The Magic 3 do WDW again May 2022 - Day 7 Animal Kingdom, Disney Springs and Hollywood Studios

[MrsSilverStar]

I left yesterday’s report on a rather ominous note, complaining about the noisy people above us in the hotel. Well Mark barely slept due to the noise so was straight off to the front desk this morning, to see if we could be moved. I was nervous because I know the Poly is nearly always fully booked - but luck was on our side and a lovely CM said if we could get packed up right away, he’d move us to a 3rd floor room in the same area.

Those cases were packed in 5 minutes flat 😂 Mark was not risking another noisy night! Our new room wasn’t an adjoining one either and was so much quieter. We could even just glimpse the monorail through all the trees, so much nicer!

Anyway, after that crazy start, it was time to hit the parks.

Today was the Champions League final and Mark and Heath are huge football fans so we had to build watching the game into our day even though their team (Chelsea) wasn’t in it - so I’d made a 2pm booking at the sports bar City Works in Disney Springs before we came out.

We had a park reservation for Animal Kingdom - if it had been staying open past 7pm, we probably would’ve gone after the game, but as it wasn’t, I wanted to go before so we could park hop later…the reservations do make this a pain so I hope changes are made eventually. Plus it was really disappointing to not be able to see Animal Kingdom at night. Luckily we enjoyed that on our first trip, it’s so beautiful. But this really affected how often we went to AK and made it our least favourite park this visit.

Anyway, on with the day!

We bought individual lightening lanes for Flight of Passage at 7am - $44.73 for 3 including tax - so we didn’t bother with rope drop and ambled in around 9am.

We did our usual Pandora visit to ride Flight of Passage and Navi.

The boys were ravenous by this time so we grabbed some breakfast from Tamu Tamu and Harambe Market - $30.55 in total

Everything tastes better when it’s Mickey shaped!

We were in Africa because we wanted to do the animation experience - Mark loves this!
So we hopped on the little train and headed over. I forgot that it’s a decent walk to get to the animation place and we knew a show was starting soon, so we speed marched through, no time to look at the cute animals!

We were drawing Eeyore and our animator said they use real life inspiration for all the drawings so they brought two donkeys in!

So cute! This really added to the experience. We all enjoyed drawing and Heath was given the animator’s sketch at the end which was lovely

We had a genie+ for Kali River Rapids next - Heath would never forgive us if we came here and didn’t ride it!

We messed about with more genie+ lenses

Today was the first day of the new Kite Tails shows - a reduced version of the previous show basically. We’d never seen the earlier incarnation and actually loved the regular short bursts they do now. It meant we just stumbled across it happening, without having to plan round it - and we all know there’s enough planning at Disney!

I had my usual lone spin on Everest, I used the single rider line which moves pretty quickly

The guy next to me looks bored out of his mind 😂

We spotted Kevin and another gold statue on our travels

I was keen to squeeze in another visit to the Nomad Lounge.
The walk up list was closed so we just asked at the door. The cm said as long as we didn’t mind Heath sitting at the bar, we could go straight in…so we did!

We really love it in here. Just feels like a lovely peaceful stop, with great drinks and food.

On our way out of the park, we finally got to spot the elusive ant eater! We’d been looking out for it so were really excited 😂

It was a lovely morning at the park but now it was time to head to Disney Springs for some football. We got the bus to Saratoga Springs and walked from there again - it’s annoying there aren’t buses direct from the parks but apparently that’s to stop people parking for free at Disney Springs and then going to the parks. Heaven forbid Disney doesn’t get all your money!

Heath and Mark were thrilled to be in a sports bar, full of screens! It was full of football fans and was quite rowdy but in a fun way. One rather drunk Liverpool supporter latched onto Mark and they had a lot of banter about their respective teams - he was a very good sport when Liverpool lost, bless him!
Anyway, I only cared about the food and drink!

Those pretzel bites were absolute heaven on a plate, drenched in butter - so good!

Mark loves a Bloody Mary and couldn’t miss out on this

He practically got a whole meal in there!

While the boys were watching the football, I was busy stacking rides for the evening at Hollywood Studios

I think we were at WDW at a fairly quiet time because we always got what we wanted on Genie+ and rarely had to wait long to get on a ride. It felt like we barely queued for the entire holiday…so as much as it pains me to admit, we actually really liked Genie+ and ILLs. I’m sorry!

We did a bit of shopping before heading out. Mark loves a loud shirt and discovered Ron Jon Surf Shop which is full of them 😂 so he had a little spending spree in here, $126.72. This photo is from the next day but here’s one of the shirts in all it’s glory!

We got a bus to Caribbean Beach to get the skyliner to Hollywood Studios. (You can see why people who don’t do a lot of planning find WDW overwhelming!) We rented a locker for all of Mark’s shirts - $10…daylight robbery!

Once we were in and unburdened, Mark was hunting more gold statues

Then it was ride time

I had somehow missed that there was a projection show with fireworks at HS (even as a mega planner!) so we loved stumbling across that as we left Toy Story land. It was great to arrive last minute and just be able to sneak into an empty space to watch the show.

It was so nice tonight that we decided to just wander around and soak it all in.
Mark got some great nighttime shots.

This park is great at night - love all the neon. I really enjoy taking the time to just stroll around, such a change from sprinting from ride to ride!

Heath watched a little bit of the movie under the stars once we got back to the hotel, before we dragged him off to bed.

Tomorrow, I have a solo trip back to HS before we head to Epcot to meet up with friends. We also squeeze in a visit to Trader Sam’s. More soon.