Mice, Magic & A Maiden Voyage: Day 2: Sogginess, Songs & Spillages

[iheartwdw]

Day 2: Sogginess, Songs & Spillages

We had the alarm set for 6:30 this morning, but we were both still jetlagged and ended up waking up from 2:00 onwards. We ended up giving in at 5:00! It did mean that we were hungry by the time breakfast came around and gave me plenty of time to get down some detailed trippie notes! Our plan today was to spend some time around Epcot, which I was beyond excited about as it is my second favourite Disney park (MK is obviously the first, if you were wondering!) .

Before we came away there was a thread on the Dibb that was describing the horrible weather that Dibbers were experiencing in Orlando; roads had flooded and Busch Gardens had closed. I was really worried that we were going to have a total washout of a holiday. However, yesterday had been baking hot with the normal summer afternoon storm. The unseasonal weather was going to catch-up with us today though, as we were watching the weather channel whilst getting ready and it was set to be a wet, miserable and grey day! I was sulking, but determined to make the most of being in WDW and all of the exciting things that we had planned today… silver lining!

No breakfast in the room this morning, as we had an early ADR for 8:00 at Akershus with the Princesses. We got ready and made the short walk to the bus stop and were there just before 7:00. There were plenty of buses for MK and AK, but no sign of an Epcot one. We asked the next bus driver that pulled up. He was very chatty and helpful; apparently the Epcot buses do not start running until 7:15 and he let us know that one would probably get to us in the next 5 minutes. He was right and we were at the bag check by 7:45. We had a comedy duo checking our bags today and as there was no one else waiting, they were joking around with us. Nathan had a bottle of water and Fanta in his bag for later and the CMs were saying that we must be British as we have Fanta?! I thought that it was more of an American drink, but they seemed to think that it is a popular Brit beverage and were taking the mick.

Confusion over, we bumped into some more friendly CMs at the entrance, who asked us if we would like them to take our photo, so that we could take advantage of the empty park – it really was deserted! They were eager beavers and kept on getting us to do different poses and were playing with the zoom for different shots.


Just one of the many poses.

On the way through the empty park, we also met another CM who was also a keen bean and asked if we wanted a picture taken in front of the fountain… we just must look very photogenic with all of these offers! Of course we said yes and were happy to have so many pictures of just the two of us with nobody else around.



We continued with the photo shoot and took some more pictures of our walk across Epcot and over to World Showcase. I was happy that a monorail was doing the loop inside the park and I managed to capture quite an artsy shot!... well for me anyway!


These were the cute ears that Nathan had gotten made for me as part of my birthday present.


Look at those horrible clouds, where were all of the blue cloudless skies?!

There was no queue outside of Akershus by the time we were there and we were shown in straightaway, spot on our ADR time. Before we went over to our table, we met the hostess with the mostest Belle. She was not the chattiest of princesses, despite there being no-one behind us, but she was pleasant enough. Maybe it was a bit too early for her?!



Akershus is a mix of buffet and family style breakfast. There is a selection of cold items, such as fruit, pastries and specialist Norwegian dishes that are served as a buffet and you can help yourself too. You can go up as often as you like. The warm items are served family style, which means that you are given a big skillet filled to the brim with sausage, bacon, eggs and potato hash – again you can ask for more of anything to be brought out, although we couldn’t manage to finish all of our first serving off.


My buffet plate.


The family style serving.

I went up to grab some fruit and a croissant before the princesses came around. Our first royal visitor was Jasmine, who was more of a conversationalist then Belle. We were discussing Abu’s escapades and she was asking if Nathan was as naughty.



Next up was Snow White, who checked to see that I wasn’t eating any poisoned apples amongst my fruit as she has had a bad experience in the past!



We were also visited by Cinders. I forgot to mention that Nathan isn’t a fan of face characters and doesn’t like that they can speak to him. When they are so in character he doesn’t know what to say! His nemesis is Aerial… we met her at Cinderella’s Royal Table on our honeymoon and she was very excitable, she kept on shouting “bubbles” and was merrily chatting away to him. He was terrified! So I was very proud of how brave and grown-up he was being around them today. He was joining in with the chit-chat and he even posed with his arch-rival!


I think she knew to not shout out bubbles! He he!

Our server was lovely and kept us well topped up on juice and also brought me a birthday button, cake and card signed by all of the princesses, as she noticed that there was a celebration noted down on the booking.



It was just after 9:00 by the time we finished, which we realised was park opening. Due to the tiering system in Epcot, we didn’t have a FP+ for Test Track and Nathan was very keen to ride. This would be a new ride for him and for me in a way, as it was down for a refurb during our last visit. We rushed over, hoping to get on without much of a wait, but the clock was showing 60 minutes already. The single rider line was only 5 minutes, so we decided to do this. We designed our car together; Nathan was keen for speed rather than the aesthetic look. As we were in the queue, the CM pulled Nathan and the man in front of him forward and they ended up waiting for the same car. I was pulled to wait for the next car. I decided to be a bit cheeky and ask the man that was with Nathan if he would mind swapping, so that we could ride together . Luckily, he was fine with this and even though we queued for single rider we got to ride together – score! I was very grateful to the other guest .


Nathan enjoying the carwash.

Our car ended up coming in first place for its ‘aerodynamicness’ and in third place for all of the other categories. We both really enjoyed the ride, but I did prefer the old test dummy theming compared to the new Tron lighting. I’m not sure if it is worth waiting an hour for, although I am so impatient and do not like waiting for any of the rides or shows!

We headed into Mousegear next, as I wanted to pick up one of the new Sorcerer Mickey themed water spray fans. I wanted to get one at the beginning of the holiday to make sure that we made the most out of it, as they are very pricey. I also picked up a Minnie hand sanitizer, Nathan had already bought his Stitch one yesterday. I was also tempted by some cute Mickey earrings. I think they were in the kids section and they were tiny Mickey heads made from crystals. I thought they would be nice and subtle. I wore them for pretty much every day of the holiday afterwards, as Mickey goes with everything in Disney!



All shopped out, we hit the rides again with Journey into the Imagination! Although not a very thrilling ride, I have very fond childhood memories of riding Figment and playing in the area after the ride. Slight tangent… Does anyone else remember those metal pin things that you could push your hand against and they would take that shape? I’m not sure if Nathan enjoyed the ride as much as me, but we still had fun together afterwards designing our very own cheeky dragon.

A quick restroom break to a not very clean toilet, compared to the normal Disney standards (Eew ), before we headed over to Spaceship Earth. We had a FP+ booked for this, but Nathan had mixed up the time somehow and we had missed it. Luckily, there was only a 10 minute wait so we got in the standby line. I think the ominous looking clouds were keeping people away from the park and this seemed to be working in our favour. Despite being fairly cool, the person that was sitting in the carriage before me must have been toasty as I had a very warm and sweaty seat – bleurgh!

We had a soothing ride with the Dench and made sure we took some pictures of our future. I seriously love this ride!



We played some of the games in the post ride area. Nathan got very into the broom game, where you had to push energy to the areas that most needed it. I was soon recruited to make sure that all of the houses in his little world were well provided with electricity. By the time we had finished saving Nathan’s community it was 10:00 and had started to drizzle, so we decided to find something indoors to entertain us before our next FP+. I would have been completely content doing some more shopping, but I think Nathan was worried about his bank balance so took us in to Innoventions instead. We ended up in Storm Struck and are now well educated on how to survive and turn our house into somewhere that can cope with severe storms and hurricanes… I am sure that this will be very useful back home in the Midlands! He he!

I was feeling a little parched after our educational experience, so we nipped into the Electric Umbrella for one of my favourite beverages - a slushie! Yay! I had the pineapple and coconut, which tasted like a non-alcoholic pina-colada = scrummy and Nathan opted for the blue raspberry. There was a lovely old little lady CM and she ended up serving us, she saw my birthday button from Akershus earlier and insisted that I had a treat as a present. I was still fairly full from breakfast, so asked if I could have a pot of fruit instead of a cake. She was very sweet and didn’t want Nathan to miss out, so also gave him a pot as well. I received so many birthday wishes all day from CMs and guests, it was really nice and we made sure that we returned the well wishes to people that we saw wearing celebration badges. We used 2 snack credits to pay for the drinks.


My birthday treats.

It was 11:00 after we had finished our drinks and rehydrated, which meant that our Soarin FP+ was now active. We still had a fairly long wait in a very boring queue space, but we managed to bag the front row. It was a great view with no dangly feet and as we knew that there was a hidden Mickey on the golf ball that flies towards you, we made sure that we watched out for it. As Living with the Land was next door, this was our next port of call. We spotted even more hidden and not-so-hidden Mickeys on our boat ride.





...more to come!

[iheartwdw]

...Continued

The previous drizzle had now turned into a complete downpour, so we took shelter back in Mousegear hoping that it would slow down before our next ADR which was at Teppen Edo .



Our 2:00 reservation time was quickly approaching and the rain was showing no signs of letting up, I was not looking forward to the long and wet walk all the way across to Japan. However, we only had 10 minutes before our ADR so I was going to have to man up! We ponchoed up and power-walked as quickly as we could. Most people were walking in the opposite direction and heading out of the park, there were huge warm puddles on the floor that were unavoidable and I was wearing sandals, which is not a good combination. We were absolutely drenched by the time we arrived!

Teppen Edo is a must-do for Nathan, he really likes watching the chefs prepare the food and we both love Asian style food, so he was looking forward to today’s late lunch / early dinner. As we were so soaked through and soggy by the time we arrived at the much anticipated restaurant I asked if there was a cloakroom or anywhere else I could leave my rain mac. Unfortunately there wasn’t, which I was really surprised about, as surely with the summer thunderstorms wet guests must not be an unusual occurrence? They did however provide us with some Napkins, so we could at least dry off a little.

We were quickly shown to a table that we were sharing with a British family and a couple from the Philippines. The family from the UK were very friendly and chatty, but the Filipino couple didn’t seem to speak much English so couldn’t join in with much of the conversation. I did feel guilty and hoped they didn’t feel left out; we tried to make small chit-chat with them throughout the dinner. As we were settling in and introducing ourselves to our tablemate’s one of the CMs came over and asked us to remove our rain macs from the back of the chairs, we didn’t know where else we could put them as we had already enquired at the check-in desk, they brought us some carrier bags to put them in. I have to admit, I was a bit peeved! We had tried to leave them somewhere suitable and they should have given us bags at the front desk if they didn’t want us to put them on the back of the chairs.

Embarrassment over, our chef soon introduced himself and took our orders. As we had eaten a large breakfast, we didn’t fancy any starters and just ordered mains. The Brit family on our table were recommending dishes to us, as they had fallen in love with the place and had eaten here three times already on this trip! Wow! We eventually decided on the chicken and steak for me and the shrimp and steak for Nathan. Our fab chef started to whip everything up.



We had the normal choo-choo train, erupting volcano and Nemo jokes, which I still found funny even though I had seen them before. As we were eating we were brought the normal trio of dipping sauces and as they were being cleared away I experienced my second sauce spillage of the holiday as the waitress that was collecting them in, dropped a tray next to me and all up my legs! What is it with me and condiments on this holiday? I seem to be attracting them! The food was as amazing as always and we could have licked our plates clean. Even the rice is tasty on its own. I wish we had somewhere similar to this in our local area that we could visit.

I was sooo stuffed afterwards and couldn’t face a dessert, the CMs at Disney could never really understand this, as it is included with the DDP and always had a look of shock on their faces when we turned them down. There was some Disney magic though! A group of CMs came out with a bowl of ice-cream, with a candle in it singing happy birthday and a chef’s hat decorated with a bow for me to wear . After they had finished a table nearby with a Mexican family sitting around it, started singing their version of happy birthday to me in Spanish to a round of rapturous applause. It was extremely cute and I was very flattered . Only in Disney would people that you have never met perform a rendition of a song for you for your birthday. I felt very spoilt with all of my birthday treats today and it helped to make up somewhat for the awful weather!



The terrible weather had not disappeared by the time we were leaving the restaurant and the rain was just as torrential. I used this as an excuse to duck in from the wetness to Karamell-Kuche on the way back from Japan. It smelt ridiculously good in there and we struggled to choose a snack for later on in the room, there was a little bit of a queue though, which gave us some time to drool over all of the goodies in the cabinets and narrow down our choices . I knew that I had to have a bag of the caramel covered popcorn and a large counts as a snack credit – whoop! Nathan wanted a caramel and nut covered apple, which the CM cut into wedges for him to make it easier to eat. We decided to use 1 counter service credit for these, as we knew that we would never use them all up otherwise, so we also grabbed a bacon caramel square to make it up to the 3 snacks needed for the 1 counter service credit. The popcorn should have been $6, the apple $6.79 and the bacon square $4.49 totalling over $17, which I thought was a good use of a credit.



They were all really scrummy, especially the popcorn and the apple. The bacon square was nice, but I wasn’t keen on the smoky taste and it isn’t something that I would order again. This is why the DDP works well for us, as you can pick things that you might not normally choose and I feel it gives you a little bit more freedom.

As the weather was still miserable, we decided to head back to the hotel, so we walked through the park and had very little of a wait until a bus for SSR turned up. Once back in the room, we freshened up and dried off. We also devoured some of the popcorn and apple! It was quite tempting to stay in the room for the evening, as we were feeling the tiredness from the early starts, but the lure of DTD helped us to get our bums in gear! DTD was the destination for tonight, as I was hoping to pick up our $200 gift card that was included in our package as we booked directly through Disney.

Just after 6:00 we decided to catch the bus from outside our room, as it was still drizzling and I didn’t want to get all soggy again. It was only a short bus ride before we arrived and I could start shopping! We went straight into the Christmas shop, so I could choose some new tree decorations. Is it just me or does anybody else love the smell of this shop? It just smells like Christmas as soon as you open the door! I chose three decorations, which I will have to show you at the end of the report in my holiday haul as I cannot remember which three they were!.. Oops! I was also on the lookout for a pair of new stockings for us and a matching tree skirt, but I didn’t fall in love with any of the ones in there and they were also super expensive, so I didn’t get them. We were chatting away to the lady serving us and I asked if they had any Sven or Olaf tree decorations, as these were on my wishlist, but apparently they hadn’t had any in since November! It was now August?! Seeing as Frozen is so popular, I was surprised that Disney had missed out on 10 months’ worth of sales. She said that if we saw any around the parks, to snap it up as it sells out immediately when they do have them in.

Our next stop was World of Disney. I always seem to get lost in this shop, I find the layout really disorientating and it is always busy, so when I wander off from Nathan to look at something it takes him ages to find me again as I am aimlessly walking around! Our first stop was guest relations near the jewellery counter to collect our gift card, which they managed to locate with very little wait. Whilst at MK yesterday, the Alex and Ani bracelets had caught my eye. I really liked the pale blue ‘a dream is a wish your heart makes’ charm, but they only had the silver bracelet in stock and I preferred the gold. As we were waiting for our gift card I noticed that they had the gold version here. Nathan told me to treat myself, as he knew that I really liked it and was worried that we wouldn’t see it again. He was right, as for the rest of our stay we never saw the bracelet in stock again. This meant that we didn’t even manage to leave the counter before we had already spent some of our newly acquired gift card! Whoops!


Sooo pretty!

We spent some time perusing the rest of the merch on offer, there was a whole list of things that I liked, but I decided to restrain myself as it was only our second full day and we had already picked up quite a few things!


Nathan found a friend!

After we were all shopped out we headed to Earl of Sandwich for our tea. I chose the Hawaiian, as I had been dreaming about this since the last time I had one nearly three years ago and Nathan decided to try the Holiday special, as this was still seasonal and we had not sampled it before. There was a long line, as there always seems to be in here, but it went down really quickly and we were being served before we knew it. We did have to wait quite a while for our sandwiches to be made and for our buzzer to go off, I think it was because we were smack bang in the middle of the dinner rush.





We had the homemade crisps as our side, but couldn’t eat these on top of the sandwiches, so we took these back to the room to have as a snack later on in the holiday. The sandwiches were as good as we remembered, warm and full of flavour. Nathan was a very happy chappy, as apart from burgers, sandwiches are one of his favourite food groups! I think he would be quite happy living on burgers and sandwiches for the rest of his life!

Fatigued and full of food we made our way back to our Disney home at 9:30. The bus station was absolutely manic and heaving. Each stop was hosting temporary stops for another hotel, so there were two at each and it seemed to be causing lots of confusion. The CMs were rushing around to try and help everyone out, but it didn’t seem as if it was well organised. Once back in our room, we carried out what would become our regular evening routine of getting showered, park bags ready and outfits chosen for the next day before we fell into bed and started to dream of Mickey.



Thanks for reading along,

Laura Xx

[Sparksy72]

I absolutely love your 'custom' ears! I'm so pleased you had such a great day in spite of the rain and your new bracelet is just beautiful 😊

[MrsSilverStar]

love that bracelet! So pretty. And I'm obsessed with Disney Christmas ornaments so can't wait to see what you bought

[iheartwdw]

Originally Posted by Sparksy72

I absolutely love your 'custom' ears! I'm so pleased you had such a great day in spite of the rain and your new bracelet is just beautiful 😊

See more...

Thanks they are so cute, they also came with some Disney princess badges that you could attach to the centre of the bow if you wanted to Disneyfy them even more!

I'm worried I might end up with a bit of a bracelet collection if we went again, as there are even more that I like!

Thanks for reading,

Laura Xx

[iheartwdw]

Originally Posted by MrsSilverStar

love that bracelet! So pretty. And I'm obsessed with Disney Christmas ornaments so can't wait to see what you bought

See more...

It is pretty, o wore it the other day to work and kept on reminiscing about our fab holiday every time I saw it

I brought too many Christmas Disney decs, so they'll be lots for you to see!

Laura Xx

[Sparksy72]

Originally Posted by iheartwdw

Thanks they are so cute, they also came with some Disney princess badges that you could attach to the centre of the bow if you wanted to Disneyfy them even more!

I'm worried I might end up with a bit of a bracelet collection if we went again, as there are even more that I like!

Thanks for reading,

Laura Xx

See more...

I also wanted to say we have officially crossed off two days on your beautiful 100 day Disney countdown! Thank you again so much! So excited to see all the beautiful bracelets

[collybird]

I love your outfit, very cute.

Love your earrings and your Alex & Ani bangle.

What a long day, you did well to make it to Disney Springs after being in the park so early.

[2littleboys]

Hi Laura

Another fab day... I love your bracelet, do they do the same one in silver?

Glad the weather didn't spoil your day, looking forward to the rest x

[margyloveswdw]

Another great day and mmmmm the holiday sandwich!