Days Off Part 1: Day 17

February 11th

Day 17: Magic Kingdom

I'd spent a pretty adequate amount of time at all the parks at this point, except Magic Kingdom! Laura and I were the only two in the apartment, so we left around noon to go explore the most magical place on earth. The first thing we did after arriving was look for our roommate Morgan. She works as a PhotoPass photographer in Magic Kingdom, so we started looking for her along Main Street, and found her right in front of the castle! I don't have the the photos she took of us because those went to Laura's card, but I do have this adorable one of Schmorgie in her costume!

Right away we got in line for Haunted Mansion because the wait was something like 20 minutes, which is just ridiculous for 1:30 in the afternoon in Magic Kingdom. Then we wandered through the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse, which is right across from Aloha Isle, home to my most favorite dessert in the whole world, the Dole Whip!

After devouring my Dole Whip float, we found a place in Frontierland to watch the Festival of Fantasy parade at 3 o'clock. We had such a great view right along the fence-string-thing and even though we were baking under the sun, it was absolutely worth it. Here are just a few of the thirty or so pictures I took during the parade :)

Belle and the Beast open the parade!

It was really sunny, but you can see Flynn Rider up there on that swinging thing! That was right before he winked at me.

In case you can't tell because of the glare, this is in fact Ariel

Maleficent. This was probably my absolute favorite part of the parade. It was so dramatic and you could feel the heat from her fire!

Right after the parade we hopped into line for Pirates of the Caribbean, which only took about half an hour. After that we wandered around New Fantasyland, I got Lefou's Brew, and then we started heading back toward Main Street USA. We had plans to meet our roommate Morgan at The Contemporary for a quick service dinner, but Morgan was defeated after her shift, so Laura and I headed toward the monorail solo, only to find that it was temporarily shut down. Fortunately The Contemporary is about a five minute walk from the gates, so we made our way there on foot. I had never been inside The Contemporary except when on the monorail, so it was pretty cool to get to experience it more thoroughly. We went to their quick service location, the Contempo Cafe, for dinner where I had some kind of feta-chickpea-greek olive salad that I of course loved.

The whole place looks like the Seattle airport and Chef Mickey's is inside, which is a big character buffet that we're all dying to go to. Honestly, I'm dying to go to any character buffet because it combines my two favorite things - casual interaction with characters, and endless amounts of food.

After dinner we went to Downtown Disney for a little late night shopping, to the grocery store, and finally home. For more reasons than one, it was a day I will look back on for a very long time.