Day Two – Wednesday, January 6, 2016 – Part Two

After dropping off our goodies from the race Expo, it was time to head to our first park of the trip! We headed out to the front of our hotel and had to wait….. one minute until the bus was pulling up. We were killing it at Disney transportation so far!

After a bus ride which took around 25 minutes, we were pulling up to Magic Kingdom! We had picked this to be our park of the day based on our supper reservation, and it just seemed like the perfect one to start with! And the Christmas decorations were still up, which I didn’t think they would be so I was excited about that!

As soon as I entered the park, I stopped to get a birthday pin (my birthday was the following Wednesday, so I figured it was ok to wear one since it was within a week). As soon as we got to Main Street the Move It! Shake It! Dance & Play It! Parade was starting, so of course we stopped to watch our first WDW parade.

While watching the parade I actually got a little choked up, after months of planning and reading trip reports on the disboards, I was finally standing in Magic Kingdom! The parade itself was nothing special, but it was cute and had some great characters. After the parade, we walked down Main Street (where I was again a little choked up at the sight of Cinderella’s castle – it’s so big and beautiful!). We didn’t really have a ton of time to admire it though, we had to get to our first Fastpass selection of our trip! FP+ #1 – Splash Mountain! Once we hopped into the fastpass line, it took about 5 minutes before we were boarding our log. I also prefer the logs here compared to Disneyland – sitting side by side is so much better! It’s so easy to plan ahead for a funny photo on this ride, so here’s our first ride photo of the trip:

By the time we finished our visit with Briar Rabbit and Briar Bear, it was after 1pm and I hadn’t ate since breakfast, but we were both getting hungry. We knew we wanted a quick service option, since all of our table service credits on our dining plan were spoken for with reservations, so we decided on Peco’s Bills! We figured we’d be fine splitting an entree, since we did have a supper reservation for later and we knew we’d have a fairly large meal there. Our review of Peco’s Bills can be found here.

We finished up and went to the Christmas store in Magic Kingdom. I’ve been trying to buy a new ornament on every trip we go on, so eventually I can decorate an entire Christmas tree just with ornaments that remind us of trips we’ve taken together. I decided on this one, I knew I wanted something that had the year on it, and also said Walt Disney World (which this one has on the side).

I was scared of breaking it if I had to carry it around with me all day, so I had it shipped to our hotel for pickup the next day – I love this feature of staying on site!

After this, it was time to head to our second fastpass of the day (and our second ride of the trip!) We basically had to walk from one side of the park to the other, but that was okay, we had lots of time. Luke snapped this picture of me in front of the castle while we were walking to Tomorrowland: (and yes, I had a different Disney outfit to wear every single day we were there haha)

We stopped for our first Photopass pictures of our trip along the way too! We were both really hesitant about buying Photopass before we left, especially with our terrible exchange rate, but my mom decided to give us money towards the cost as part of my birthday present. So, I prepaid the $150US for it – which ended up being $211 Canadian dollars, ugh.

Anyways, I was determined to make it worth it! So here’s a few from our first stop at a photographer:

 

From there, we headed over to Space Mountain. The Fastpass line was huge, and I was a little worried we might be in for a long wait time, but it ended up moving pretty well, and we were at the front of the line in about 20 minutes. The star effect isn’t nearly as good as it is at Disneyland, and I wasn’t a huge fan of the single file seats. Also, 7 weeks after this, we were at Disneyland again and got to experience the Hyperspace Mountain overlay – and nothing can compare to that. It was phenomenal! I still enjoyed Space Mountain at WDW, but I definitely enjoy this ride more at Disneyland. That being said, here is our on-ride photo (our Space Mountain pics were among my least favourite of the trip sadly):