Cookies and Scream- November 2021- Day 9 Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom

[Supersofe]

Day 9: Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom

I have finally got round to making an Index. You can find that here

Step Count: 36 918 (! )

Strap in for a long one today guys, we really went hard! It started early, we were up (alarm set!) at 6.30am. We packed up our final things and we were checked out of Hawthorne Suites by 7.05pm. We had enjoyed our stay here; it’s nothing special but it was a really good price and the location was perfect. The room was very quiet (except for the air conditioning) and it was very useful for us to have the suite, made it feel a lot less cramped.

Later today we would be checking in to the Dolphin at Disney World (a real treat that we managed to book with Amex reward points, please see my pre-trip report for details). So this meant that we were able to access the early magic hours (only half an hour at this point in November) at the Disney Parks. Today we were heading to Animal Kingdom.

We got to the car park at 7.20 and we were happy to find that our magic bands had our hotel stay registered so we didn’t have to pay for parking (at this point anyway, we had to pay later to park at the Dolphin). We had some nice photopass photos by the big Christmas tree outside the gates and got in to the park at 7.35am (it opened for hotel guests at 7.30 so not too bad).

Like everyone else we legged it to Flights of Passage. We were told the queue would be 40 minutes and we waited about this (including the pre-show). I’ve never queued for FOP before (we’ve always had a Fastpass (RIP)) but the queue area was really cool, I was excited to see the giant floating Avatar man. We also played the game on the Disney Play app which was fun and helped pass the time.
I enjoyed the ride but unfortunately we were in the very bottom corner of the screen. The images looked a bit warped and the 3D really didn’t work well at all. I almost had to crane my neck to look at the centre of the screen so I felt like I was looking at other riders the whole time which ruins the experience slightly. I was a bit disappointed by this as I’ve always loved FOP before.

After we left FOP, the queue for Navi river journey was huge (for some reason it was for the whole of our holiday!) so we headed round to Africa. Unfortunately the Safari was closed but that meant we could get some breakfast. Time for another cinnamon roll! We got the “special” 50th anniversary Mickey Cinnamon Roll from Kusfari Café ($7.50) and a coffee for J which came to $11 with tax. The special icing turned out to be bright blue which was actually a bit off putting and very sticky! It was tasty though, I just wish we got one of the white icing ones which seemed to be available from the other shop!

Once we finished our breakie luckily the safari was now open. The posted wat was 20mins and we waited about 10. We had a good safari and saw lots of animals, the hippos we out of the water which was unusual and we also saw a baby elephant and rhino (very adorable!).

After we left the Safari we headed around to Asia and to Everest (one of my favourite rides!). The posted wait was 20mins but we just walked on (I wonder if they were inflating the wait time as at this point this was one of the special rides that you had to pay extra for on Genie Plus!). Everest was fun as always but it is getting a little bit rattley- hopefully the work they are doing on it at the moment might help with that. Once we came off we went straight back on! Strangely we managed to be sat in the exact same seats (row 7) both times!

As we crossed the bridges on our way to Dinoland we saw Mickey, Minnie and Pluto on a boat. This was so cute! Animal Kingdom was definitely our best park for spotting the characters in spots like this!

Next up is my favourite ride of them all, DINOSAUR aka the best ride in Orlando. I was wearing my DINOSAUR t-shirt especially for the occasion. The posted wait was 15, and we waited about 5. Unfortunately the pre-show was very quiet and I couldn’t hear it over the people talking but the ride was amazing as always.

After this we went to Dino-Bites to get the 50th ice cream sandwich ($6.99). This was delicious and looked so cool and very special. We found a sunny bench to eat it on and it was plenty for us to share (if a little difficult to eat!). I thought this was actually quite good value for a Disney 50th snack!

We thought about going on Everest again but the queue looked a lot longer than before (still said 15mins though) so we decided to get out seats for Kite Tails that was starting at 11.15am. We weren’t actually sat in the designated seating but on the seats by Everest; right next to the crash landing area! There are two versions of this show- Lion King and Jungle Book and today we got to see the Jungle Book version with Baloo and King Louie.

I actually enjoyed this show quite a lot, it was very sweet and the crash landings were perfectly hilarious. It was extremely short though (maybe 10mins max) so I wouldn’t wait a long time for it. It would probably be better in the actual seating too as they have little kites amongst the audience.

After the show we had another photopass photo (they have a super zoom photo by Everest) which was fun and then we decided to look around the Jungle Trek. We could only see 1 tiger and the cast member told us that they only have one out at a time.

Next we headed over to catch the train to Conservation Station. We waited 5 minutes for the train and it was nice to see some animals on the ride. When we got to Rafiki’s planet watch we found we were 5 minutes late for the animation class. However, we asked the cast member and they were so kind- sorted us out with some paper and pencils and snuck us in the back. Today we were drawing Pua the pig from Moana. This was a lovely activity and it was nice to do something a bit different. Our drawings turned out alright and now they’re in a frame at home.

After the animation class we went and looked around the petting zoo; there weren’t many goats around but we gave the piggies a good scratch. We looked around the inside animals too, and I was very interested to see the mini CT scanner for the animals!

We waited about 5 minutes for the train and when we got off we spotted on the app that FOP only had a 30min wait so we decided to give it another go. We waited 30mins until the pre-show, about 40 to get on the ride. It was quite a bit better this time as we were in the middle row though the 3D still wasn’t quite right. Also, the person next to me screamed the whole way through that was quite annoying.

It was time for a slightly late lunch and we fancied Flame Tree Barbeque. We tried to order on the app but it wasn’t working right, we were queuing up to order in person and then managed to make it work. We got 2 lots of pulled pork mac and cheese and J got a slushy which came to $32 with tax. This was sooo yummy! The portion was a lot more generous than it first appeared and the seating area was lovely.

After lunch we went to have another ride on the best ride ever, Dinosaur. We basically walked straight on to this, we just had to watch the pre-show. Next up we wanted to watch the Festival of the Lion King. We got to the theatre at 3.50pm for the 4pm showing. The show is still lovely. It’s basically the same as it ever was but unfortunately without the acrobatic monkeys. Also, the bird dancers didn’t do the trapeze, just some normal dancing! We still enjoyed it though, it didn’t feel too watered down; it lasted about 25 minutes.

To finish off our day at Animal Kingdom we went to look around the gorilla trail. We had a lovely view of all the animals including the tiniest baby gorilla, it was so cute getting a little piggy back from his mum.

We had pretty much done everything at Animal Kingdom at this point; the rapids were closed and unfortunately we hadn’t got on the River Journey as the queues had just been too long. We walked back to the car at about 5pm but our day was far from over!

On our way to check in to the Dolphin we stopped at the Speedway petrol station and got $40 of gas to fill the tank. We also got 24 bottles of water for $7. Then we drove over to the Dolphin, it took us a little while to find the self-parking but we got there in the end.

The lobby for the Dolphin was beautiful, with a huge glass chandelier thing and a lovely fountain, we felt so swanky. There was quite a long queue for the check in. J had done the online check in earlier so we joined a different queue. It didn’t seem to go any quicker though!

Because we had bought one of our 2 nights at the Dolphin with American Express points we technically had 2 separate bookings. We called them the day before to make sure they had been linked which they assured us they had but when we got to check in this seemed to cause an issue. We had to wait a little while but it got sorted in the end; we were in the central section of the hotel (i.e. the huge triangle) on level 15.

Wow, our room was lovely! We had actually been upgraded to a Theme Park view room- this never happens to us, we were delighted! We had a great view out to the boardwalk, and we could see both Hollywood Studios and Epcot. The room was lovely too, two huge beds and very modern feeling (please excuse the mess in these photos!)

We were feeling quite tired at this point I’m not going to lie! We had a (very short) nap but we were up and ready to head out to our next adventure at 6.50pm. Tonight (a Wednesday) was the extra magic hours at Magic Kingdom for deluxe hotel guests and the Swan and Dolphin are included in that! The park closed at 9pm and then for 2 hours after that was the extra magic hours.

Even though the Swan and Dolphin have lots of the perks of the real Disney Hotels they don’t have the full Disney transport. If you get their buses to Magic Kingdom you get dropped off at the Ticket ad Transportation Centre rather than the main entrance so you still have to catch the ferry or the monorail. To get round this we walked from the Dolphin to the Yacht club. The walk was about 10 minutes and it was really lovely, along the edge of the water.

The Yacht club seemed lovely, it was very relaxed and beautiful. There was a conference of some kind happening on the board walk outside. I think I need to find the type of job that takes you to conferences at Disney World! The bus stop was just out the other side of the lobby, pretty easy to find. We had to wait about 10 minutes for the bus to Magic Kingdom.

We got to the main entrance of Magic Kingdom at about 7.30pm. We had a look around the main street shops, I especially enjoyed looking in the crystal shop and I spotted a necklace that decided to come back to buy on another day.

Enchantment was due to start at 8pm and at about 7.45 we decided to get our spot. We had watched the show on day 6 from the main hub so today we decided to watch from a little further up Main Street. I had heard that there were projections on the buildings so thought this might be a nice idea. There was plenty of space and we found a good spot about half way down.

The show was lovely from this view and I did enjoy the projections, they added a bit of context to what we were looking at. I still found the main projections on the castle quite hard to make out but the fireworks were wonderful.

When the fireworks finished the park was still open to everyone until 9pm. We waited for the crowds to die down a bit (there was such a huge rush to the exit!). It was quite hard to get across main street but we made it to Tomorrow Land and to Astro-Orbiter at about 8.25pm. Our plan for the evening was to prioritise rides such as this and Jungle Cruise that we hadn’t manage to get on yet. The wait for Astro Orbiter was 15 minutes, it’s quite a slow process having to get the lift up but it makes it feel exciting. 4 of the rockets weren’t operational too which I’m sure didn’t help. I find this ride actually quite scary! You feel so high and it goes relatively fast but it is fun.

After this we decided to go on the People Mover. Unfortunately it stopped 3 times while we were on it (sometimes for quite a while!). I started to get stressed as we didn’t want to waste any of our extra magic time sat on a broken down people mover! By the time we made it round it was 9.05pm and the rides were closed to main guests.

First up we headed to Space Mountain, there was a cast member at the entrance to scan our Magic Bands. From now on we did not queue for anything, we walked on to all the rides for the rest of the evening!

We walked over to Adventure Land, excited to ride Jungle Cruise but it was closed! It does actually say this on the Disney website but I didn’t think to check so be prepared for that! In the rest of the evening we went on Pirates of the Caribbean, Big Thunder Mountain (this was hilarious as the train only had about 4 of us at the back and then one lady sat at the front all on her own!), Seven Dwarves Mine Train, the Carousel, Peter Pan (I do not get the hype about this ride at all, maybe you need an accompanying child), Winnie the Pooh (better than Peter Pan), Tomorrow Land Speedway (I got to drive this time and was terrible!) and Space Mountain again. All without queuing at all. The park felt so quiet, it was like we were in the actual TV adverts where they sell an empty Disney World to you; I half expected Mickey to come trotting round the corner to take me by the hand. It was the most magical experience that reminded me why I love this place so much.

Once the rides closed at 11pm we headed to the hub. This was the only place where there seemed to be some other people, we got some lovely photos with the “Pals” statue and also the other special golden statues. We were planning on grabbing some souvenirs on the way out but unfortunately the shops shut at 11pm on the dot.

We sadly had to leave and went out to get the bus back to the Yacht club. We only had to wait 5 mins for the bus back but we did have to stand as it was full. The biggest bus queue was definitely for Animal Kingdom Lodge! When we got back to the Yacht club we headed straight back to the Dolphin and got there at about 11.50pm. There was some kind of light show happening to music with the palm trees which was very cute but we were far too tired to stay to watch.

As it ticked over to midnight we purchased Genie Plus for the next day. We were heading to Hollywood Studios and thought this might be required! We wanted to be able to grab the things we wanted as quick as we could in the morning. But for now we were knackered and straight to sleep.

Thanks for reading and well done if you have made it this far! What a day! One of the best I have ever had in Florida. We felt so lucky to be able to enjoy the Deluxe hours in the park and it really was a once in a lifetime experience. In hindsight, starting early and doing a full day at Animal Kingdom first was perhaps a little over ambitious!

[pinktraceb]

What a fab day! You packed loads in!

[Inky]

Looking forward to extra evening hours when we stay at Beach club , sounds fab.

[mick]

That was a long but very good day

Joan

[Goldia]

We've also never queued for FOP and I'm interested in seeing the queue. It seems like a fun morning at AK, although what on earth is that blue icing doing on the lovely Mickey cinnamon bun? shocking! I hope it doesn't spoil it.

Your room at the dolphin looks great and what a fantastic evening at MK...note to self...check out which rides are open for the deluxe resorts extra evening hours thanks for that tip. You got on loads of rides as walk on though.

A really lovely day. You must have been shattered at the end even with your mini afternoon nap.

[Supersofe]

Originally Posted by Goldia

We've also never queued for FOP and I'm interested in seeing the queue. It seems like a fun morning at AK, although what on earth is that blue icing doing on the lovely Mickey cinnamon bun? shocking! I hope it doesn't spoil it.

Your room at the dolphin looks great and what a fantastic evening at MK...note to self...check out which rides are open for the deluxe resorts extra evening hours thanks for that tip. You got on loads of rides as walk on though.

A really lovely day. You must have been shattered at the end even with your mini afternoon nap.

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Don't get me started on the blue icing! It looked nothing like that in the picture on the menu! It was still yummy though!

And yes, don't follow my example (I think it's pretty much just Jungle Cruise that is shut though)!

Thanks for taking the time to read everyone

[Tassiriki]

What an amazing day! Those extra magic hours in the evening really worked well for you. You packed so much into one day again.