Hollywood Studios in the morning, Magic Kingdom and running over small children in the evening
This was our Hollywood Studios day. (It may have been called MGM the last time you went to Disney World.) There aren't a lot of rides and shows that we wanted to see at Hollywood Studios, but there were a few things that we wanted to be sure to do.
We got there at 8:40 for the 9:00 opening. For some reason, it took them a long time to start scanning tickets and letting people in the park. I think they started around 8:50. By the time we got through the gate, they had already started the rope drop ceremony.
Our first priority was Toy Story Mania. It's a new ride that had only been open a few weeks, and it's incredibly popular. If you don't get there at the park opening or get FastPasses, the line is at least 90 minutes long throughout the day. FastPasses run out by noon. It's worth it, though.
The ride is an interactive ride, like Buzz Lightyear at the Magic Kingdom. Why they decided to use the Toy Story theme on another interactive ride I don't really know, but it is fun. This ride is 3D. Your ride vehicle stops in various rooms, and you play a different carnival game in each of the rooms. You have a gun with a string that you pull, and you use it for each of the various games. There's a ring toss in one room, pie throwing in another, one where you throw darts at balloons, and a few others. The screen interacts with your gun. So when you use the gun to fire in the dart throw room, you see your dart on the screen, and if you aim correctly, you see your balloon pop. A screen in your ride vehicle keeps score. We rode it twice, once with FastPass and once just standing in line right when the park opened. We would have gotten another FastPass and ridden it again if we had planned on staying at Hollywood Studios all day.
Tigger and Piglet waiting in line for Toy Story Midway Mania.We watched the Muppets 3D movie. Chris and I both love this movie. Mickey's Philharmagic at Magic Kingdom and It's Tough to be a Bug at Animal Kingdom are both newer and have more amazing special effects, but the Muppets movie is so much fun. It has the two old men making jokes in the balcony, just like on the old Muppets shows. At the end of the movie, all of the characters break out into a fight, and someone starts firing a cannon. The theater walls end up full of holes, but if you watch after it's over and you're leaving the theater, the walls go back to normal so that it's all nice looking for the next group.
We saw the Playhouse Disney stage show. That was okay. If you have kids who watch the shows on Playhouse Disney, they'll like it. Tigger and Pooh thought it was good. You sit on the floor, and I ended up leaving early with Roo because he just wanted to walk around.
Chris took Tigger and Pooh to Star Tours. That's one of those flight simulator rides. You watch a screen that looks like you're flying, and the theater moves along with the screen to make it feel like you're really going somewhere, but you don't go anywhere at all. I thought the boys would be scared, but they both had fun. It turns out that they thought it was a Lego ride. Chris has a Star Wars game that he plays on the Wii where the characters are made out of Legos. It's less violent than most video games because when you hit someone with a light saber, their body parts just pop off because they were built out of Legos. Anyway, it turns out the boys associate Star Wars with Legos, since they've never seen the movies, and I guess Legos can't be scary.
Chris and Tigger went on the Hollywood Tower of Terror. This is a ride that I've never done because I'm scared to. It's a Twilight Zone-themed ride where you go into an elevator in an old, haunted hotel, and the elevator free falls several times through out the ride. You don't even know how many times you'll fall because the computer that runs the ride changes it every time. They rode it with FastPass, and they could have ridden it twice because I got 4 FastPasses with our 4 tickets, but Tigger wasn't up to a second ride. He said that he wasn't scared but that he just didn't have much fun.
One of the things that we had really wanted to see when we started planning our vacation was Lights, Motors, Action! It's a car stunt show. Race car-obsessed Piglet would have loved it. Unfortunately, it was closed for refurbishing the whole time we were there. We'll have to catch it next time.
Our lunch at Hollywood Studios was a buffet with Playhouse Disney characters at Hollywood and Vine. It was fine. The chef was much better than the one we had the day before at the Crystal Palace. I felt comfortable eating everything he said I could eat. I asked him specifically about the corn spoonbread on his buffet, and he said it didn't have any eggs. That made me upset that I skipped the spoonbread the day before. The only things I had felt comfortable eating at the Crystal Palace were rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, pizza, and ice cream. This time, I got to eat a wider variety of foods because I believed that the chef was being thorough when he told me which foods I couldn't eat.
Here are some pictures of the boys at this buffet.
June noticing that there's a picture of her on Tigger's shirt.
When we were ready to leave Hollywood Studios, Roo was asleep in the stroller. I didn't want to get him out and wake him up, and I had some shopping to do, so Chris and I split up at this point. Chris took the big boys back to the hotel where they swam and then napped. I rode the boat to the Yacht Club resort because I could roll the stroller on without getting the baby out. I shopped a bit there, and then when Roo woke up, we got on a bus to the Magic Kingdom. I went into the Magic Kingdom and did some shopping at the Main Street Emporium. I thought about going further into the park and shopping at the cute shops in Adventureland and Liberty Square, but I was ready to sit. I've mentioned that it was really hot, right? I got on the bus and rode back to the Wilderness Lodge, and then I went out to the minivan to clean it up from our trip down to Florida because it was almost time to drive home, and I wanted to get organized before we left.
Later I'll tell you about our evening trip to the Magic Kingdom in which I wounded a young child.
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