For our first full day at the World, we had breakfast reservations at the Crystal Palace, home to Pooh and friends and great buffet meals. The Magic Kingdom opened early that day for resort guests, and I wanted to get there early, but we were all tired from traveling the day before. Jane had to take care of the room issue, and get her
GAC card so Keith and I went ahead. We browsed in the yet-uncrowded Emporium on Main Street USA (a great everything-you-want parks merchandise store), and made our way up towards Adventureland.
We wanted to ride Pirates of the Caribbean, but realized we had only a short time before our Crystal Palace reservation and turned back. We checked in at the Crystal Palace and got our pager. Than we waited.
Tyler and Jane got to Crystal Palace 15 minutes later and we waited.
30 minutes later we were still waiting.
At some point, I was fuming (this normally doesn't happen to me at The World), so I sent Keith up to the check-in window to find out what was up. Apparently, they never entered our pager number into the waiting cue! There were many apologies, and two 4-people, any-ride-you-want Fast Passes (which Keith pointed out saved us at least the hour we spent waiting). Eventually we sat down to a wonderful breakfast.
We discovered that Jane likes some tea with her ice:
.
Teenagers aren't crazy about pictures with characters:
But I am (no big surprise there):
Keith also got a birthday celebration at breakfast:
We did ride pirates of the Caribbean after breakfast. As we exited into the inevitable store (it's actually a very cool store, with lots of pirate "stuff") we encountered this guy:
He was great. I stood there for 5-10 minutes and watched him getting poked, people kept trying to guess if he was live or audio-animatronic, they posed in front of him, he never moved or blinked. I'd hate to have that job but boy was it fun to watch!
And then of course we had to ride
Splash Mountain.
And the boys rode Big Thunder Mountain. I am NOT a rollercoaster person, and neither is Jane, so we just waited for them to come off. Then we did several other must-do rides, including Toy Story. And to our great disappointment (though I knew of it in advance), the People Mover (Tomorrowland Transit Authority) was down for refurbishment. It was supposed to be back up on 8/24, but it stayed down for our entire stay. :(
Remember the tissues I ordered from GardenGrocer? I casually tossed a couple of packs into my fanny pack on our way out the door that morning. About halfway through breakfast I started sneezing. And I kept on sneezing through the rest of the Magic Kingdom. By about 3pm I was exhausted and miserable, and Jane still had room issues to resolve (!), so we decided to go back to the hotel. I always have zinc lozenges with me, so I sucked one, took a decongestant, and went to bed while Keith read. I slept for 2.5 hours, took another zinc, and felt like a brand new person. We headed for EPCOT, and aside from a couple of sniffles at the beginning of dinner I was fine. By the next day, there was no sign of a problem. Weird, but I wasn't complaining!
We ate in Tuttu Italia, in the Italian Pavilion at EPCOT. Personally, I miss the old restaurant that was there (Alfredo). Keith loved the new one, better than Alfredo. At least we all agreed that the desserts were great!
And Keith had yet another Birthday Celebration :)
We watched IllumiNations to end a GREAT day!