Making The Magic Kingdom My Bitch
One of the few perks of Florida residency is cheap* tickets to Disney World. In exchange for dealing with asshat toll roads, insane drivers, and really, really stupid people, we get to hemorrhage money at the altar of Uncle Walt.
But it’s hard to complain when it’s so damn fun.
Friday – Magic Kingdom
After the boring stuff of paying for parking and tickets, Knize and I head to the monorail station. The plan was to take the monorail over to the park and then take the ferry back that night. The monorail line was insanely long so we decided to take the ferry over, but not before the awesome Avengers monorail passed overhead. Of course, my dickhead camera was too slow, but I got a picture of its ass end later.
This monorail is so sweet. Too bad this is all my camera could manage. Stupid camera. >:(
I took that picture (and the next one) from the Main Street train station. If you’re going to the park for the first time, then taking your time and wandering down Main Street with the other gawkers isn’t a bad idea. But we wanted to beat the crowds to the Haunted Mansion (the best ride in the park, IMHO.) Take the train to Frontierland, and you shave a lot of time off of the trip to the back of the park.
This may be the best picture I've ever taken with the stupid cell phone camera.
Disney World did some pretty sweet updates to the Haunted Mansion. The new family busts in the queue line, along with the other exterior updates, are much better than the old line.
Picking statue boogers is always classy.
They made some upgrades to the interior of the ride, too. The hitchhiking ghosts made both Knize and I go “holy shit!” They actually interact with you instead of just sitting there. My favorite ride is even better now. Check out this behind-the-scenes video from the Disney Imagineers (one of the coolest jobs on the planet):
Also, on our first ride through, the cast member in the stretching room totally scared the shit out of Knize. After the lights turned back on Knize turned around and they were practically nose-to-nose. I don’t think he meant to do it on purpose, but it was hilarious. And also confirmation that, yes, we did pick the wall with the door in it.
Fast forward to our ride on the Jungle Cruise, where Skipper Terry said the funniest thing of the weekend:
“I have this gun here in case the hippos attack, but I’m not allowed to use it anymore. I can scare them with it, though.”
*leans over the side of the boat towards the animatronic hippo, waving the gun*
“HIPPOIGOTAGUN!!!!”
The other people in the boat weren’t nearly as amused, but that’s because Knize and I are made of concentrated awesome, and we get that shit on a deeper level. I hope that someday Skipper Terry reads this and sees how much we loved that, and how we quoted ”hippo I got a gun” all weekend at the most inappropriate times.
Then, I took way too many pictures of It’s A Small World. Because why the fuck not?
We went to Tomorrowland, rode the Stitch Alien Encounter-type-thingie, which I hadn’t ridden since it was the scary original Alien Encounter. Eh. It was OK. I love Stitch, but the original way-too-intense-for-the-anklebiters version was amazing.
And then we were tired and rode the Peoplemover. We rode it once, went on something else, and then got on it again. This time, Space Mountain was broken down and I got to see its sweet metal guts for the first time. The pictures are shitty because the Peoplemover zooms through there (and also because my camera suuuuuucks.)
After a few more shenanigans, it was time for the Main Street Electrical Parade. You just don’t understand how much I love this parade. It is just under the Spectromagic Parade in my list of epic parades.
And then my phone died because it’s a stupid little pussy. Seriously, if I hadn’t just thrown wads of money at Mickey Mouse I could have had a new phone by now.
As we left we also realized something important: despite all of the Disney travel blogs telling you to ask to ride up in the front of the monorail, don’t ask to do it. Ever since the accident almost three years ago that claimed the life of a monorail driver they’ve stopped letting guests ride with the driver. The poor guy we asked almost looked pained when he told us we couldn’t ride up front. I felt bad. I bet he gets asked a lot, and most people probably press the issue. Luckily, we remembered right away why riding up front is a no-no now, and we chilled in a middle car for the ride back to the parking lot.
Since this post is already way long, I’ll recap Saturday’s journey to Animal Kingdom in my next post.
*”Cheap” is a term used very loosely here.
