Disney 2009: Thursday

We slept in a bit this morning, but were out of our room by 9am. We headed to Disney’s Hollywood Studios today, and our first stop was Toy Story Mania. Based on early reports from the Passporter Forums and DISBoards, I was expecting to wait an hour or more for this ride. When we got there at 9:45, the Fast Pass return time was 11:30, and there was a 20 minute posted wait. We grabbed Fast Passes for later and hopped in line. The wait wasn’t 20 minutes — in 20 minutes we waited and were off the ride. The pre-show for this ride is amazing; you really need to see it in person to believe it.

That Mr. Potato Head is about 8 to 10 feet tall and interacts with the people in line. “Hey, you — yeah, you in the green shirt with the backpack on.” My guess is that they have someone behind the scenes feeding his lines to a computer. But he really does talk to you as you go by waiting for the ride. Disney has definitely topped themselves this time. The ride itself is a 4D midway. You wear 3D glasses and shoot rings, pies and arrows at moving targets and get feedback including puffs of air (that’s the 4D part).

We had lunch at the ABC Commisary since it was the only place open. The burgers were ok, but the chocolate mousse we had for dessert was excellent. After lunch we decided to ride the Tower of Terror before I lost my nerve. It was the only coaster that I hadn’t ever done at Disney World — all I had to do was conquer this one. I’m sure it’s fun for some people, but it just was not fun for me…. I don’t handle negative G-forces well. I couldn’t tell you how many times they raised us and then dropped us, or how far each drop was. I just know that I was screaming my head off, couldn’t open my eyes the whole time and was just glad to be on the ground again where I could pop a couple of Tums. (Having just eaten lunch, the ride caused my acid reflux to act up). The theming of this ride is great — if you’re not a thrill seeker, I highly recommend that you go through the line to see the theming even if you just take the “chicken exit” (also known as the “OH HE** NO” exit).

With Tower of Terror done, we headed to the Aerosmith Rock ‘n Roller coaster. This one is a favorite of ours, but we had no clue how much the music added to it until we had to ride it this time without the music. Totally silent == no good. We did get to ride a second time later with the music. Totally excellent.

From here we headed over to Muppet*Vision 3D and another spin on Toy Story Mania. Once those were through, we took one more ride on the Aerosmith coaster before heading out. We were supposed to have a very late lunch at Mamma Melrose’s and then see Fantasmic, but we weren’t quite ready to eat yet, and had no clue how we would kill the 4 hours before the show since we had seen and done all we wanted to — so we changed our reservation to Nine Dragons over at Epcot and headed to the hotel for a break. As we were leaving it was getting seriously dark and cloudy, and we started getting a good steady rain just as we arrived at the bus stop for our resort. We had to wait for about 20 minutes, but at least we were dry. When we got back to our room, we found that MouseKeeping had left an autographed photo of Mickey and Minnie for our anniversary.

After a nap and a change of socks, we headed out to Epcot in a very hard rain. We walked the long way around World Showcase and stoped in Germany for wine and beer and then rode Maelstrom in Norway. Nine Dragons (in China) instantly became one of our favorite restaurants. The food was absolutely wonderful. I had the Honey-Sesame Chicken, and John had the General Tao Chicken. Mine was light and crispy with a sweet sauce; John’s had a peppery spice to it that was quite different. They put a candle in my dessert (for my birthday) and brought us a card that said “Happy Birthday” and “Happy Anniversary” in Chinese. The staff sang Happy Birthday in Chinese. I had the gingerl cake and John had deep fried banana cheesecake with ginger ice cream.

With the rain, there was no way that Fantasmic would actually go on, so after dinner we rode the Mexican River Ride in Mexico.  Then we headed back to the resort for a couple of drinks and called it a day.  Magic Kingdom tomorrow!!

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader.