Today was a very early start… I was up at 6:40… in hindsight I probs didn't need to be up quite so early! I got ready first and mum followed half an hour or so later. We wanted to get to Starbucks before extra magic time as I don’t function well without a morning coffee. Side note- really cheeky but Newport bay don’t provide any tea, coffee or a kettle- Vienna dream castle did provide these and it was half the price! Just something to note here…
Newport Bay in the early hours... it is beautiful.
We left the hotel just after 8am and popped into Starbucks. We ordered an orange juice each- these are freshly squeezed and lovely and I had a coffee to start the day! We sat for about 10 mins before heading to the Studios park to join the queue. It didn’t take long to get through the ticket machines at 8:30, maybe 5 mins or so. We had a plan to head to crushes coaster and ride this with a small queue as there are no fast pass options.
It took a lot of convincing to get mum on this ride, we queued for around 25 mins, after listening to mum scream the whole way round we came off and she admitted it wasn’t so bad! We ended up going down the biggest drop backwards- she didn’t like that haha, it is luck of the draw which way you face going down as the cart spins! We liked the ride and said we would do it again but it was another one we found fairly short! Wouldn’t want to queue over an hour again.
I then did Tower of Terror about 9am, it had a 10 min queue. This was one I had to do on my own, I love this ride and think it may be my favourite! I think it may drop more than the Florida one!
We then came out of the park and headed back to the hotel to get some breakfast. I had several helpings of the Buffett- the food was really good! They give you very small sized plates though. After breakfast we headed back into the parks.
This is a bad pic of the Buffett food really... and makes the plates look big haha
We headed back to the Studios park with the plan to do the Frozen Musical show. We then learnt you had to get in the queue very early for this so we had missed the showing we wanted to see and people were already queuing for the one an hour and a half later! Instead we went to see the 11am showing of the Motor action show! This was fantastic! Really recommend this highly.
After the show we went over to the Disneyland park- all in all I’m with the popular opinion that there isn’t loads to do in the Studios park! Especially with rocking rollercoaster down at the moment too! We took a few photos on mainstreet and with the castle- it was clearer skies today! Then we headed to Thunder mountain to get fast passes, Our return time was 14:15. In the meantime we rode phantom manor- we found this really quite spooky! Not one to do if you have young kids or kids who get scared easily, its defo not as tame as the American one!
We had a quick browse in the shop near by- I eyed up a jumper I wanted at an eye watering price of €45, I would buy this later in the trip though oops.
After our quick browse we went to join the snow ride queue, it is a nice little ride. Again though very short- not one to queue a long time for unless you have small children.
We returned back to Thunder mountain to do our fastpasses! We loved this ride, just as we remembered although mum said it was more in the dark than she thought! You cant beat thunder mountain, its a classic.
On the way out of the park to grab some lunch we got two fast passes for Buzz lightyear. We had a return time of 16:00. We went to Starbucks for lunch I had the Mac and cheese- which I would really recommend and I think mum had a muffin and a hot chocolate. After warming up we headed back for our fast pass- we still had to queue about half an hour for this with a fast pass- I think they were having some difficulties with it! I got a score of 249,600 this time! I was very happy with this.
Afterwards I did a bit of shopping, picked up a simba mug and a keyring, and then we waited for the Disney’s Stars on Parade. This was fantastic. I stood at the end of mainstreet round the loop near the gate where the floats go in once they have finished going down the street. This is a really good view and seems to be a lot less crowded- though you will find people will move there once they’ve seen it from another angle before hand.
Then we headed back into the Disneyland hotel for a cheeky glass of wine and a chance to warm up! We were waiting to go back down to the Disneyland Park for the Illuminations again. We stood further away for these this time which I think was better. There are less people directly in front of you!
We did a little bit more browsing as we passed through Disney village on the way back to our hotel after the fireworks. Mum bought a little Christmas tree decoration. Back at the hotel we changed and freshened up as we were out tonight for the Buffalo Bills show. Before hand we had a quick drink at The BillyBobs country bar in Disney Village. We both agreed this was great and we wished we had stayed there all night listening to the live music!
We had booked into the 21:30 showing of Buffalo Bills free with our meal plan. We arrived at 21:00 got allocated our seats and given a blue team cowboy hat! We pre-ordered a bottle of wine to take to our seats and after watching a couple of cheesy songs we were shown to our seats. Blue team are seated last so we thought we had the worst seats. Quite the opposite though! We had the best seats, right in the centre in the middle row!
We enjoyed our night very much. It was something different, although I’m not sure we would do it again. The food was good but very very meat based. The service on the whole was good apart from one waiter who kept trying to take our wine!
And the show was very random and we had no idea what was going on…. Would recommend going as a family though for sure.
We came out of the show about 11pm. Disney Village was all closed and it was deserted. We walked back to the hotel- very tired and ready for bed! We were both sound asleep by midnight.
We walked 28,000 steps- I slept very well that night lol.
