Day 1.
So, we start the day by heading to the Tower of Terror, which is located at the bottom right of the map in Sunset Boulevard. Now the cool thing about Sunset Boulevard is that it looks like it’s taken directly from the 80’s, and I really like that retro feel, even though I wasn’t born until many years after those times. When we arrived at the Tower of Terror, it was sadly closed. Instead of doing the Tower of Terror, we did this ride called the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. It’s like a roller coaster where you can barely see, and it has this really abrupt start where you get kind of launched into the building. One thing I forgot to point out is that we were sleeping at the Swan & Dolphin hotel, which is not owned by Disney, but they have a partnership which basically means that we get to go to the park half an hour earlier than people who aren’t sleeping at a hotel in the Disney World area. This also means that sleeping in was not an option, so by the end of this trip I was pretty tired out. After the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster we went to Mickey’s Runaway Railway, which was conveniently also closed. Then we went to Toy Story Land and rode Toy Story Mania which was this shoot ‘em up ride with 3D glasses. I got a score of 140,000 which I think is good but I’m not sure.
Then we went to Galaxy’s Edge to ride the Millennium Falcon on the Smuggler’s Run ride. It was really fun and kind of like a video game where you worked as a team to pilot the Falcon. We waited about 30 minutes for this ride, and I think that it was worth it. It was worth it enough that we did the ride again later in the day, but this time we used Genie+ to skip the line. I’ll get back to Genie+ later. After the Millennium Falcon ride we got blue milk and green milk, which were basically just glorified milk slushies, but they were still good.
We left Galaxy’s Edge at about 10:30 to go do Slinky Dog Dash in Toy Story Land. The ride was more fast paced than it looked and had a really cool toy aesthetic. When we finished the ride we decided to do our first show of the trip: Indiana Jones. On our way over we encountered the parade, which was pretty cool. The Indiana Jones show was cool, and it had the boulder scene and lots of (acted) fighting and (real) flames.
By now it was about 11:40 ish, so time for our lunch reservations. I didn’t expect much from Disney World, but this was the finest of the fine dining. I had a fillet mignon with a really good tomato soup and some blue lemonade with a glowing ice cube. It was my first time having fillet mignon, and it was so good.
We registered our Genie+ for the Tower of Terror because it was now open, and we had some time to burn before our reservation so we watched a lot of shows and browsed on Main Street. We saw the Beauty and the Beast musical, then we browsed a little, got some ice cream from a giant Loch Ness monster statue, took some pictures with these gold coloured BB-8 and R2-D2 statues that were there to celebrate the 50th birthday of Disney World. We watched a Frozen 4D sing along, which had actors, tv screens, projectors, and a very overused bubble machine.
When we were done with all that we headed back up to Sunset Boulevard because it was almost time for Tower of Terror, and we browsed shops on the way up there. When we arrived it was not quite time yet so we watched a Cars show, and it was pretty cool how they made Lightning McQueen appear as if his eyes, mouth, and tires were moving like the eyes and mouth of a human being, whereas the mouth and eyes were just projected on in a very believable fashion and the sides of the tires moved to give the illusion of the whole tire moving.
Now it was finally time for Tower of Terror, which had a pretty good plot, and was based around the black and white TV show the Twilight Zone. Basically the plot is that a long time ago there were these people in this very nice hotel, but the elevator got struck by lightning while they were moving, and the people in the elevator got sent to the Twilight Zone and guess what? It was Florida weather so it was boiling hot sun when we were heading over to the tower, but when we arrived it started raining and there was thunder in the distance. This kind of terrified Gavin because if the tower itself was not enough, it was actually thunder and lightning outside. So Gavin opted out of the tower, and my dad went with him. I still did the tower with my mom, and it was different than I expected. The “elevator” you were in went up so you could see a room that was empty. Then a thunder sound played and little sparks jumped around the room, then lightning struck again and we saw some cool hologram of some ghosts, then the room went dark. Our elevator went into this pitch black hallway with some weird effects on it, then we entered a second elevator shaft at the end of the hallway. We went all the way up to the top of the shaft and stopped. Then the doors opened and we had this great view of the entire park, and when I say the entire park I mean the whole thing. There was about 5 seconds to enjoy the view, which is a lot of time, but then once those seconds had passed we dropped into a sudden free fall which was absolutely terrifying. We were thrown all the way back up and into a free fall again, but this time there was not stop at the top. Finally we dropped from halfway up the shaft, and it was over. This was a really fun ride, but the actual elevator part was shorter than I though it would be.
Just after we did Tower of Terror, Mickey’s Runaway Railway opened, so we did that. The Runaway Railway way really cool and used some very unique and fine-tuned technology to make the ride work. There was quite a large use of projectors and screens, and it worked really well to make you feel like you were actually inside of a animation.
Now it was time for the part that was probably the highlight of the day, and one of the highlights of the trip: Galaxy’s Edge. This was the Star Wars land of the park, so obviously it was busy, which made the lines for the rides very long. We did Star Tours which was pretty cool, and fun.
Right next to Star Tours was right next Galaxy’s Edge, but for some reason Star Tours was not in Galaxy’s Edge itself. After Star Tours we entered Galaxy’s edge to do Rise of the Resistance. Rise if the Resistance was such a good ride. It was the crown jewel of this park, the ride was so good that they you had to take a ride just to get to the ride. We started the ride by boarding a large shuttle with some Star Wars characters on the shuttle, and when we were supposed to be taking the shuttle to some resistance base or something we got captured by a star destroyer and they tractor beamed us in. Once we had arrived inside the star destroyer the same door that we entered from opened and we were led into this huge room filled with storm troopers and this massive screen showing space stuff. We were led by these imperial guards, who were pretty good actors, into a jail cell where Kylo Ren came in to try to take some information from us, and when he left the cell we were led into a room where the real ride started. I have a video, but there were some people in the video who were talking a lot during the ride, so if you want a full video of the ride just search Rise of the Resistance on YouTube.
When we were done with Rise of the Resistance we headed to do the Millennium Falcon ride again, and then we ate at this Star Wars themed restaurant called Docking Bay 7. The aesthetic of the restaurant was cool, but all the food was super salty. Now we had done all the rides except one, which was some Toy Story ride.
So we did that ride, which was right next to Galaxy’s Edge, returned to Galaxy’s Edge, and browsed the stores. The stores had some really cool stuff, but most of the unique and good stuff was unaffordable, and the stuff that was still good, but not unique you could buy off Amazon for half the price. It was getting dark so we went to watch the fireworks and took the boat home.
Well, that concludes Day 1 of this blog post, there should be a link to the next blog post here. If there is no link and no media in this post, the blog posts are not finished yet, and will be shortly.