A fairly late start this morning - I didn't wake up til 9.45 and it wasn't until around 11am we caught a bus to Typhoon Lagoon, where this time it wasn't chucking down with rain!
We found a comfy shaded spot on some slightly scruffy-looking sun loungers and dumped our stuff, then went our separate ways - Tom to do the water slides, me to relax in the lazy river. I did a couple of circuits of the park, then headed back to the loungers where I'd brought a secret weapon - my Kindle. Smothering myself liberally in sun lotion, I lay there slowly crisping (to mangle a Victoria Wood line, I felt like I should prick my arms with a fork). After about 15 minutes it became too hot to lie there, so I went back for another circuit of the lazy river. Repeat the sunbathing, and then decide I'm too lazy to walk to the lazy river. Instead, a nearby ice cream stand provides me with a large waffle cone full of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. That helps.
Back to sunbathing, and I hit on a brilliant idea. There's a shallow kiddy pool behind the area we're sat in, and it's mostly empty. The water's only about 2ft deep. I take my Kindle and sit down in the water, with my back and head in the shade, and my legs out in the water. Lovely and cool, though there's a lot of sand at the bottom and I'm pretty sure that when I stand up my swimming trunks will be full of it!
After an hour or so of flitting between the sun lounger and the pool, Tom's returned and I tell him I'm going to make a move back to the room. This is because if I spend any longer outdoors, not only will my summer alter-ego, Mr Tomato Head, make an appearance, but will be joined by Mr Savaloy Arms and Mr How On Earth Did You Sunburn Your Feet?
Buses back from Typhoon Lagoon are a curious affair - Tom suggests it's because of the Downtown Disney construction work. Rather than the usual direct bus to your resort, everybody gets a bus to Epcot and from there their usual resort shuttle. Slightly convoluted, but at least I was dry by the time I got in, if not a little chilly from the usual vigorous Disney bus air conditioning/on-ride freezer.
This evening's dinner reservation was at the very convenient Olivia's Cafe, which is the on-resort restaurant for Old Key West, which means it's all of a 5 minute walk from the room. Thus I spent the hour or so beforehand relaxing on the bed playing Warcraft II. Because that's obviously what everybody does on holiday, right?
The restaurant itself was bright and airy, with friendly welcoming staff who kept us well topped up with drinks and a very quick food service too. Compared with last night's "meh" Signature restaurant it was a pleasant experience.
From dinner we hopped on a Hollywood Studios bus which had handily pulled up as we left the restaurant. We had FastPass for tonight's Fantasmic show, which we saw for the first time at the weekend. In a fit of good sense, we'd also booked a speculative FastPass for the Tower of Terror. I'd enjoyed this ride immensely at the weekend so was happy about this - in my view it's one of the best-themed rides in any of the parks. There was no queue at all in the FastPass lane so we were straight into the pre-show.
After Tower of Terror, we decided we'd take a look at Rock'n'Rollercoaster as it's next-door, and see how its queue looked. The dot matrix said 30 minutes for standby, but the queue was barely poking out the door, so we decided to chance it. As it happened we were again straight into the pre-show - that's no 30 minutes, not that I'm complaining!
Fantasmic was now filling up so we headed across the road to it. Already the massive auditorium was around 2/3 full, which surprised me as the park didn't feel as busy as at the weekend; Tom then pointed out that there were two showings that night, whereas tonight this was the only one. We ended up sat on the last but one block to the left, reasonably near the front, so got a good view of all the video sections and the boats, if a little limited one of the main stage unlike last time when we were almost dead centre. Tom got himself some nachos with that vile yellow "cheese" substance they put on them, and a flat Coke Zero for me - annoyingly it was so busy that there wasn't time to go complain/have it replaced before the show started)
The pre-show for Fantasmic was something we hadn't experienced last time. Thankfully. Think overexcitable children's entertainers, trying to warm up a crowd with singing games and "my side is better than yours" type rivalry. I didn't think much of it, but then I'm not 7 years old, and I am a miserable old git at times, particularly when someone's trying to gee me up against my will.
The disadvantage to being near the front came when the show ended - it took at least 15 minutes of stop-start queuing to get anywhere near the amphitheatre exit - that place badly needs an extra way out on the side we sat! I was going to look in the shops but they were all rather busy, and mostly full of the same merchandise everywhere else sold.
Back at the resort I popped to the shop and got some Twinkies for Stephen (of all the things to ask for!) which used up two more of our snack credits. Because the meals on the dining plan are pretty good, we'd not been snacking much, and now 2 days before the flight home we'd found ourselves with lots to use! Cue me eating my own weight in giant cakes...
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