wind back and forth many times, then go around a corner, and come out again from behind a wall farther along. What you don't see is that between the corner and the re-emergence is another huge room of switchbacking corrals, holding 3-4 times as much queue as you've already waited through. Even when you know to expect it, it's always disheartening to round that bend and have the reality of 30 more minutes in line descend upon you.

That, of course, is why there's a "Fast Pass" for most rides. A fast pass is a little paper ticket that basically "holds your place in line" for you while you can go do other things ( like... buy stuff... ). While there are some restrictions to fast passes, they're definitely worth getting when it works into your timing. You get one of these passes froma machine near the entrance to the ride, and it has printed on it an hour-long time frame in the near future, e.g. if you get one at noonish, it might say  1:30-2:30.  You then come back to the ride some time during that hour, and you can get into the "fast pass line"  a second, much shorter line that leads to the actual entrance to the ride. The gate keepers at that entrance let more (or at least equal) people in from the fast line as from the regular line. Wait times are usually less than 10 minutes.

But, you can't just run around the park getting fast passes for all the rides you want. Once you have one, you can't get another one until some amount of time has passed. So the pass really is just holding your place in line. If you were physically in one line, you can't physically be in another line at the same time. If you'd gotten the pass above, at noonish for a ride between 1:30-2:30, you wouldn't be able to get another pass until, say 1:15.

The most fun part of this day was the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster. It's one of the few coasters that my niece was tall enough to ride. Even though it isn't as big or fast or scarey as many coasters in the world, we were still wondering if it would be too much for Bethany. It's pretty loud, and dark in places. But fortunately, not only was she not scared by it, she *loved* it! She spent the whole 3-minute ride laughing her head off! Too bad the line was over an hour long - but more about that on Sat. evening. I have a video of that ride here (it'll take a while to download probably)

I spent nearly the whole time with my niece, sister, and brother-in-law, and fortuantely they also recognized the wisdom of not trying to cram everything into the time we had. Instead, we planned on the few scheduled events we'd booked ahead, and came up with general ideas about where to go and what to see, but didn't get too attached to them. We also planned to come back to the room mid-afternoon on most days to relax, swim in the pool, have over-priced foofy drinks at the poolside bar, and unwind for a couple-three hours before the evening's activity. I guess being the attentive parents of a 5-year-old gives you an appreciation for spacing things out like that, and it certainly paid off.  

After the chillin afternoon, we bussed back to the entrance to the Magic Kingdom, where we caught a boat across the lake to the Polynesian resort for our Hawaiian Luau dinner. This was the only event where all 13 people in the group were together. But even then, we were seated (along with a few hundred others) at these long narrow tables aligned towards a stage area, so you couldn't really interact with anyone but those near you.  The food was served family style on large platters, and it was an all-you-can-eat thing. When a platter started to look empty, they just brought more.  Dangerous stuff, that all you can eat... The quality was pretty good. Nothing amazing, but certainly tasty and of decent quality.

Along with the Hawaiian food in massive amounts was a show featuring the music and dance of the many Polynesian cultures. Not just Hawaiian hula, but also Tahitian, Tongan, Maori, and others.  The show was OK, the dances were authentic and well done  (well at least the Maori haka, and poi), but I found the scripted stuff between them to be a little too contrived and fake. That was the first of that feeling that I'd gotten so far, and it wasn't too bad.