8:15 AM – I wake up and am greeted by “Good morning, babydoll!!!”. OMG there is someone else in the room, and she knows my nickname!
Oh, false alarm, the wife was just awake before I was. I haven’t seen that happen since the early Aughts. Freaked me out.
Time to pack up and leave this incredible place. It’s so much easier to leave knowing that our vacation isn’t over, we are just relocating back to a beautiful, comfortable 2-bedroom townhouse. When we are in Disneyland and stay at the Grand Californian, leaving is always so difficult because we are almost always heading home at the end of a great trip.
10:15 AM – Back in the resort, re-unpacked and settling in for a few hours before we head back to Animal Kingdom to finish off our list of things to do there. We plan to spend some time with the animals, hit the huge Pandora ride, and a couple others. Then, home in the evening to watch the Colts and Texans, in one of the biggest games of the year so far.
And maybe we are just gonna have to open up a bottle or two of the wine that is still here, waiting for us to return.
They fixed the hole in the roof where the panelling fell down while we were gone, of course. Hope they found a home for the raccoons. Shouldn’t be too tough around here.
1:00 PM – Off to Animal Kingdom for our last time this trip. As I mentioned previously, we packed our first week with tons of days in the theme parks because the crowds are going to be WAYYYYYYYYY worse next week, as US Thanksgiving approaches. This is our sixth straight day in a park, and we are looking forward to it but also looking forward to a relaxing day tomorrow.
2:05 PM – Our Fastpass for Avatar: Flight of Passage is up. It takes us about 5 minutes to get to the front of the queue. I won’t go into too many details, but suffice it to say that the landscape of theme park rides has been turned on its proverbial head.
This ride is the best we have ever experienced. Game changed. Life changed. Absolutely unreal.
Stop reading this, get on a plane and get down here and experience it. Seriously.
We have another wonderful day. What a special trip this has been so far. Usually, we say “this vacation has gone SO FAST!”. This trip, for whatever reason, has been the opposite. I can’t believe we still have more than a week to go! Awesome.
Bittersweet as we leave the park, knowing we will not be back here for, probably, 2.5-3 years. The Magic Kingdom’s 50th Anniversary comes up in October, 2021, and they will be having a years-long celebration, which is the reason for the plethora of construction going on across the parks. It is going to be something else, and we expect to be here sometime in 2022.
We had basically already decided that we would go back to our normal Florida visit time, which is late March/early April. Traditionally the weather has been excellent then, particularly for outdoor activities like lounging by the pool. But the weather this trip (outside of the first two days) has been PERFECT for theme park days. When you add in the amazing time we have had at the Epcot Food & Wine Festival, which takes place around this time every year, it’s going to be hard to not come back in November 2022. We’ll see.
Oh, and this was (I believe) the first time they have ever put up Xmas decorations in this park. Christmas has come to all the parks (except Epcot) so far.
7:00 PM – We stop at the grocery store to pick up a few more provisions and then head back to our resort to turn in for the night and watch some football. And yes, of course, there is wine. We still have 9-10 bottles to knock off this week. I don’t think that is going to be much of an issue.
That’s all for today! Tomorrow is a resort day, no parks, no schedule, no nothin’.
One thing you can count on? Some very, very good wine. Trust me on this.
Confessions of a Huge Wine-R 