Memorial Day Do-Over at Disney

Recently, Hubby asked what our plans were for Memorial Day.  As a family, we began doing ‘something’ for Memorial Day as a way to celebrate another year of school passing, because Annie was hating school and failing.  It’s since become a tradition to do something – we’ve gone to Jacksonville Beach and St Augustine, but our favorite, of course, turned out to be Disney.  We’ve been going to Disney for Memorial Day for about 4-5 years now and love it. So, no surprise that we decided we should go this year, treating it as a ‘do-over’ because of the bad last day we had from our last trip.

We, of course, stopped at Krispy Kreme on the way down, and decided to try making the trip without the Garmin.  We did great, found our way onto property, but then ended up BEHIND the MK Parking Plaza gates, on the road near Wilderness Lodge (I think)!  Now, if we were less by-the-book or if it wasn’t Memorial Day Weekend, I would have continued on my merry way to the MK parking lot without buying a parking ticket. However, I like my car and didn’t want it to get towed, so we had to backtrack all the way around, all so we could get a parking slip!  Before doing that, however, we did take a moment to drive through the Wilderness Lodge parking lot, to get a feel for the place – we’ll be there in under 4 months!

It was hot and really busy, so we didn’t expect to get a lot done.  We picked up some new Sorcerer cards, rode a few rides, ate lunch (repeat after me: DON’T EAT LUNCH AT LUNCH TIME AT PECOS BILL! It was crazy busy!) then decided to get on the Railroad to take us back to Main Street.  As we sat on the train and slowly took off, hubby tapped me on the leg, pointed at Big Thunder and said “People are IN LINE!” Holy crap! Soft opening!  We rode the train all the way around and back to Frontierland, then the three of us did that not-running-but-walking-way-too-fast-to-be-walking walk over to Big Thunder and got in line – the line was all the way past the Fastpass machines, but it was moving very quickly, and I had my camera up, snapping shot after shot as quickly as I could! 

The Standby and Fastpass lines have been switched around

In-Line Water Fountains (High and Low)

Some random guy partaking in the goodness of In-Line water

A look back at the queue (and all those boxes...)

Random people in front of a separator wall (okay, they're family)

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

The geysers are freshly painted and fully geysering!

What's up with the boxes? Do we get some Old West Strippers?

Love the lights! Are those AC Vents in that rusty pipe?

2nd type of hand-rail, meant to look like water pipes?

 We’re one of the first to ride!!!!

Nope.

We got to the final turn-around in the queue before you begin to go down and the ride came to a stop.  We were in line for a few minutes before we were told that it was down for good, and we were escorted out of line.  BOOOOOO!

There was rumbling within the groups of families that the ride may come back up in ‘a few minutes’ so we camped out by the hooded fastpass machines and kept an eye on all the CMs.  At one point, a cutie CM named Daniel came over and I was asking him questions – namely: Can I go take pictures while there’s no one in the queue?  Shocker- the answer was no.  Supposedly, even he wasn’t allowed in there when the ride wasn’t running!  I asked him about the Mysterious Boxes in the queue and he stated that he couldn’t talk about those, but we ‘may see some cool stuff on Monday’ when BTMRR officially opened.

I think we hung around for about an hour – Frontierland emptied out for the three o’clock parade, then the tide rolled back in when it was over, until finally Daniel came over and politely (and without saying it was definitely closed) mentioned that if we had other rides we wanted to ride, we may want to head that way. So we threw in the towel and gave up on being an early rider and got back on the train. We all laughed and said that if we saw people riding, we were going to cut someone!  We didn’t, and we didn’t. We took a side trip over to the Contemporary to suck up some of their free wi-fi, then headed back to MK to grab a few things at the Emporium (that we didn’t get on our earlier trip at the beginning of the month) and swapped that stuff out for my camera gear at the locker up front.

We finished the night with dinner at Columbia Harbor House, then watched The Magic, Memories and You with the special summer theme, then Wishes. By the time we got back to the locker and returned our key, it was nearing 11.  We joined the masses at the ferry boat and I think we got back to our car around 11:45. 

Here now, I admit to the stupidest thing I’ve done in almost 20 years: I drove home.  I’d been up since 6am. It’s now midnight.  Somewhere around Okahumpka on the turnpike, my body realized what time it was and wanted no more of this awake stuff.  For the next hour, I was one blink away from sleeping.  I’ve always heard how dangerous it was to drive when you are that tired, but like a lot of people, I never REALLY knew.

I know now.  Do not drive if you are that tired! Ever.

It was about 2:30 by the time we pulled into the driveway and climbed into bed. 
I think it was 2:31 when I fell asleep.

Needless to say, hubby called in sick 5 hours later for work, then climbed back in bed!