With an early alarm this morning, I did the usual and rolled over back to snooze. But once we were both up and ready we headed out to catch the bus to Blizzard Beach. Like anyone in the know does, we borrowed some towels from our resort pool rather than paying a fortune to rent them!
Before going into the park we tried out the adjacent Winter Summerland crazy golf course, which was rather nicely done. The idea being that Santa goes there on holiday so it's Christmas themed despite being in the summer - cue lots of awful puns and bad rhymes on the hole descriptions.
Into the park, we had a fairly early dinner reservation this evening so decided to have a correspondingly early lunch - nothing special, bacon burger and fries with a fruit salad for dessert (trying to not be a complete pig, plus the normal dessert options weren't really tempting me)
I wasn't really in the mood to do water slides today, so found a couple of rings and floated around the lazy river for a couple of circles, topping up the sun tan (ha!) and squashing small children as appropriate (squashing small children is *always* appropriate).
After that I went to the "beach" pool, where the bottom was made of what felt like coarse sandpaper and gravel, so grabbed another ring and floated on the waves for some time - the constant bobbing up and down made me feel like I was on a much smaller, wetter version of Tower of Terror!
Bus back to the resort, shower and change, blah blah blah. Then it was onto a bus to the Magic Kingdom, but not to enter the park. Instead we switched to the ferry launch across the lake to the Grand Floridian resort, where we had dinner booked at Narcoossee's, one of their Signature restaurants (that's 2 table service credits on the food plan, fact fans!)
This proved to be a very good move. Not only was the restaurant situated next to the dock, overlooking the lake and the Magic Kingdom, but the waitress was delightful and the food was absolutely delicious. We had Surf & Turf - a 7oz Filet Mignon with a lobster tail poached in butter. I couldn't fault it. While Tom ordered a more grown-up cocktail with bourbon, I went for the sparkly sweet one with a glowing ice cube in the middle. I liked it so much I had another one with dessert, which for me meant a lemon curd and blueberry tart with an orange sorbet. This was just as good as the main course, and didn't last long at all!
After the meal we took a brief stroll through the grounds of the Grand Floridian (very posh) and up to the adjoining monorail station, where we took a one stop trip to the main gates of the Magic Kingdom. We had a FastPass reservation for Space Mountain but this was currently down, so instead we did a couple of short/no-queue attractions like the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse and the Jungle Cruise. Our skipper for the latter wasn't quite as deadpan as the previous one we'd had, which I didn't find as good, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt as to be fair we'd heard many of the jokes last time round.
We considered trying some other rides but it was getting towards time for Wishes, and the park was very busy around the castle area. We stopped on a bridge to watch the Electrical Parade go by, then grabbed a Dole Whip Float each and started working our way through the crowd to the viewing area. In a fit of good decision making, Tom had booked us FastPass for Wishes, which gave us access to a cordoned off area of grass next to the castle where there was plenty of space and a good view of all the fireworks. I don't even need to say that the show was excellent, as Disney's fireworks displays have that reputation anyway, but it was.
After the display we noted that Space Mountain had reopened, and made our way through the crowds to Tomorrowland, where we found that not only had it reopened, but the queue had grown to over an hour, and the FastPass gate queue was stretching across the plaza. We quickly decided that this was a very bad idea for the moment, and headed back towards the rest of the park.
The Haunted Mansion had a very short queue time (marked as 13 minutes in the app, in fact it was walk-on) so we had a jaunt around that, thankfully without stopping repeatedly this time. It's the sort of ride you can go on time and again as there are always new things to notice, particularly around the queue line and the graveyard scene.
Working our way back up, Winnie The Pooh's ride was showing a 10 minute queue time. It was more like 15, which wouldn't have been so bad, but along the queue line they had put various playthings to entertain the children. Noisy playthings, like drums... Hmm. Slightly deafened we eventually made it onto the ride which was a quite original dark ride with plenty of charm.
We'd already done the Little Mermaid on our first night but there was no queue (except a family in front who kept stopping for no apparent reason) so we did it again. I promptly had "Under the Sea" stuck in my head for the next 20 minutes.
The park was quieting down now, so we headed back to Tomorrowland where Space Mountain was showing a much more sensible 25 minute standby queue time. Our FastPass for earlier had been extended due to the shutdown so we went through on that, and skipped a smallish queue. By some quirk of the FastPass system, once it had extended our original booking we were then somehow allowed to book the same ride again, which it usually doesn't let you do! Thus we had two extended FastPass reservations for Space Mountain, so decided we may as well go round again! By this point the main queue had shrunk massively, so if we'd wanted another go we could have just gone round that without major delay.
However we were both tired and achy-footed, and the park was closing in 20 minutes, so decided to go catch the bus home to bed!
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