Wednesday 19th August 2009
We had a lie-in today after our late night last night. The plan for today was an easy day in World Showcase, as that didn’t open until later. Nigel and I pottered about for a bit and I rang my mum, who’d just come out of hospital, to see how she was doing. We eventually got Stephen up at about 9.45, had a quick breakfast (the usual!) and then set off for Epcot, parking in Discover and arriving in the park about 11.10.
We hadn’t done Test Track on our previous visit so we decided to pick up some FP for later. We knew the queue would be awful and it was – 110 minutes! Even the FP queue was 15 minutes.
Headed off to WS and decided to start with Norway so we could do Maelstrom before the queues built up. (Us? Queue-obsessive? Never!) Luckily, it was a walk-on. We even stayed to watch the film for the first time – it wasn’t bad at all and at least we didn’t feel too guilty walking straight through, with all the poor CMs standing there!
We went back to Mexico so Stephen could get his passport done.
We didn’t spend long here as we had explored it a few days before – just took a few (hundred!) photos.
We decided to begin our walk around to Germany, as we had an
ADR for lunch at Biergarten. It was lovely to just take our time and appreciate all the little details on the way.
We stopped off at the Outpost so Stephen could play the drums when, suddenly, rain just poured from the sky. Thank goodness we were already undercover – within seconds, people were soaked to the skin and the pavements were flooded.
After several minutes, it stopped just as suddenly as it had started. CMs appeared from all sides with huge brooms to sweep the pavements and everything was dry and steaming within a few minutes. We carried on to Germany and first up, a meeting with Snow White!
She had a very high-pitched, squeaky voice! We then explored the shops and the pavilion until it was time for our reservation – we especially love the Christmas shop here.
As we went into the Biergarten , we were really surprised – we hadn’t really had any idea of what to expect, having only really looked at the menu. This was Nigel’s choice of restaurant – anywhere that has sausages on a buffet is good in his book, especially coupled with beer!
The setting was a German village at night, with tables set out underneath the stars – it was really effective.
The tables are long, trestle-types that seat 8 or 10 people – we knew this before we went. We were sitting with a family from Iowa who were very pleasant – the dad was very keen to talk politics and was especially interested as to how the British public viewed Barack Obama!
Nigel had a beer flight and we dug into the buffet – it was lovely, with a good variety of food. Stephen loved the schnitzel and I thought the Bavarian cheesecake was delicious. Nigel just ate loads of everything.
We’d timed our visit so we could watch the oompah band. That was great fun watching them play so many different instruments and we all enjoyed joining in with the toasts!
Cont ...