• January 26, 2017
• January 27, 2017
  • Part One
  • Part Two
• January 28, 2017
  • Part One
  • Part Two
• January 29, 2017
  • Part One
  • Part Two
• January 30, 2017
  • Part One
  • Part Two
• January 31, 2017

Guest author (Handsome) Luke Ant… we don’t put full names on the Internet. So Luke Hasselhoff

Note: anything Italicized is written by me, Fallon. 

January 26th 2017 was but a wonderous day. Long known as the celebration of the birth of Canada’s greatest superstar – Wayne Gretzky. As well as star of Ellen’s Energy Adventure Eileen Degeneres, Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, one of the Legion of Doom guys… Animal I think. Plus Eddie Van Halen.  And me.  The Eddie Van Halen of being me.

Anyhoo… this year Fallon decided she wanted to celebrate my birthday at Disneyland. So I’m all sure – why not?!?! I mean – Disneyland for my birthday. Heck yeah.

That morning we awoke at the ungodly early hour of like 8AM.  *shudder* And trudged our way to Edmonton International Airport. Direct to LAX was in our future. Or so we thought. Because you know, that’s actually what happened.

*Once we got through customs at the YEG airport, we went for our old faithful at the US Terminal – Quiznos. Traditional on Rosemary Parmesan bread for me, and Mesquite Chicken on the same bread for Luke. Sorry, I only took a picture of mine. Also note – none of the disgusting things like onions are on it 🙂

We had tons of time before our flight left, so I grabbed a few magazines – wedding and hockey! It kept me entertained on the flight. 

I had pre-ordered and pre-paid for food on the flight – once again our old faithful of WestJet flights – the ham and swiss croissant. I’ve ate a lot of these in my day.

We get to LAX and in my pursuit of a Pepsi (you’re not truly celebrating America until you’ve had a soda made with high-fructose corn syrup) – we veered too far away from our SuperShuttle pickup point.  Whoops. BTW the bathroom trip that accompanied OperationCorn Pepsi Pursuit was glorious. I heard harps and shit. Literally.

Anyhoo, we get picked up in the shuttle by a guy who pretended it didn’t bother him that we weren’t at our proper pickup point because we pre-tipped and after picking up some other weary travellers were on our way to the Anaheim Ramada Maingate North. We get there and it’s definitely in the top 4 of Orange County Ramada hotels. I tell you what.  They let us check in early by a couple minutes. I could tell the clerk was all about throwing caution to the wind and playing by his own rules.

The room was nothing fancy, but it was fine – especially for the price we paid on Hotwire!

It’s time to get Fallon’s super-duper ultra-platinum pass that so few ask for the folks at the gate are all but guaranteed to drop a “Let me get my manager” when you ask about it.

So after choosing the worst line 2-3 times, we get to the counter and Fallon asks about this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious annual pass and the cast member is all “Uh… lemme get my manager.”

Medium story short – we get it. Fallon’s major credit card is super stoked about this endeavour.

Now we’re hangry af. Let’s get to Trader Sam’s.

It’s our first venture all the way through Downtown Disney. We get to the Disneyland Hotel. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not the value of the Ramada Maingate North  through h-o-t-w-i-r-e, hotwire.com.  But it is clearly amazing. I must stay there one day. Hopefully after some sort of benefactor finds this posts and offers to set us up there. Great Expectations style. Minus all the other shitty things about Great Expectations.

We saunter into Trader Sam’s and find a seat. A Table for 4.  There’s 2 of us. As Canadians – this puts us at quite an impasse. We know seats in this venue are at a premium and sitting outside is foolhardy.  Yeah I said it. Sorry for the salty language. So we take the seat. That’s right America. 2 Canucks took your 4 spots. Only because we rationalized it because we were about to order a bounty of pricy deliciousness.

Fallon wants to get into the specifics of the meal in another POST. I typed that in caps so she can hyperlink the shit out of it later. (*I’ve now hyperlinked the shit out of it, just click on the word POST up above).

So we have drinks. Then appies. Pupu style. Then Drinks. Then supper/lunch. Then slizzard. Then instead of staying there all night we realize we’re $120US deep so maybe it’s time to call an audible and change up the evening’s plans. Especially since we’re that level of tipsy where it’s sunshine and rainbows and if people stopped drinking here there’d be 87% less alcohol related dumbassness in the world.

So we head out, look at some shops, don’t buy kickass cool Star Wars socks because we just spent that money on Pupu, then Fallon’s all – wannu see movie?

Sure.  There’s an AMC in Downtown Disney. Let’s do that. We choose La La Land because we’d heard grumblings that it’s a critical darling so beloved that one day it may even win the Oscar for Best Picture for 2.75 minutes. We buy 2 tickets. It was like $29US or something (See tipsy). I’m all “This is what movies cost us in Canadian funds. What a racket?!”

We get a small popcorn and I demand an Icee because those aren’t available in Canada because our slushie drinks aren’t carbonated for some reason. It’s prolly the government’s fault. I choose blue raspberry. Because blue raspberries are definitely a thing that exist in real life. This was such a tiny little popcorn! And so expensive! It actually cost basically the same as it would in Canada, but once you factor in exchange rate – gross.

Before we take our seats, Fallon calls her grandmother because she wants to wish me a happy birthday. It was the last time we ever spoke. She passed away shortly after. There’s an unexpected bummer, right? It’s true. She was a remarkably sweet woman and I miss her.

So yeah… La La Land. The theatre was decent and thankfully the American cinema spares you of 11-14 actual commercials before the suble commercials/trailers kick in. We see it. It’s a delightful yarn. The stupid people behind us didn’t like the ending. But they were vapid and they can suck a butt.

After that we made our way back to the main entrance of Disneyland, summoned an Uber, headed home and hoped the “oh there’s a 12% chance I can get knifed in the parking lot of this hotel” had properly dissipated. It did. Neither of us got knifed. We partook in the background of some random musical number but hey – that’s what happens when you’ve gone back to Cali (Cali). It was a decent musical number. 6.5 out of 10.

As soon as the bus dropped us off at Hospiltality House at Old Key West, we headed in to check-in. As Canadians, we can’t by-pass this step as Disney is unable to mail Magicbands outside the country. Check-in was extremely easy, we didn’t even need to wait in line (there was no line!). The cast member helping us was named Caleb I think? Carter maybe? It definitely started with a C, and he was very friendly! I feel bad for him, Luke and I hadn’t ate in hours by this point (and hadn’t ate much all day to be honest), and we were getting nervous we’d miss the ADR we had booked for tonight, so we were a little snappy with each other. I swear, we rarely, if ever, fight, but we were both more than a little hangry haha. We were both friendly to Caleb/Carter though – we’re not that type of people! He could clearly tell we were a little stressed out, so after giving us a map of the resort, our room number and our magicbands (purple for me, yellow for Luke), he helped us out by carrying some of our luggage to bell services. It was really appreciated! We actually stopped by the check-in area a few times over the next few days, hoping to see him working so we could apologize for how short we were being with each other, but he was never there

Once we arrived at bell services, we asked about our Garden Grocer order. One of the cast members got our names, and was back out with our order almost immediately. He then told us to follow him to one of the golf carts, loaded our groceries and luggage in and then drove us directly to our room! So awesome! I joked to Luke that we were on our first ride of the trip, he was taking some of the corners pretty quick in that golf cart and I thought I might fall out a few times haha. He helped us carry everything inside, and we tipped him and thanked him. We didn’t even have time to check out our room, we had to get moving! I grabbed my Dooney & Bourke Haunted Mansion purse I had treated myself to a few months back, and we headed out to the bus stop. We ended up being extremely lucky – we ended up with a room on the first floor in building 35, and the Turtle Pond bus stop was just across the road. It took us less than a minute to get there each day This was already a huge improvement over the All-Stars!

We didn’t wait long before a bus to Disney Springs pulled up – I think we waited maybe 5 minutes? We were both a little nervous as we sat on the bus – we were both really looking forward to our ADR, but we weren’t sure if we were going to make it on time! Luckily, Turtle Pond was one of the last stops on the Old Key West bus loop, so we were exiting the resort very quickly after a brief stop at Hospitality House. I knew OKW was close to the Springs, but I had no idea just how close! In less than 10 minutes, we were getting off the bus at the newly designed Disney Springs Of course, as soon as we stepped off the bus, we realized we had no idea where to go or how to get to our ADR…thank goodness for the MDE App!

We set off walking, and within a few minutes we saw this beautiful sign:

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As I walked up to the check-in booth, I checked on the time – we were still 5 minutes early for our reservation! Go us! All that worrying for nothing

The actual review of the food can be found here – but just know we LOVED it.

After eating, we decided to check out the Springs. When you first get off the bus, it definitely has an outdoor mall feel to it, but it’s still very nice. There’s so many new stores and restaurants since we were there in January 2016 as well!

We ended up at Uniqlo for quite awhile. There were so many great clothes to look at, and everything was reasonably priced! I told Luke I would buy him a present, and to pick out any shirt he wanted. He couldn’t decide between two of them, so I just bought both of them for him. They were just under $15 each – not bad at all! I also bought myself two new shirts there, but I can’t find a picture of one of them online (and it’s currently somewhere in the abyss that is my closet…).

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I wish Uniqlo would ship to Canada, there were so many things I wanted from there! The only stores in Canada are in Toronto, which is quite far from where I live. Oh well, now I know to save extra money for Uniqlo shopping next January when we go back to Florida!

We stopped and purchased a FuelRod for our trip from the photo store – that was $30 well spent! I know when these were introduced last year, there was a lot of complaints about it, that you can buy phone chargers much cheaper than that. For us, we were immediately sold on the fact that you can exchange it for fresh ones as many times as you’d like from a simple vending machine type thing located inside the parks. If we didn’t drain it during the day, we would take it back and charge it in our room at night, but it was so convenient! The day we got engaged, I believe we swapped it out for fully charged FuelRods at least twice (so many people to call/text to let them know because we were so excited!). We only required one, and just shared it as needed. We brought it home with us, and used it for our Disneyland trip as well (they also have the vending machine swap stations around the parks).

I knew I wanted a few new Christmas ornaments – one with the year on it and and for each resort we would be staying at. I decided to get this done on our first night, since we were already in Disney Springs.

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Sorry those pictures are all different sizes, I just took them from Google searches. The actual ornaments I bought are wrapped in tissue paper and put away with all of my other Christmas decorations. The 2017 ornament is awesome, it lights up and has the tree and the TOT on the back of the ears (so all 4 parks are represented).

After paying for our ornaments, we decided to head back to Old Key West and call it a night.

Up next: runDisney Expo and the first park of the trip!

After eating our terrible food, we were within our window for our 2nd FP+ – on the safari! I took so many pictures this time!

After exiting our safari vehicle, we decided to walk the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail – we really wanted to see the naked mole rats! The gorillas were also pretty cute…

After finishing the walking trail, we checked on the time and realized a showing of The Festival of the Lion King would be starting right away. We rushed over there, and made it into the building before they closed the doors. Our seats weren’t the greatest, but that show is so good! Sorry I have no pictures, I put my camera away and just enjoyed the show. I think we are going to use a Fastpass on this show on our next trip, we enjoyed it that much!

It was our last day in a Disney park, so Luke decided to grab his last Dole Whip of the trip – with a shot of coconut rum.

While he was waiting for his Dole Whip, one of the Cast Members came over and noticed my birthday pin that I was wearing. She asked me if today was my birthday, but I responded with “It’s my Birthday Eve!” (which was true, my birthday is January 13th). She smiled, told me to wait a minute and came back over with something on a plate. She told me she was allowed to give out a few of these each day to help people celebrate, and she wanted to give one to me. I had no idea what she was trying to give me at first, but once I saw it I thanked her so many times! Look at how awesome this looks:

It was an elephant ear! What a great little dose of Disney Magic on our last day I was so happy after that, that CM’s small gesture just made my day! We took our snacks and found a picnic table to sit down that was a really nice quiet little spot. We sat for awhile, enjoying our treats and watching all the ducks walking around.

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After we finished up our snacks, we started making our way along the path back to Asia. We stopped for a few Photopass pictures:

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We didn’t walk much farther before we saw a line for a meet-and-greet, so we decided to wait. It was around 20 minutes of waiting or so before we were at the front of the line and meeting Baloo and King Louie! They were so much fun! They were fascinated by my brightly dyed hair.

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By the time we said our goodbye to Baloo and King Louie, we were inside our window for our third Fastpass – on my favourite ride!

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After riding Expedition Everest, we walked outside and looked at the standby time – only 15 minutes! I actually clapped my hands in excitement and shouted “Again!” What can I say, I was in a really good mood that day! So, we joined the standby line, and less than 15 minutes later we had this picture taken:

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We’re in the back row, doing an over-the-head high five to each other – we had fun with ride photos!

By this point, it was around 3:30, so we decided to start slowly making our way out of the park. We did stop at It’s Tough To Be A Bug though.

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We’ve been to the California version of this, so we knew what to expect (and when to lean forward haha). I love the location of this in Florida though, it’s so cool to be underneath the Tree of Life! I did not like the fake smoke though, I got really filled up, and was finding it a little difficult to breath (the joys of asthma).

After the show, we continued walking towards the exit, but Luke stopped to use a snack credit on a raspberry-lemonade drink thing. It sounded really good, but it was way too sweet for my tastes! He drank some of it, but found it too sweet after awhile too, so about half of it was thrown away. Oh well, we had snack credits remaining that we had to use up!

After tossing away the way-too-sweet lemonade, we said our final goodbyes to Animal Kingdom, and left a Disney park for the last time on this trip We caught a bus back to All Star Music for the final time. We weren’t in a rush, and had no other major plans for the evening, so we made our way to Intermission Food Court – we still had dining plan credits to use! You can read that review here. After emptying our dining credits, and enjoying our last Disney meal, we went and collected our luggage from Bell Services and called a cab. 25-30 minutes later, we were dropped off in front of Westgate Palace to start the Universal Studios portion of our trip.

We woke up fairly early this day, since we sadly had to leave All Star Music . While we finished up with the packing we didn’t do the night before, we ate a few snacks from our stash we had ordered online (cookies for breakfast is something I can get behind every day of the week ). After we finished packing and getting ourselves ready for the day, I took a few pictures of our room and then we said goodbye to it. Originally, this was going to be a non-park day – original plan was to head to Disney Springs for a few hours before calling a cab and going to our next hotel, but after I got sick on our Animal Kingdom day last week, I knew I had to get back there. One day over the weekend, we had stopped by the front desk at our hotel and we were able to upgrade our 6 day tickets to 7 day tickets, and it only cost us $10/each! That same day, I signed into my Disney account and was able to grab some great Fastpasses.

We dropped our luggage off with bell services, and they placed it into storage for us for the day. We then caught a bus to Animal Kingdom again – and I was determined to do the park justice this time! According to the time stamp on the following Photopass pictures, we arrived by 9:40am – so we weren’t doing too bad on this morning!

After entering the park, we stopped for more Photopass pictures in front of the Tree – it was our last day in a Disney park, and I was determined to get our money’s worth out of pictures!

We walked along, and decided to jump in line to meet Russell and Dug! I love Up! I had actually never saw it, but within the first month of dating Luke made me watch both Up and Wall-E, since they are two of his favourite movies.

We had a bit of a wait for this, maybe 20 minutes or so, but it was worth it! This was a cute meet-and-greet!

After telling Dug what a good dog he was, and admiring all of Russell’s Wilderness Explorer badges, we headed over to Dinoland to use our first FP+ on Dinosaur.

I mentioned when we went on it last week, and I’ll mention it again – this ride is just ok. If you’ve ever been on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, you’ll understand how that is so far superior to Dinosaur. That said, we will more than likely go Dinosaur every time we’re at Animal Kingdom…

We were getting pretty hungry by this point so we stopped at the Yak & Yeti quick serve. You can read my review here, but just know that we probably would have been better off just staying hungry . The best part of the meal was the sitting area – it was outside and huge! At first we thought it was just a few tables, but they stretched back and around the building. It wasn’t busy at all, so we had no problem finding a table.

There was a cute little water feature which had a bunch of birds bathing.

Next: Finishing Up at Animal Kingdom

After watching some animatronic bears enjoy a jamboree, Luke decided to grab a Dole Whip, and we found a place to sit down and enjoy it.

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After he finished his snack, we headed back to Tomorrowland. Once we got there, we decided to go to the Monsters Inc Laugh Floor. It was pretty much the same show as we had seen last week with a lot of the same jokes, but it still made me laugh (again, I might have been a little overtired/exhausted by this point). After leaving that, the PeopleMover had a short line so we jumped on that. I really enjoy this, it’s a great way to see some of the park while taking a bit of a rest – and going inside Space Mountain was really cool! From there, we went to use our 4th FP+ of the day – to Space Mountain again!

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Ugh. For some reason a few lights were on around the outside of the building which encases this roller coaster, so it wasn’t as dark as normal. I could kind of see the track in front of us, but not perfectly clear (there wasn’t enough lights on for that), and for some reason this made me feel really sick/nauseous. I’ve never had that happen on Space Mountain before. I was a little sad, since this was our last ride at Magic Kingdom and it was not the best way to finish

It was about 6:15 by this point, and since I wasn’t feeling great after that ride, we decided to just head to the Hub to secure a spot to watch the Electrical Parade (which started at 7pm). I’m not usually one to stake out a spot that far in advance, but it just seemed like the right thing for us to do at this point. Along the way I stopped to buy a thing of popcorn – I needed a snack to hold me over until our supper ADR and the smell of popcorn in the parks had my mouth watering for days before I finally gave in and purchased some. (I LOVE popcorn, but it often does not love me or my Crohn’s). We found a place that we figured would be a good spot to watch the parade, and then sat on the ground to eat and wait. Disney is not cheap with the oil or the salt on their popcorn! It was exactly what I wanted though, and I ate almost all of it (and had no issues after, hurray!).

We ended up waiting almost an hour by the time the parade reached us, but we had an alright view to distract us while we waited

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After waiting for awhile, the Main Street Electrical Parade reached us! Enjoy this plethora of pictures haha, I took a few (Also, I apologize, the order is all messed up, but you get the idea):

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If you couldn’t tell by the amount of pictures I took, I LOVED this parade! Although, about 6 weeks after this we were in Disneyland and had a chance to see the Paint the Night parade and that blew the Electrical Parade out of the water! Paint the Night was absolutely incredible, by far the best parade I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t want to take anything away from MSEP, it was great, but just not the best that Disney has to offer.

After the parade went past us, no one moved. We realized people were planning on standing where they were to watch Wishes (it was an amazing spot right by the Hub in front of the castle). However, we had a late supper ADR to get to! It was very slow moving, and it’s a good thing we didn’t have far to go but we made it to Crystal Palace in time! It did take us close to 20 minutes just to get across the Hub though, so in hindsight we didn’t chose the best viewing location for the parade – just keep that in mind if you need to move to another location in the parks in between the parade and the fireworks.

It had been a long day by the time we got to Crystal Palace, but the Pooh characters are among my favourites so I still enjoyed it (even if we did have end-of-the-night buffet food). For food pictures/ reviews, click here. Here are a few character pictures:

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It’s hard to tell, but the bow in my hair was Eeyore inspired . Even though it was the end of the night, the characters were fantastic! While Piglet was over, Wishes started so Piglet grabbed my arm and was pretending to be scared of the loud noises outside. Eeyore saw my hair bow and gave me a HUGE hug, and then linked arms with me and tried to walk away with me (his handler was also awesome and started making jokes about how Eeyore wasn’t allowed to steal me).

The restaurant itself is also gorgeous!

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The park was obviously closed by the time we left the restaurant, but people were still trickling out out of the park. We were walking down Main Street when we heard a noise, so we turned around and got to see the kiss goodnight from Tinkerbell! I had already put my camera away, so no pictures of that. Since we had avoided most of the rush of people, we only had to wait about 5 minutes for a bus before we were on our way back to our hotel. We sadly had to do a little bit of packing, and then we fell asleep fairly quickly.

When we exited Winnie the Pooh, it was only 9:20. The park had only been open for 20 minutes, and we had already been on three rides! This day was going wonderfully! We decided to head over to Tomorrowland. We were trying to hit any and all rides we had missed on our first MK day, so when we saw a 15 minute wait time posted for Astro Orbiters we jumped in line. That ride is a tight squeeze for two adults! But it does offer some pretty great views

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It was then time to use our first FP+ of the day for Space Mountain! I don’t even know what I was doing with my face, but I think the award for funniest face has to go to the random stranger in front of me…I’m also not sure why Luke looks like he’s freaking out?

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Next up was Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin and Luke beat me again. I might have mentioned this already, but this ride is so much better in California. I don’t like that the guns are attached and you can’t pick them up in WDW. In DL, by being able to pick the gun up your aim is so much better! And yes, this is yet another ride photo where we are making stupid faces…

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We started walking towards the castle but stopped for Photopass pictures under the Tomorrowland sign. The photographer was a bubbly little thing, very friendly. She was fascinated by my magenta-coloured hair and wanted to talk about hair dye for at least 5 minutes. Poor thing wasn’t very good with the camera though…It’s a good thing we have plenty of other great Photopass pictures that I didn’t mind these ones not turning out.

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After getting some bad Photopass pictures, we headed into the Hub. The Dream Along With Mickey show was on, so we stood and watched it for awhile. I apologize, my pictures are not in order at all and I can’t remember now the exact timeline of the show.

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After watching pretty much the entire show, we checked the time and realized it was time to head to our early lunch reservation – once again at Be Our Guest! That’s right, we hit the BOG trifecta of all three meals! The only time I was able to book an ADR was for 11:25, which felt so early…we were still full from our breakfast, but we figured we would find a way to eat We checked in pretty much on time, and they were immediatedley ready for us. We were led across the bridge and into the castle, where we were once again handed a plastic tracking device rose. I was so glad we had pre-ordered our meals, the line of people waiting to order at the kiosks stretched almost half way across the bridge – I’d guess they had at least a half hour wait before they would even be ordering. So pre-order people, especially at lunch!

After finishing up our lunch at BOG, we headed out and went to the Storybook Circus area. We had rode Dumbo last week when we were there, so today we decided to go on the Barnstormer. The wait was a little longer than I’d normally like for a ride like that, but it really wasn’t even that long (20 minutes or so). It was a fairly standard little kid rollercoaster that was cute, but very short and not something we feel the need to go on every trip.

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We started slowly making our way around the park. We stopped to use a FastPass at Haunted Mansion (when we dropped our Peter Pan FP+ after walking on to it first thing in the morning, we were able to pick up this one). After riding, we stopped for a few Photopass pictures

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It was then time for our final FP+ of the day – Big Thunder Mountain Railroad! This is one of my favourite rides, but for some reason this was the first time we had ever went on it during daylight…We picked up on so many little details that get lost when riding it at night!

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We checked the MDE app and it was saying Haunted Mansion had only a 15 minute wait so we headed back there and rode it again (we both love it!). We actually took our time going through the queue line, and let a few people go ahead of us so we could check out all the little details (but I didn’t actually take any pictures of anything…). What a great queue line, so much detail! I also seem to find new little things on the ride every time I go on this.

We slowed down after this, we were in no rush to get anywhere. We did stop by a Fastpass kiosk to pick up a 4th FP+ for the day, but it was hours away. We went on the Riverboat in Liberty Square, but I found a bench to sit down on and ended up not being able to hear a thing. I could have moved, but I was enjoying sitting down for a few minutes. I also took zero pictures on this, I was just enjoying the relaxing boat ride. We then decided to check out the Country Bear Jamboree – so cheesy! I’m not sure if I was just overtired, but I found this show hilarious.

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