Made my fastpass reservations! But despite getting up at 4:00am to do so, I did not get a FOP pass. Is it worth the stand-by wait?
I would say yes for a 60-90 minute standby wait. It's a great attraction. I cannot say the same about Navi River Journey. The only reason my 60 minute standby wait for that was worthwhile is because I was fortunate enough to spend the entire 60 minutes talking with some fellow runners so that made the wait quite enjoyable.
Switched over to Riverside. Still probably going to end up at FQ at least once since as I realized no beignets at Riverside. May hop off the bus at FQ after the full get my beignets and then figure out how to get back to the hotel (maybe the bus)
I've seen people staying at POR get on the race bus at POFQ to head back to POR. You could also take the boat if you wanted to. And the beignets are available all day. I'm not at Port Orleans this race weekend, so no beignets for me. Womp womp.
o for this week's SAFD, what FP+ did you make, which are you excited about, anything you missed that you really wanted to get?
Got the ones I wanted, but I still don't know how much of this visit will be focused on Galaxy's Edge and Rise of the Resistance. Definitely trickier to get the usual FP+, but I attributed that to getting on the system 3 hours after it opened since I decided I valued sleep more than getting up at 4:00am west coast time.
I'm bummed about the new tiering system at HS though...
It's honestly terrible. Far too many really good to great attractions are on the top tier.
Tower of Terror (stupid HS tiering system!!!) I opted for Slinky Dog instead and am hoping to ride ToT at rope drop, if I can’t fit it in elsewhere. My standby limit is in the 20-30 min range depending on my mood and the attraction.
Tower of Terror can have reasonable standby waits so it's at least got that going for it.
I didn’t even think about this when I made my Tusker House reservation. If my friends don’t join me I’ll be solo. It’ll be a little weird. I still wanna go though. Hmmmm I’m gonna have to think about this one.
I've done many character meals solo. Since most of my trips are solo, I just have to live with it. For the most part, I've had attentive character handlers or restaurant wait staff who even hang by to make sure they're around when the character comes to my table. And if they're not, I've either had fellow guests volunteer or be willing to be take the photo.
I’ve done many of the races solo and always do meet and greets with the medals and have never felt awkward.
While I'm comfortable doing character meets solo, it is always far more interesting after a race with medal(s), especially in the parks. The characters often make a huge deal out of the medals. After Dopey, Mickey decided to count them all until he got overwhelmed by all of them, Goofy concluded that I was indeed goofy, Minnie decided to make the 10K medal kiss the marathon medal, Chip and Dale had great fun playing around with the spinner medals and showing them off to the photographers, Snow White asked if I had been skipping around the kingdom, and Dopey got very, very excited. Indeed, some of my favorite character moments have come when I was wearing race medals.
If you want character medals, but feel awkward about it, wear your race medal. It will help immensely.
it was hard on the CMs. The talking heads are very heavy.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only good reason to end that meet and greet. Hearing Mickey talk was always pretty cool.
How much time should we plan on being at the expo to pickup our packets and shop?
Packet pick up is quick. Shopping and/or photo ops can be the real time consumer. In addition to the race merchandise, the vendor area may offer a lot of things, including last minute items you forgot to pack. Or in my case, I bought some self massage tools one year that really help me to this day from a vendor.