When You Wish Upon a Star...

Thursday morning about 9:30, we arrived at our chosen hotel in Orlando, the Champions Resort. This is a pretty nice place, actually and we were stoked to get 3 nights for $100. We bought our 3-day Disney passes (good for all Disney parks and including all rides), and we headed for the Magic Kingdom.

Pia has never been here before, and I've only been once, in 1984, aged, nine. Of course a lot has changed since then but what was surprising was how much had not changed much, only been improved upon.

As a 9 year-old, this place had a big effect on me. It excited me in the usual way that a theme park excites children but it also instilled in me a sense of wonder and imagination that seems little-dulled by the passing of 26 years. If I ever manage to write that novel I've been wrestling with, it will be largely thanks to Walt Disney.
Disney World and the other Disney parks are, quite simply, the best place on Earth.

We had been very careful to arrive here in shoulder season, not peak. And not during school vacation, which is June, July, August here. So in theory, it should not be too crowded. Of course it still is. There are several schools that are having excursions here for their end of school year and there are a lot of European families here. Maybe it's school vacation there.

Anyways, we had 45-minute wait to get on the Jungle Cruise (still worth it) before we discovered a new thing called a Fastpass. It's free. You can approach a ride with a line-up and either join the line, or, get a fastpass ticket, which tells you to come back later at a specific time and when you do, you jump the queue. It's a real time-saver. Anyone who's beeen here knows that there's so much to see and do, that although the park is open from 9am until 9 or 10pm, it's hard to fit it all in. But we just about did...

We went on all the old favorites:
The Jungle Cruise;
Pirates of the Carribean (Expanded a lot since the films were made);
Thunder Mountain;
Splash Mountain;
Space Mountain;
It's a Small World;
Peter Pan;
and many, many more.
It was such a great day (even though we got a violent thunderstorm and heavy rain for a couple hours).
We stayed and watched the fireworks (They have a fireworks display here every night of the year that could teach the Sydney New Years' guys a thing or two) and arrived back at our luxurious (no, really) hotel at about half-past-midnight, exhausted but overjoyed.

Pia about 100 feet off the ground in the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse

Walt and Mickey pose in front of Cinderella's castle (a restaraunt inside)

African Elephant charges our boat in the Jungle Cruise

The Haunted Mansion from a safe distance. This is probably my favorite ride

The Railroad Station

Cindy's pad. Love what she's done with the place...

Thunder Mountain Railroad