Yay! It’s time for me to relive the most magical holiday of all! It’s time for the DisneyWorld blog!! I know you’ve ALL been waiting for this one and if you haven't... well let's just pretend you have?! Ok? Hakuna Matata 😜
Day 1 🏰
So, after an obviously, insanely long travel day and a surprisingly late-ish night at Epcot on our first day, we were up around 5am with a mixture of jet lag and uncontrollable excitement. Once we were ready, we were straight off to Magic Kingdom. It’s got to be the most classic of Disney Parks, of course, as Magic Kingdom is the home of the enchanting Cinderella castle. It truly is breathtaking, as you walk on to mainstreet and get your first glance, all I can describe it as, is a completely overwhelming flood of emotions. Not only do you have the miraculous sight of Cinderella Castle, but there’s the welcoming hustle and bustle of mainstreet too. We were lucky enough to get to see The Dapper Dans, Magic Kingdom’s barbershop quartet, almost immediately, which threw us straight in to our first 'perfect day'.
We actually did take the first day very slow, we genuinely just wanted to take in the magic of the happiest place on earth. We grabbed food at the famous Casey’s Corner, we ticked off some of the classic Magic Kingdom rides, such as ‘It’s a Small World’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, ‘Big Thunder Mountain’ as well as the new almighty ride that is ‘Tron’ - myself being the thrill rider I am, this has to be my favourite at Magic Kingdom, you are placed on a motorbike type seat and blasted through TomorrowLand, it’s sooo fast and quite frankly immense. We also ticked some shows off such as ‘Monster Inc Laugh Floor’ in which Lucy got her moment of fame on the screen 😂 and one of the best parts of Magic Kingdom, the wonderful ‘Mickey’s PhilharMagic’.
Now, my highlight of the day was absolutely, no question the ‘Festival of Fantasy’ Parade, whenever I get to see characters, it brings back that childhood joy of wonder and imagination. We even had a special little moment with Tinkerbell as the three of us were ‘disneybounding’ as Peter Pan, Wendy and Tinkerbell. It literally brought a tear to my eye. 💚
The first day at Magic Kingdom is a day I will literally never forget, it was simply, a dream come true. 💕
Day 2 🎬
Day 2 was Hollywood Studios Day or as I like to call it 'TOY STORY DAY!' Kitted out in my Toy Story merch, we headed straight to Toy Story Land and straight on to the extremely fun 'Toy Story Mania', which is a target shooting game, I didn’t think I would enjoy this as much as I did, in actuality it was honestly so much fun, of course I lost, but I’m telling you if we’d have gotten another chance to go on it again, I would have thrashed them all 🤨. After a lengthy wait for ‘Slinky Dog Dash’ we headed over to Galaxy’s Edge, which is one of the newer lands in the Disney Parks. Even though I’m not very knowledgable about the Star Wars movies, even I was gobsmacked as we walked in to this land. It is so immersive, you’ve got characters running around asking you for help to move on with their missions. The Chewbecca costume, I just couldn’t get over, it was such was an incredible costume, he looked so real, see a picture below. We proceeded to our reservation at 'Oga’s Cantina', in which we were all a tad disappointed. There wasn’t any seating for us and it wasn't quite as immersive as we would have expected, especially considering the rest of the land is so immersive, but we got a cocktail and enjoyed some air con, so we can’t complain there. Now, carrying on our luck and what we were calling ‘our perfect day’s’, as we were leaving Galaxy’s Edge we noticed ‘Rise of the Resistance’ was down. Now if you know anything about this ride, you’ll know the wait time is always ludicrous, I don’t think it often goes below 90 mins. Lucy being the park pro she is, suggested we walk past it on our way out, as when it goes back up the wait time may be reasonably shorter, low and behold we were on the ride in under 30 mins. We really couldn’t believe our luck.
Our plan to end our second day was to see one of Disney's most famous evening shows - 'Fantasmic', well this was abruptly ruined by the MOST annoying Florida rain, as the show unfortunately got cancelled. We still had a lovely evening, having a few drinks in Hollywood Studios under shelter, although lets say the shelter didn't keep us particularly dry, that is how heavy the rain is over there. I developed a hateful relationship with this Florida rain! More on that later, it played a main character on this holiday don’t you worry 😒.
Day 3 ⚪️
Not much to report on Day 3 in Epcot, other than lots of margaritas and a vast realisation that we could probably never ‘drink around the world’ - not only is it veeeeerryyy expensive, but my gosh the heat(!!!) people, it’s tough man. I very much enjoyed embarrassing Jack and Lucy with my car creation on Test Track (pic below), getting apparently the most rare song on Guardians of the Galaxy, which is ‘September’, also a mega ride, especially if you’ve got a banger of a song. Last but not least, we ended up getting a great spot in the UK Pavilion for the fireworks show, ‘EPCOT Forever’, until once again our main character reared it’s head… RAIN! Not going to lie after not letting it dampen our spirits the night before at Hollywood Studios (even with the Fantasmic cancellation), it did dampen out spirits slightly this night, but we stuck it out and saw our first fireworks show of the holiday.
Day 4 🦁🐘
Day 4 was all about the animals and our first restaurant booking at 'Yak and Yeti'. If you haven’t got the gist yet, we were at Animal Kingdom! Animal Kingdom actually had some of my favourite rides of the trip, ‘Expedition Everest’, which I wasn’t expecting to be one of my faves as I’ve never heard it spoken about in much detail. It doesn’t generally seem to be a common favourite. I was so shocked at how fun it was, to be fair, it starts off rather slow, showcasing just a good rollercoaster, then in the middle, it changes gears, you’re speeding, you’re going backwards, immediate stops, it’s just so great, all whilst on a mountain, there’s not much better if you ask me. 🗻 I also absolutely LOVED ‘Flight of Passage’ - this is one of Disney’s newer attractions, being introduced in 2017 (on my birthday as a fun fact). Even the queue was awesome, you get to see Jake in Na’vi form, which for some reason really blew my mind, it looked astonishingly real. The ride is a simulator ride taking you to Pandora on the back of a Banshee. I can’t explain how spectacular this ride is, let’s put it this way, I literally couldn’t stop smiling the whole time.
We had a lunch reservation booked at Yak and Yeti, which is an Asian inspired restaurant in Animal Kingdom, the food was delicious and it was in fact wonderful to eat some vegetables, haha! We were also all gobsmacked by the so called ‘American portion sizes’ - I think this may have been the first time it hit us how ‘all out’ they go over there, we hardly got through half of our portions, and this gal can eat!
Of course, because we were at Animal Kingdom, we got to see some animals, which I personally very much enjoyed and quite frankly Animal Kingdom is a very pretty park and very immersive, it does feel like you’re in Africa, or Asia, or the imaginative land of Pandora. Unfortunately we only made it to Animal Kingdom once during our trip, so I’m very glad we made the most of our day there.
Day 5 🏖
We would call our water park days our chill days, although we didn’t exactly chill, it just never seemed as intense as a park day, so we spent day 5 at Disney’s 'Typhoon Lagoon'. Pretty much a day of water slides, craazzzaaayyy wave pools, fried chicken, wedgies, sunburn and ultimately prancing around like a child all day = you just can’t beat it! As this was a slower day, we popped into Disney Springs on the way home for a spot of shopping and to begin the hunt for the millions of Disney themed things we wanted and then had dinner back at the apartment.
Having days like these whilst on a park trip like this, is so important, especially when you’re…mmhhmmm… slightly older, this resulted in us being revived and refreshed for our next day.
Day 6...
You’re just gonna have to wait til the next blog post to find out where we spent Day 6…
All my love and magic,
Shannon ✨