St Patrick’s Day Trip
What a nice weekend to go to Disney. With the big St Patrick’s Day parade going on in Savannah, it was just another reason for the Bigbie’s to get out of the area with too many people, police, and filled restaurants. This would also be our only weekend without kids, except Kellie, around our anniversary, and we love Disney so another quick trip to Orlando was in order.
March is a little busier season in Disney World because in addition to Spring Breaks going on, there are all kinds of other activities and special events that occur like cheer leading competitions, singing competitions, special parties, etc. but with a little knowledge of what to do and when, we were able to ride everything we could with a three, almost four, year old and actually had a lot of Fastpasses left over each day that we ended up giving away to people as we left each park. I think we gave away Fastpasses to ride Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin 3 more times and we rode it twice! I had heard about a secret (shhh) to scoring points and wanted to try it out and it definitely works. Kellie also got a pair of Disney Crocs, pink Princess ones. She has two other pair of Crocs in blue and yellow but these are her first with the Mickey holes, you can see them on the video above with a Cinderella Castle Jibbitz. I had often wonder how these could possibly be good shoes for Disney World with as much walking as you can do there but I wore mine and they worked great, I’ll be wearing them for our trip in June for sure.
We also got to see something that I had never heard of until recently, I know weird huh. On most nights about 30 minutes after the park closes you can see this unpublished event at the Magic Kingdom called the Kiss Goodnight. Who would have thought to stay in the park after it closes?!?! Usually everyone runs out the park after the Wishes fireworks show or the night parade Spectromagic which leaves you in a mostly empty park. People mill around on Main St USA and buy ice cream and kind of sit around and then the music comes up and an announcer comes over the PA system and there are some pretty cool lighting effects on the castle. We did this on Friday after driving down that evening because Magic Kingdom closed at 11:00 and Saturday night it closed at 12:00.
Saturday was our biggest day at Disney in a while. We were there at rope drop that morning at Magic Kingdom so we would be sure to get Kellie on Pink Dumbo and ride all the rides she is able to get on. She’s about 38″ tall so it won’t be long before she can ride most of the other rides at that start at 40″. We had done a few rides at Magic Kingdom Friday night so we really didn’t push and be park commandos as far as riding everything goes but there were a few rides we wanted to do like Haunted Mansion which will be closing for renovations the day we are going for the big trip in June so the other kids won’t get to see it until after the rehab. Last year they missed Pirates of the Caribbean since it was closed to add Captain Jack Sparrow to the ride before the movie released last July. Surely they aren’t adding Eddie Murphy to Haunted Mansion I hope.
We stayed until right after lunch and then hopped on the Monorail to EPCOT since Kellie wanted to ride the new Nemo ride there and she hadn’t seen Turtle Talk with Crush since she was little so she understood it more this time. I also wanted to check out the Mexico pavilion because they are renovating the ride there and it is due to open in April so we’ll get to ride it when we go back in June. We had early dinner reservations in Morocco because Kriss loves to eat there and afterward we headed back to the Monorail and Magic Kingdom with a pocket full of Fastpasses.
Another secret I had heard of was to ride Jungle Cruise at night and it is pretty neat. When we were there last month they were training Jungle Cruise Captains for the new park in China and we had a female Chinese guide. Now, Jungle Cruise is usually funny because of the corny jokes the guides tell but when you have an overly enthusiastic Chinese girl that speaks Engrish with a heavy accent telling the corny jokes it is F-U-N-N-Y! We didn’t see any of them training this time but the night time ride is pretty cool.
We didn’t stay until park closing Saturday night because it had been a long day but we did leave right after 10:00 so it was a full day and we beat the crowds at before the second Spectromagic started.
Sunday we didn’t have to leave early since the girls weren’t coming home from their ski trip until Wednesday so we slept in a little after two late nights and went to Animal Kingdom and rode Kilimanjaro Safari and several other rides and saw the new Nemo show that replaced the awful Tarzan Rocks that used to be there. After grabbing a quick lunch we got on the road and got home.
