Park Day Nine: Magic Kingdom (cont’d)
The walk over to Cosmic Rays was delightfully quick. I’m a fast walker by nature, so moving with a double stroller in crowds is borderline painful. These little moments where I could go off on my own and actually move with anything resembling efficiency were like a breath or fresh air.
When I got to the restaurant, the Mobile Order counter did not look good. There were at least a dozen people waiting for food and the CMs were repeatedly calling names of people who weren’t there. The app still said that my meal was being prepared and that they’d alert me when it was ready, so I just stood to the side to wait it out. While I was there, I popped up
MDE and grabbed overlapping Buzz FPs for about an hour out.
The CMs kept calling people who weren’t there yet to get food while a clump of us got progressively more restless. It seemed like the group of us waiting just kept growing while very little food was getting picked up. Eventually, a CM with a tablet came around to help with the crowd: one couple in particular was having trouble because their app crashed before they could mark themselves having arrived. At this point, I’d been waiting about 20 minutes so I asked the CM if she had an update on my food. After pulling up my order, she said that it was already ready. We walked over to the counter and, lo and behold, there was my tray. I’m not entirely clear why my name was never called, and the app never did update to say I should come get my food, but I didn’t have any time to stay and complain about the delay. At this point, it was 12:37pm which meant I was missing the beginning of the parade.
The rest of the family was situated on the inner circle of the hub facing outward, so I was going to have to cut across somehow, too. Luck was on my side because, right as I got to the edge of the parade, they made the announcement to have people come out and dance. I was able to zip through just before the crowd of kids filled in and caught back up with Hubby and the kids.
The kids had a blast. They hopped right up and danced their hearts out. Shy, reserved girls they are not! As soon as the parade was over, they hopped back in the strollers to have lunch. Since I had only been able to grab the Cosmic Ray’s half of the meal, we headed for Tomorrowland while the kids munched. We went up to the Space Mountain CM to grab me a RS and then Hubby found a place for the kids to sit and eat while I headed up to complete the Lunching Pad mobile order.
At the mobile order counter, there was also a line with people who were picking up having paid at the register. After waiting a few minutes and noticing that no names were being called, I asked the people around me if any of them had placed mobile orders. One of the other guests said that they were having the mobile order people get into the same line as the register folks to pick up their food. When I made it to the front of the line, I told the CM that I had mobile ordered and she just asked me what I was getting. She didn’t even want an order number, just brought me the food. It wasn’t until hours later that I got a notification in the app that my order was complete. Between this experiences and Cosmic Rays, I’m wondering if they were having issues with the mobile order system on this day. All of our other experiences with it earlier in the week had been great, so I’m not sure what was up in Tomorrowland.
Once I got back with the food, Hubby headed over to Space Mountain. He was using his anytime FP that he’d gotten when RnR went down in the last hour of operation the day before. Unfortunately, the FP line was pretty backed up. The kids and I had time to eat, use the bathroom, and move the strollers into the parking near Buzz before he finally emerged.
We headed over to Buzz at 1:37pm to a line stretching well outside of the FP queue. More concerning, the line wouldn’t move for large chunks of time. Finally, it moved enough that we could see the loading area, but they stopped loading guests again. The ride ran empty for a while, then we saw a lone engineer riding which would have been funny if we weren’t losing valuable park time on our last day. I get that rides go down, but Disney should have just closed the ride given us anytime FPs for the trouble. Eventually, a CM came through with a walkie talkie who seemed to have a bit more authority. We asked him what we could do about our FP if we didn’t want to wait and he said that, if we walked through past loading, we’d find CMs at the exit who would give us an anytime FP. Our family and a few others at the front decided to bail and found the FPs who gave us replacement FPs. I specifically asked what they’d be valid for and the CM said everything but PP and 7DMT, which I expected. As we exited through the gift shop, we saw that the ride photos were still displaying despite the empty cars, which gave me a little chuckle. The girls decided to add it to our PP for good measure.
By this time, it was 2:20pm, a full 43 minutes after we’d gotten in line, and we were running out of time in our park day. The plan had been Buzz, Peoplemover, and then I’d take my ride on Space, but we’d lost too much time. Hubby and I decided he would take the girls on Peoplemover while I used my Space RS. Then, we’d use our FP to visit Mickey and Minnie on the way out. I was really glad we opted to leave the Buzz line before it officially closed. About a minute after I got into the Space line, Buzz closed down and I’m pretty sure that entire queue went straight across Tomorrowland to hop in line for Space. Once I got in line, I double checked MDE to make sure that our FPs had loaded, which is when I saw that it was good for everything but PP, 7DMT
and the Mickey greet. So much for doing that on the way out! I texted Hubby to ask the girls what they wanted to do and they requested BTMRR, so that was the new plan. Being a single rider, I was bumped to the front of the line at Space pretty quickly and only had a 10 minute delay between tapping in and my ride photo.
I met back up with Hubby and the girls at 2:45 and we started power walking towards Frontierland. Unfortunately, as soon as we got to the hub, I realized there was no way we were going to be able to fit in BTMRR: the crowds waiting for the parade were just too thick. There was nothing else in Tomorrowland to use the FPs on: Buzz was down, Speedway was under refurb, and they were too short for Space. If it weren’t for the parade, we could have figured out one more ride to do. However, if we ended up exiting with the parade crowds and had bad bus luck, we could very well miss our ride to the airport. We decided we’d just head towards Town Square and see if the FP CM at the Mickey greet would have sympathy on us.
On our way down Main St, we stopped at the confectionary. We still had 9 QS and 15 snacks left to use, and I was going to use them on sweets! (Actually, we had earmarked a couple to be sandwiches we ate at the airport, but mostly sweets.) We went nuts and converted 7 of the QS into candies to take home. There were cake pops, pecan caramel deliciousness, and several bags of Goofy gummies. Next, we continued to Town Square where we asked the CM if there was any way we could use our FPs to see Mickey. I explained the whole story: that we had asked the ride CM and she said the only exceptions were 7DMT and PP, that we were leaving that day and didn’t have time to go deeper into the park, etc. He still wasn’t willing to let us through, which was frustrating but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. If we’d had more time, I would have been having a conversation with guest services about keeping people sitting in a line for a ride that wasn’t functioning, and CMs not giving correct information about the anytime FPs. The misinformation was what really got me: if I’d have known the limitations upfront, I would have foregone my ride on Space so that we could have one last family ride together. It stunk because, after an amazing morning, the last hour meant I was leaving the park with a sour taste in my mouth.
We said goodbye to Magic Kingdom and headed for the bus stop. While we were waiting, everyone started getting a little choked up about vacation ending. Rather than letting the kids wind themselves up into a proper cry, we talked to them about how it’s ok to be sad when something fun is over, but it’s better to focus on how much fun it was.
There was a good wait for the bus, which eventually arrived at 3:35pm. The driver apologized for the delay but said that there was major traffic out front so we’d be taking a back exit. He narrated while we past through Tron construction, the monorail service center, and the fireworks shooting location. We were back at the Boardwalk to say goodbye at 3:55pm.
Our first order of business was a final trip to Ample Hills. The girls and I got treats but Hubby wasn’t hungry, so I sent him over to use our final two QS credits for Italian hoagies from the Boardwalk Pizza Window. That left us with 11 snacks to go, 8 of which we used grabbing bagels and croissants from Boardwalk Bakery. At the gift shop, the kids grabbed trail mix with their final 3 snack credits, picked out a set of dolls with their remaining gift cards, and grabbed Boardwalk and 2019 pins to add to their collection. At this point, it was 4:42pm and we had a 5:00 ME to catch. We got our carry ons from bell services and worked on consolidating our recent purchases into them. While we could have had 5 carry ons and 5 personal items, we didn’t want to be dealing with all of that hand luggage plus the strollers. Instead, we were able to fit most everything into a thin duffel that we had packed just for the purpose, although some of the treats got a little smushed. The bus was there right at 5pm to take us to the airport and we begrudgingly said goodbye to Disney World.
On our final day, we had an incredibly successful morning followed by afternoon frustration from ride downtime and misinformation. The only thing we missed from our plan was that I never managed to ride Peoplemover. Between long lines earlier in the trip and the compressed timeline on this day, the only ride our clan took was Hubby and the girls while I rode Space. In all, we had seven family rides, one rider-swapped ride, one Daddy-and-the-girls ride, one character meet, two shows, too many treats to count (we used 7 QS-for-snacks and 19 snack credits in one day), and a very early breakfast to see a very empty Fantasyland.