Tuesday, 1/2: Rope-dropped AK for Flight of Passage. Somehow ended up in the bottom left corner, which honestly is one of the worst places to be as far as picture quality. And I'm not sure if it's just me/my eyes, but I feel like some of the 3D effect is getting more blurry/doubled as this ride ages. After FOP we rode EE, then walked back over to the Safari. The cheetahs were OUT and moving around, which is something we'd never seen before; usually we are squinting to see one that's curled up in a ball back in the shadows somewhere.
After grabbing some snacks, we rode the train out to Rafiki's Planet Watch and did the animation drawing which was really fun! We got to draw Bambi.
I joked with DH that we should just stay and keep drawing all morning until it was time for our lunch reservation at Sanaa. Speaking of which, I somehow confused our 12:55 ADR with 11:55 and we showed up over an hour early, and we were
so hungry. We took a chance and went down and asked if we could be seated before our scheduled time, and they said no problem and we were sat 5min later. This is one of my favorite meals at Disney. We don't have any Indian places up where we live, so this is pretty much the only time we get to have bread service. When we were done eating, we asked for containers for our leftover sauces, and our server just brought us out a whole new set of all of them. Being in a room so close to DS, we just planned on grabbing naan from Eet when we felt like repeating this meal.
After lunch, we stopped at our room to drop off our leftovers, and then hopped to MK (again.)
Our My original plan was to watch HEA on Tuesday night (
fireworks on ALL of the nights!), but since we had fit them in on Monday, we ended up riding a few thing things and then heading back to the room. We wanted something sweet to end the night, so we walked over to Ghirardelli and got sundaes. Pro-tip. When it's in the low 50s/upper 40s, don't try to walk all the way back to your resort with a hot fudge sundae, because the fudge will have hardened by the time you get back and be really difficult to eat.
Wednesday, 1/3: Expo day! Yet another early-morning wakeup. DH and I divided ourselves up for expo groups (him, DS1 and DD in one group, and myself, SIL, DS2, and DS3 in a separate group) to see who could get the earliest one and have an extra space or 2 for anyone here that got a late group. DH ended up with group 5 and Z Knight joined us for the foray into the
octagon merch building. I was not prepared for the line waiting to get into WWOS itself, and we were all the way back by the resort busses and completely unsure if we were in the right line (was it for merch? was it for bibs? was it just to get in the gates?) since there were no CMs there explaining what the line was for.
It wasn't horrible while we were into the rundisney merch building, but it was a bit disconcerting how many people were stacked up around the perimeter with massive piles of stuff just sitting there. It's like that every year, but there were some really big piles. I don't know that I even saw the purple Dopey jackets, and were were some of the first non-club people in there. We did mobile checkout and it was applying the 20% DVC discount even though we did not purchase our contract directly from Disney. We also grabbed a jacket for another board-member. They didn't have the size she wanted, so we grabbed 2 jackets and messaged her about it, and when DH went to put the unwanted one back he was nearly attacked by 2 women when he went to hang it back up.
I really disliked the setup for the big number backdrops since we couldn't find the half or the full. Last year's setup was waaaaay more logical. They did not need as much space set aside for Mobile checkout as they had roped off (IMO, based on when we were in there) and could have had everything together instead of spread across 2 rooms.
After grabbing a pineapple cider and a beer, it was off to bib pickup. We were in the "holding" room for that when I looked and DH and stated "
OH NO. I left my wallet in the room. Which means I don't have my drivers license." In reality, it was still in the car, but I didn't know that and we started to make a plan for how we would split up for me to get it, and then meet back up later. But then I remembered that I had a picture of my license in an email for being a volunteer driver for our school last year. I asked someone inside if I would be allowed to use a picture of my license, and he assured me it would be fine. We poked around the expo building briefly, handed of the jacket, and got out of the madness.
We did head to DS and order our character sketches. The popularity of those seems to have gone waaaay up as they told us it would be about a month before they show up. The last couple of years they have gotten home a day or 2 after we get back, so this is a pretty dramatic increase in lead-time.
Dinner was at Morimoto. Always yummy. Had the same server as last year. DH teases me that I'm a cheap date because I always get the duck ramen there, but it's always good and there's a TON of it.