The only park we hadn't done, Hollywood Studios, was our destination today. After yesterday's lie-in I set an alarm for 8am to ensure I was awake early. Of course, it went off, I snoozed it and fell back asleep waking up again around 9 for breakfast.
Arriving at the park there was an enormous queue of vehicles waiting to get in, including park shuttle buses. This appeared to be because the entrance our bus came in by only had 2 tollbooths for the guest parking lot. When we got to the front there were fairly short queues for bag check and ticket checks, compared to the ridiculously long queues at Animal Kingdom on Friday!
Our first port of call was the Indiana Jones stunt show. This was held in a massive arena, which was surprisingly full. A host pulled volunteers from the audience to be "extras", while stuntmen/women demonstrated various scenes, including falling from buildings onto crash mats, and choreographed fight scenes. It was rather entertaining and reminded me of the similar show I saw at Universal in LA a few years back.
From there we popped across the park to Beauty and the Beast, which was a live action show featuring songs from the film. This was all well and good but we fancied something a bit more high-octane, and our first FastPass of the day was for Rock'n'Rollercoaster. The main queue was around an hour, so we were glad to be able to skip that!
Unfortunately the row we were seated in was rather wet on the floor, as a previous guest appeared to have spilled their drink. We didn't realise how wet til halfway round when we suddenly got a slightly damp shoe each! As we disembarked, I thought it would be a good idea to let the ride attendant know so that they could prevent anyone else from having the same issue. Unexpectedly, he put us through something I'd only read about - the reride hallway, which took us back to the station for an immediate go again. Not only that, but we were bumped to front row as well! Excellent customer service from Disney there!
After our two shots at that, we went round the corner to the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Now here was a ride where the design team really went to town. The theming was absolutely flawless - from the exterior, the lobby and through to the basement area where you're loaded into the lift cars. The ride itself was pleasingly unpredictable, shooting you up and down with randomly opening doorways, and gave a nice amount of airtime as you bounced around in the shaft. If it hadn't have had such a long queue I'd happily have ridden that one again.
It was now time for lunch (and I was getting peckish), and we had reservations at the 50s Primetime Diner. This was a very interesting concept - the idea was as if you were eating at home in the 50s, with the waiters acting like family members. It was even better if you had kids (I was watching groups around us) as the waiters would dump a load of cutlery on the table and tell the kids they had to do their chores and lay the table! Everyone stayed in character throughout, while old 50s American TV show clips played on TVs around the room. We both had the "sampler" platter, which comprised of fried chicken, meatloaf and pot roast with mash. For dessert we went for a Boston Chocolate Cream Parfait, which was some odd concoction of chocolate fondant, vanilla cream and bits of sponge cake. Very enjoyable.
To walk off dinner, and because we had a few hours before our next FastPass, we had a very pleasant walk along the river. The weather has turned very agreeable over the last couple of days - the cloying humidity of the first week has completely vanished and it's been warm and summery, but not too hot. We were still glad to get to the Boardwalk resort and fill our refillable resort mugs up with a nice cold drink, before continuing to our destination - the Fantasia mini golf course we'd been to the previous week. Unlike the previous week, it now wasn't pouring with rain, so we were able to enjoy it without having to hit balls through puddles! As it was fairly busy we were constantly catching up with the people in front, while the lady behind us frantically tried to stop her young kids excitedly getting mixed up in our game!
Back to the Boardwalk for another refill, and then onto a boat back to the Hollywood Studios park again. As it had got later, the park was a little quieter, though still had reasonably long queues for the bigger rides. We had a FastPass for Star Tours, a Star Wars themed 3D simulator ride, which was a lot of fun. Apparently it doesn't always give you the same experience each ride, which we confirmed later on with our second go having a different storyline in the middle.
Down from there, we found the Muppets area. Now anyone who knows me knows I've a very soft spot for anything Muppets-related, so the MuppetVision 3D show was right up my street, complete with animatronic Statler and Waldorf heckling from their customary box, and a live-actor Sweetums running around the auditorium. I was preparing to spend a bit of cash in the store on some Muppets t-shirts but they didn't really have anything I wanted, except a few character hats (Beaker was tempting me!) so I didn't buy anything at all.
Rides were still busy, so we visited the Walt Disney: One Man's Dream exhibition, which had a number of exhibits charting the timeline of Walt's life, right up to the conception of Disneyworld. It concluded with an interesting short film showing some of his early work.
We'd picked up a FastPass to the late Fantasmic show, so while the early one took place we had a leisurely dinner at the food court next to Tower of Terror. My pizza tasted exactly like Domino's, but the banana dessert had clearly never even seen a picture of a banana, so the yellowy goo had the taste of those foam bananas you get in penny sweet mixes. Not my favourite pudding by any stretch of the imagination.
We crossed the road to enter Fantasmic about 20 minutes before the start. There was already a sizeable FastPass queue building, and hordes of people pouring into the normal queue area. We were funnelled up the hill, through a surprisingly wide row of wristband scanners (the normal pair you get on most rides would never have cut it!) and into the top of the amphitheatre. I use the word advisedly, as it was a huge semicircle of seats (we later read that it had a capacity of 6,900, which is a good off-peak day for Alton Towers!) Tom went and grabbed a box of popcorn each, as the smell had been driving us nuts since the start of the trip. It was buttery but incredibly salty - the smell had led me to believe that it'd be sweet!
The show itself was very good indeed, involving character actors, stunts, light effects, water fountains, boats and fireworks. A host of Disney villains played off against various heroes and heroines in what's meant to be Mickey Mouse's imagination. Definitely worth watching, but get there early enough!
As the crowds poured out, the ride queues were still sizeable, despite it now being Extra Magic Hours. The Movie Ride, which had been busy earlier, had now quietened, so we managed to go on that. The ride system itself was reminiscent of Ellen's Energy Adventure at Epcot which we rode yesterday. The large slow-moving trams were this time piloted by a guide (I say piloted, he didn't do much except press Stop and Go buttons!) Some staged fight scenes worked nicely and there were some decent animatronics and clips from various films. Good for a walk-on, not sure I'd queue for it though.
By this point we were tired and there didn't seem a lot of point in hanging around, so we got the shuttle bus back to the resort. Tomorrow: Blizzard Beach waterpark and Magic Kingdom for "Wishes"
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