Hi Dis-friends! I'm back with another update, one week post
Disneyland! It was a super fun trip- we lucked out in terms of crowds and weather, which is great because I assumed we would draw the short end of the stick with both. It was great to be back in Disneyland, and so cool to see Galaxy's Edge, but between you and me, I was missing WDW a lot. I'll probably do a mini TR about that trip, nothing too in depth because I need to commit to finishing this one first.
Anyway, on with the show!
Day 5, Part 2: Magic Kingdom After Dark
With our Flower & Garden festivities complete, it was time for a midday break before hitting MK for After Hours. When we arrived at our room, we were greeted by a little bit of mousekeeping fun:
It was a cute surprise! And very relevant to the title of this trip report!
Our break was much needed, especially since it was time for me to re-dose with muxinex and motrin before the night’s activities. We spent the rest period watching some Disney TV:
These new Mickey cartoons are pretty funny. I still don’t like the art style though. It’s too…. Weird. And kinda ugly.
We arrived at MK after a quick dinner at Everything Pop- the place was dead as usual. Maybe we just got lucky, but I never encountered any of the long waits I hear about in reviews. I did see they’re introducing mobile ordering there though, which seems like it’ll save even more time!
The first thing on our agenda was using our late fastpass to meet Mickey and Minnie at the Town Square. There was a bit of a wait here, but soon enough we were among mice:
This was one of my favorite character meets of the trip! Their celebration outfits are so cute. I showed them that Mickey was on my shirt, and they were so excited. And as usual they loved our Minnie ears! It was so fun. I felt like they spent more time with us than usual too.
Rather than push through the masses, we decided to post up and watch Happily Ever After from the hub. I snuck off to the bathroom right before the show started and stopped for a selfie:
Right as I was taking this picture I could hear the show starting. For as far back as we were, I thought our view was pretty good! It was a nice change of pace from our dessert party view from earlier in the week.
I have a cool video of the finale, but I don't think that'll post here, so just take my word for it that it was really cool.
Then, we watched in awe as the massive crowds turned back towards us to leave the park. It took a while before we even felt like swimming upstream to the rest of the park. Since After Hours didn’t technically start until 9, and I didn’t want to get caught up in the weird limbo “you can’t ride anything yet” period like at AK, I was content to stay put and people watch.
And oh, people watch we did. A woman sent her mother to go talk to a cast member and ask about how to get a Minnie Van. The mother returned, and told her daughter that they had to use the Lyft app. Before she could finish, the woman interjected with “NO, that’s a REGULAR LYFT, we need the Minnie Van! How do we get the Minnie Van??” in a very angry tone. I wanted to tell her that her poor mother was right, and that they did need to use the Lyft App… But it wasn’t my place. Hopefully they figured it out. And apologized to that poor lady. Lol.
Once the crowds thinned enough for us bob and weave our way over to Tomorrowland, we did so with haste. Our first stop was… Drumroll please… Space Mountain!
The queue was pretty empty. This was one of the three times the whole trip that we ever were in the standby line. It felt weird. We waited about ~15 minutes, before posing for our ride photos:
Rather than riding again right away, we decided to hit some other Tomorrowland attractions and return when (hopefully) the line would be even shorter. I think we also took our first of many snack breaks at this time as well, because taking full advantage of the "free" popcorn and ice cream is what After Hours is all about.
First, we did Buzz:
And, just as the ride was ending, we suddenly stopped! Thankfully it was only for a few minutes. I was a bit peeved about losing valuable After Hours time on a broken attraction.
Even Buzz looked concerned at the prospect of us losing After Hours time waiting for the ride to start again.
A cast member had to come by and make the vehicles go again. You can’t really tell, but that’s what’s happening in that picture.
Then, we went for a soaring journey on the Astro Orbiter. I love that ride…. You get great views and it’s actually kinda intense when you get lowered in the end!
We took a hop, skip, and jump back over to Space and were greeted by a welcome sight:
A wait time of only 5 minutes- now that’s more like it!
In the spirit of After Hours, we took a little nap.
We took another snack break, and then ventured to Fantasyland to ride Winnie the Pooh. The waits for Peter Pan and Mine Train were still higher than I cared to wait. I think they were both around 20 minutes or more. As I captured in this blurry picture, the line was still out the door:
Peter Pan is very high on my list of rides that I won't do without a fastpass or without a nearly-zero wait. In fact, when we were at Disneyland last week we skipped it altogether because, despite the low crowds, the line never went below 30 minutes. It's a cute ride, but no thanks!
We really wanted to do the Tangled lantern photo-opp next. When we walked by, the line was still a bit long, so we veered off course and went to walk on to the Haunted Mansion. When we circled back, the line was much shorter, and we only waited about 10 minutes!
This was just alright- I don’t know if I’d wait to do it again. And I certainly don’t think it deserves a 20+ minute line! The pictures were pretty dark and I had to put on my amateur-photo editor hat and edit them.
Next, we made another snack stop and walked on to Haunted Mansion again. All in all the night was going smoothly, but we encountered a bit of a snafu at Big Thunder Mountain. They were only running one train, and we ended up waiting almost 30 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes more than I feel like I should have to wait at a ticketed event, especially considering we walked on to Space Mountain only an hour earlier. I was pretty annoyed by this. It was the low point of the night.
Trying to shake off my annoyance, we headed over to Pirates of the Caribbean. This was a complete walk on. Seriously, the ride was dead. We didn't see a single person until it was time to get on the boat.
We’re in the back, so this pic is essentially useless. We rode again, but that rode photo never made it to
MDE. Some say it's still floating aimlessly in the cyber sea to this day.....
It was almost midnight, so we started making our way out of the park, lest we turn into pumpkins at the stoke of 12. A commemorative nighttime photopass pic capped off our After Hours experience.
All in all, I enjoyed this experience. I saw a lot of negative reviews about this night talking about crowds, and like I said for AK After Hours, nothing about this experience even approaches my definition of “crowded”. Did we see other people? Yes. But seeing other people doesn’t mean crowded. I don’t know, I knew I was going into a sold-out event, and still managed to do everything we wanted to do. I think it was absolutely worth the money and I’d definitely do it again. Side note, I’m intrigued by what I've seen of the Villains After Hours event. I 100% would’ve bought tickets for that!
In sum, we rode:
Space Mountain x2
Buzz Lightyear
Astro Orbiter
Winnie the Pooh
Haunted Mansion x2
Big Thunder Mountain
Pirates x2
And we ate a shameful amount of ice cream and popcorn.
The one thing I will say that, in comparison to the AK event, this one went by SO MUCH faster. It basically flew by. Probably because there's just so much to do and see at MK. But I enjoyed the slower pace of the AK event a little more, looking back.
With day 5/7 in the books, we were looking ahead to something I’d been psyched about all week- finally getting to experience Toy Story Land and Slinky Dog Dash! The plan was to spend the morning in Hollywood Studios and then go from there, most likely heading to MK again in the evening. Because what’s a day at Disney without a trip to MK? As always, thanks for reading and I'll see you next time.