Day 2
We started out by taking the bus to Magic Kingdom. We walked through Main Street and lined up in front of the entrance to FantasyLand (which is where the huge Cinderella Castle is located) to do the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, but once the gates opened, the roller coaster was closed. Instead of lining up for a closed ride, we took a 30 minute wait for Peter Pan’s Flight, which was frankly underwhelming, and I didn’t fully understand why the lineup was so long. We had also done this ride in Disneyland. Slightly less than half of these rides we had done in Disney Land when we went there many years ago. After, we took the ride right across from Peter Pan, “it’s a small world”.
Don’t get me wrong, this ride was good, but they had a bigger, better, version at Disneyland, which also happened to be the original. The next ride we did was Space Mountain in Tommorowland. This was hands down my favourite ride at Disneyland, and the one at Disney World was just a bigger version of the Disneyland ride, so obviously I liked this ride, and I would rate it as my favourite ride in this park, with the Mine Train in a close second. Please note that I said of this park, not of the entirety of Disney World. I’ll get to my favourite ride of Disney World in about 30 minutes of reading, or 8 hours of writing. After about 3 minutes of twists and turns in the pitch black of space, we headed to our second ride of Tomorrowland: the Astro Orbiter. This ride was literally just one of those rides where you get into these little carts that just go in circles over and over, and they have these rides at every amusement park, themed or not. We decided to do the Tomorrowland People Mover right after the Orbiter, and the People Mover was this really chill aboveground ride that went through all of Tomorrowland, which included making a b-line through Space Mountain. There was also a virtual narrator who gave information on all of the stuff we passed by, or through, on the ride.
It was a short walk from the People Mover to Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, which was a shoot ‘em up ride similar to the one we rode at Hollywood Studios the day before, but in this one you could manually pivot the ride cart, although the technology has not as advanced, which I found kind of ironic considering that this area was called Tomorrowland.
We made our way back to Fantasyland in time for lunch, and we ate said lunch at the Be Our Guest restaurant, which was Beauty and The Beast themed. I had a fillet mignon again, and a cheesy soup as a starter. The Beast came out to greet people at the restaurant a few times while we were eating, and you could explore different parts of the restaurant that fit into different parts of the story. For dessert we had a plate with 3 different things, a macaroon, a ball of chocolate, and Grey Stuff. The Grey Stuff was the best out of the 3, and also the only one that was mentioned in the song, Be Our Guest.
After that meal, we went to Under the Sea, another place that was named after a Disney song. This ride was pretty cool, but nothing compared to some of the rides we did the day prior. Gavin and I went to do The Barnstormer, which is just a small roller coaster, then it started raining so we went indoors to get ice cream, which didn’t really make sense, but I wasn’t going to say no to ice cream.
We went back to Tomorrowland to watch the Carousel of Progress, which was apparently made in 1970 or some time in the area, and when you sat in the seats in the Carousel, it would move the seats around the animatronics, instead of the animatronics moving around you. After, we walked all the way to the other side of the park to do Jungle Cruise at Frontierland, which was pretty cool, but I kind of though that it would be different because of the Jungle Cruise movie.
We shot some (fake) crows on our way to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and we also saw the rainy day parade before we arrived at the ride. The Pirates ride was cool, but I personally think that the one at Disneyland was better.
Then we rode a Winnie the Pooh ride. I don’t remember the Winnie the Pooh ride very well, so I can’t say much about it. It was getting dark now, so we watched the fireworks before ending the day. We had to sit around for about an hour and a half to get a good spot for the fireworks, but I would say it was worth it. We ate some hot dogs for dinner, as the other nicer foods we had been having were extremely pricey. The fireworks were really good, much better than the ones we saw at Hollywood Studios. If there was one thing this park did well, it was the fireworks.
After watching the fireworks, we squeezed our way through the crowd to ride the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. This was the final ride of the day, and this ride was pretty cool. When we were the line we noticed that there were these kind of stations, where you could do various things, and all of them involved “gems” made of silicone or a silicone-like material. The first station were these gems that you could press to make them glow and make a sound. The only problem with this station was that the sensors inside of the gems were inconsistent, so it would not work every single time that you pressed it. The second station was faucets, that when turned on, would cause the water coming out of the faucets to glow, then the water would hit these gems below the faucets, and the gems would glow too. This one was pretty cool, but the water was not very clean. The third and final station had barrels full of gems that you could spin, and if you spun the barrels fast enough, they would project an animation of one of the seven dwarfs onto the ceiling. There were seven barrels, one for each dwarf. After that station, it was time to get on the ride. This was the least impressive of the four Lightning Pass rides, but it was still really good. It was just a ordinary roller coaster until about halfway through the ride, where you slow down and go through the mine, and the carts on the coaster would sway back a forth as animatronics of the dwarfs would sing a song. The faces of the dwarfs were projected onto the animatronics, allowing for some impressively intricate facial movements that perfectly synced with the sounds. The mine was also glowing with colourful gems. Once we passed through the mine the coaster sped up again, and we were taken into a different mine with more music after about 30 seconds twists and turns. The ride ended and we were all really tired, so we took the monorail home. The cool thing about the monorail was that it went straight through one of the hotels, and you could see people eating a restaurant as you passed through. Once we arrived at the monorail station, we took a bus to the hotel and fell asleep quickly.
Well, that concludes Day 2 of this vacation, and there should be a like right here to the blog post for next day of this trip. If there is no link and no media in this post, the blog posts are not yet completed, and will be completed soon.