We entered Magic Kingdom, our second park of the day around 3pm. We didn’t have any fastpasses, and our dining reservation wasn’t until 4:10 so we were not in any rush. We noticed that Tinkerbell had a short wait, so we went to say hello to everyone’s favourite pixie-dusted fairy. She was very excited about our wedding buttons, and insisted on checking out my ring. She was a wonderful Tink, very animated and excited and we really enjoyed our visit with her.
As we exited, we realized the Festival of Fantasy Parade would be coming through shortly, so even if we wanted to head to another area of the park, all of Main Street was blocked off for the parade route, and both sides were lined with people. Obviously we could have cut through the shops, but we decided to take the time to actually watch the entire parade (something we’d never actually done before – up to this point we’d only seen bits and pieces of it). Enjoy the four million photos I took of this parade haha –
After the parade ended, we made our way up Main Street with the crowd and made our way over to Liberty Tree Tavern to check in for our early supper. Our reservation was at 4:10, and we checked in a few minutes early – but we’re talking about LTT so of course they were running behind. They said they would text us when our table was ready, so we went around the corner and watched The Muppets: Great Moments in American History.
Eventually we were seated at Liberty Tree – about half an hour past our reservation…
One of my favourite places in Epcot is Karamel Kuche, located in the German Pavilion. I had to make a stop on this day to load up on goodies, and we left with a bag of their Werther’s Popcorn ($5.99), a chocolate covered smore ($4.49), a chocolate caramel cookie ($4.49) and a dark chocolate covered caramel with sea salt ($3.99). I didn’t take pictures of anything except the cookie, when I ate it for breakfast two days later (and it was still delicious!)
This is one of those places I can see us visiting on every trip! Even the smell of it is amazing!
Predicted food budget: $2631.67 (does not include tip)Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Estimated Cost of this meal: $31.95 (snacks at Epcot) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Actual Cost: $20.19 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Over/Under: Under by $11.76Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Remaining: $1945.01
After dropping by the Hollywood Tower hotel, we decided we needed a snack. The location for this seems to change on each trip, but Luke knew where to go on this trip to get the famous Carrot Cake Cookie! According to the picture I have of the receipt, it was at Beverly Sunset? I’m fairly certain that’s a store that sells Pixar merchandise these days, but apparently they sold snacks at one point? Maybe they still do – can anyone confirm or deny this?
I took a picture of this just because I thought it was ridiculous – but I don’t think I’d actually enjoy it…
Anyways, we bought a carrot cake cookie to share, a bottle of Coke for me and a coffee for Luke. We saved 20% with my Annual Pass, so our total was $8.33. We found a table to sit at outside where we enjoyed our treat – we had time to kill before our third fastpass.
It doesn’t look pretty, but these are so good! The “cookie” part is a carrot cake, slightly firm on the outside but nice and soft on the inside. The centre is a cream-cheese style icing (like a traditional carrot cake). We really enjoy these, and actually included them on our wedding day. I just wish they didn’t have stupid raisins – but not to worry, I do some surgery and remove them all before eating haha.
We still had some time before our third and final Fastpass, so we decided to head over to the Star Wars Launch Bay.
We decided to go visit BB-8, which was weird. You go in and stand beside a robot that beeps at you and moves its head… I guess I’m just not a fan of the non-living character meets?
As we were leaving the Launch Bay area, I spotted a popcorn bucket that I needed in my life! As I was buying it, the Cast Member asked me if I was going to give him a name, and if so, what was it? After brainstorming with the cast member for a few seconds, I decided on Frederick… so everyone, meet Frederick the AT-AT <3
Luke took that picture of me after we had walked over to use our third Fastpass of the day at Star Tours. We stopped to watch Jedi Training for a few minutes, I really hope that’s something that still exists when Jocelyn is old enough for it! It’s so cute, and some of the kids are so hilarious, and are so into it!
After Star Tours, we said hello to Gertie and admired her Santa hat haha, before heading out of the park.
I took a picture of Frederick the AT-AT sitting on my lap on the bus haha – I took lots of pictures of all the adventures he had that day haha – just wait for the next part of this trip report!
Luke suggested we just hang around the resort for the majority of the day, but I decided I wanted to use our Fastpasses and try to enjoy a little bit of our day. There wasn’t anything I could do to help, since I was over 3800km away from the hospital my uncle was currently in – so why not make the most of our day. We had missed our breakfast reservation, but luckily I had bought extra goodies at Karamell Kuche when we were in the Germany Pavilion at Epcot the day before so we shared this amazing Chocolate Caramel cookie (I want to say it cost around $4.50?). I actually popped it in the microwave for a few seconds to heat it up – 100% recommend!
We also had our snack boxes from the 5K the day before, so we snacked on a few things from there. For those not familiar with runDisney, after you cross the finish line they give you your medal, and a box of snacks. There’s also bottled water, bananas and things like that to grab if you’d like. Inside the snack box, there’s usually an applesauce pouch, a little bag of tortilla chips, a little thing of plastic cheese for the chips, some cookies/granola bars, fruit snacks, etc. It’s nothing fancy or overly exciting, but it’s nice to have a few extra little snacks for the following few days. I didn’t take a picture of the inside of the box on this trip, but I did take this of my really nice 5K medal sitting on the box haha –
Our first Fastpass was from 10:55-11:55 at Hollywood Studios. We arrived at the park around 11am, and were met by this –
We set off down Sunset Boulevard, but had to stop for a Photopass photographer. This is actually one of my favourite photos of Luke and I from this trip (you know, excluding our wedding photos haha) –
Our first Fastpass was for Rock N’ Roller Coaster. I enjoy this ride, but I’m at the perfect height where my head beats side to side against the head restraint so my ears are always sore when I get off. Am I the only person this happens to?
Also – during the queue line, there are screens advertising upcoming “concerts”. Using the RFID technology in the MagicBands, these screens change and will actually be customized to a person in the close vicinity. There’s a few spots throughout the parks that have this little custom touch – but this was the first time it was one of us!
Our next fastpass was right next door, at Tower of Terror, but not until 12:10. We decided to use the bathrooms by Rock n’ Roller, and I decided to call my Mom and get an update on the situation back home. Things weren’t good, my uncle had underwent brain surgery that morning to relieve some of the pressure on his brain. My Mom let me know that she had already changed her flights, instead of arriving the next afternoon (Saturday), she wouldn’t be getting to MCO until Sunday evening. At one point she mentioned maybe cancelling altogether so she could stay with my uncle, and I believe I responded with something along the lines of “that’s fine. If you stay home I’ll never forgive you for missing my wedding.” (emotions were high, I felt bad after I said it – but I just wanted my Mommy at my wedding). We said goodbye, I hung up and then stood in the Rock N’ Roller Coaster courtyard and had a nice little cry (definitely not the last one on this trip – I was a bit of a mess).
Around noon, I wiped my face, and we headed over to Tower of Terror. I could have headed back to the hotel room to mope around and be sad – or I could be sad while enjoying Disney – so I chose the latter!
On our first Disneyland trip back in 2015, I was adamant that I would not get on Tower of Terror, the idea of it terrified me. I could see how disappointed Luke was, so I sucked it up and told him I’d try it once – turns out I loved it and we never miss it now haha. I actually prefer the Guardians overlay in California though (I know, blasphemy!) – I like the upbeat energy of it, the fact that you shoot upwards as well, the theming, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the aesthetic of the original Tower – I only take about 467 photos of the building every single time we ride it hahaha.
I loved the lady in front of Luke! She was losing her mind – it was clearly her first time riding, and she was screaming before we even started haha. Her friend was laughing the entire time – they seemed to be a lot of fun! Even the scared lady had a few laughs at the end.
I love the themed Stitch plush you can find in the dump shop on certain rides – I tried to remember to take photos of him whenever I saw him!
I figure I should include a warning at the beginning of this post – this one won’t be all sunshine and rainbows and happy Disney stuff. I’m also going to keep it pretty short – the next post will be back in a Disney park.
Our alarm once again went off way too early – but I woke up excited! My Dad was going to be arriving later this evening (with almost everyone else flying in tomorrow), and we were going to Trattoria el Forno for breakfast – a place I’d been looking forward to trying! Luke got up and headed in to take a shower, while I grabbed my phone to quickly check my social media, and see if anyone had any last minute questions about anything before coming to Florida. There was a single text message from my Mom, that was timestamped from the middle of the night – “Call me when you wake up.” I immediately knew it wasn’t good news, so with my heart sinking I called her. It was even worse than I could have imagined.
The evening before, my uncle was in a snowmobile accident, and had to be airlifted to a hospital in the major city I live in (he lived a few hours north of me, in a much smaller city). My Mom also informed me he was currently in a medically-induced coma, he had brain injuries but the full extent was currently unknown – but it wasn’t good. A little background – there was only an 11 year age difference between my uncle and I , so he was more of a big brother when I was younger. He had moved across the country while in his 20’s – and was the sole reason I also moved across the country (I initially lived with him before moving a few hours south to Edmonton). This was tough news.
Luke finished his shower, and started to get mad because I hadn’t started getting ready, and we were going to be late for our breakfast reservation. However, he only had to take one look at my tear-stained face to realize something was wrong. I had lost my appetite and didn’t want to leave our room at that point, so we actually ended up going back to sleep for a few hours. We did end up getting hit with a $20 no-show fee for our missed Trattoria el Forno breakfast, but I did not care about that in that moment – and I didn’t have it in me to call and try to cancel that morning.
After that much needed nap, we both woke up feeling much better. We got ready, and decided to head out hours earlier than we needed to for our evening plans – we wanted to see how the lines were for merchandise at the race expo today (since we didn’t want to wait 2+ hours yesterday).
We arrived at the ESPN Wide World of Sports and it was so quiet! There were no lines anywhere, and we were able to easily just walk into the area with the merch. Seriously – if you’re not running the 5K during Marathon Weekend, there’s no need to go to Race Expo on the Wednesday!
I didn’t take pictures of our purchases, but I bought a generic RunDisney hoody, Luke picked up a few shirts specific to this race weekend and we picked up the sneaker Christmas ornament. We weren’t in a rush, and just took our time looking around. Eventually we made our way back to the buses – but instead of going back to OKW we caught a bus heading for the Contemporary!
We were so excited about our evening plans – we were celebrating our upcoming wedding by splurging on Highway in the Sky for ourselves! But, we arrived early at the Contemporary and were feeling a bit hungry, since we’d only ate snacks in our room up to this point of the day, so we headed to the Contempo Cafe (review here). We killed enough time and it was eventually time to head down to the Wave to check in for Highway in the Sky (HITS) (full review here!).
HITS ended with the 9pm Magic Kingdom fireworks viewing from the 5th floor of the Contemporary. We still had energy from our nap earlier in the day, so we decided to walk over to Magic Kingdom to enjoy a few hours in the park (they were open until midnight that night).
My photos from this night ended up out of order, and I didn’t take any notes this night – so I can’t remember the exact order of attractions we hit up during these few hours. But I do know we went to visit a few princesses. Some of these pictures make me laugh so hard – so awkward at times hahahaha
At one point, we went on Pirates of the Caribbean. I had to take a few pictures of the auction scene, since this was before the Redhead scene was changed, but it was known that it would be changing soon.
We also made it on The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh. I’ve always loved all the 100 Acre Wood characters, and even though this attraction is nothing special I really love it.
We decided to try something new to us, and went to Enchanted Tales with Belle. As we entered the queue line, a cast member stopped me – and handed me the red card! I was the chosen one! It’s kind of stupid how excited I get about this thing haha –
Also – it was still cold, in case you couldn’t tell by how bundled up I was haha.
This is such a cute little… show? Attraction? Whatever you call it – go see it at some point! Now that I actually have a daughter, I’m really excited to take her to this one day! I didn’t really take any pictures, because I think it’s weird to take photos of other people’s children – but I did take this one of the wardrobe –
And Luke took this quick video of the wardrobe talking –
We ended our night with a ride on Haunted Mansion, one of our favourites!
Luke took this video of the “Kiss Goodnight” shortly after midnight –
As we were leaving, we stopped in a few shops along Main Street. This was when Rose Gold was the hot “it” colour, and the cast members were actually rolling out an entire rack of Rose Gold spirit jerseys in preparation for the next morning. These things were impossible to find at this point, so I was really excited to see them and I definitely left the store with one that night!
It was quite late by the time we got back to our room at Old Key West, but I had a very important task to attend to before heading to bed – putting together our welcome bags for our wedding guests! The first guest (my Dad) would be arriving the following evening, with the large majority arriving the next day. It was almost time to actually kick off wedding week!
I pulled out everything we had for our welcome bags – some of it we had lugged with us from Canada and some we had purchased on our Walmart run at the beginning of our trip. We had tossed around a few ideas for actual bags to put everything into, but we had already gone over our budget for welcome bags so we ended up just asking for extra Disney parks bags at a gift shop, and once we explained what they were for there was no issue giving us a stack of them. Score!
We had shirts made for everyone (you’ll see them later in the trip!) –
This picture was of the Rubbermaid tote we’d been storing all the wedding stuff in back home – part of the reason we needed to check four full sized bags on our flight! We had a lot of stuff to bring with us!
I laid everything out on the spare bed, separated by person/couple – turns out we had a lot more than I thought we did for these bags!
Here’s a close-up of my Dad’s stuff so you can see everything we had – custom shirt, Body Glide, hand sanitizer, wet wipes, bandaids, Disney pens (some people also got Disney notepads/sticky notes), a couple packs of gum, Brita water bottle, a few bottles of water (we bought multiple cases at Walmart – it’s so cheap in the States!), travel pack of Q-Tips (we mainly bought these because of the cute Disney tin they came in), travel-sized Kleenex, Tylenol and snacks (chips, chocolates, granola bars – Disney themed of course, and water flavour pouches). There were also nail files for all the females, and a necklace for each of my Bridesmaids/Maid of Honour (they actually ended up wearing them on the wedding day)
It was really late by the time we finally crashed for the night (like 2:30am). I also didn’t realize how much my life was about the change the next morning…
If you’ve ever competed in a runDisney event, you know that your alarm goes off way too early! We got up and got ready – I was still in pain from the night before (stupid me missing a step on the stairs, such a *facepalm*).
We caught the bus and arrived at the starting place of the race (in a parking lot by Epcot). We made our way through security and headed towards our corral. I think I was in a higher corral than Luke, but you are allowed to move back (you just can’t move forward to a higher corral) so I dropped back to his. We took a selfie while we waited.
I was hurting, and knew I wouldn’t be able to go much faster than a walk – even that was painful with each step. Luke assured me to not worry about it, to not hurt myself even more by pushing too hard and we’d figure it out. Eventually our corral had the countdown, and we were off! The first characters we came upon were Chip and Dale – I needed the break so we hopped in line. I handed over my phone to get a photo with that, but also scanned my Magicband to get the photos taken by Photopass – what a difference! The cast members using your phone don’t zoom or anything – it’s not difficult to tell which photo is which –
Our costumes were Luke’s idea – he wanted to be Ursula haha. They also looked much better when we tried them at home, we weren’t expecting it to be so cold! I had on a tight tank top as a base layer, then a hoody, then an athletic tshirt on top of my hoody (the black Nike one you can see), then my Ariel top (which is absolutely a bathing suit top haha) then my jacket. My plan was also to wear plain black capri-length yoga pants with the Ariel bathing suit bottoms on top of those so you could see them better, but I needed the full length pants (luckily I had packed a few extra pairs, and these ones kind of worked with our costume theme). Luke’s purple face paint was actually some anti-redness makeup stuff layered on thick – much easier on the skin than Halloween paint haha.
We kept going, and Photopass captured these – you can see the pain on my face in a few of these pictures….
I love the rare characters that are out during the runDisney events – we didn’t stop for all of the characters this day, but we did get to meet Jiminy Cricket, vacation Genie and Horace Horsecollar (in addition to Chip & Dale), as well as some Vikings in Norway. Here are the photos taken with my phone –
What is this picture? Haha, I think the cast member using my phone was still half asleep haha…
And here are the Photopass pictures taken by the professionals –
Here are a few more Photopass pictures (we definitely got our money’s worth during this race!)
It was so cold, I was wearing Luke’s mittens which were way too big for me haha.
Eventually, we made our way across the finish line (we did not make good time haha) – and received our medals and snack boxes. We stopped for one final Photopass photo before heading back to the buses to take us back to OKW.
By the time we got back to OKW, I was so sore and we were both exhausted so we decided to cancel the fastpasses we had made for Magic Kingdom, and instead had hot showers and a much-needed nap.
