*We’re back on track with the Disney posts. I’m gonna try to be better about posting, I swear.*

Woohoo! It’s December 31st, New Years Eve!

Today, we’re going to spend about 17 hours out and about (that’s my way of warning you that I think this post has over 100 photos in it).

We woke up at about 6:00 and made our way to the gates of the Magic Kingdom so that we could take the monorail to the Contemporary.

 

We had reservations at Chef Mickey’s.

We ate pretty quickly because we were terrified of them closing the park for capacity while we ate (they did eventually close for capacity at like 11:30).

While we were sitting, I broke the hell out of my nail adjusting my tripod in my backpack. Luckily they had bandaids.

So after eating, we took the monorail back to the Magic Kingdom!

We didn’t have any fastpasses or reservations for a while, so we decided to just waste our time and went to take pictures…

With Merida!

You don’t really see her anywhere except her meet and greet.

I don’t know what happened, but I can’t track down my photos with her 😦

But, we went into Fantasyland through the Tommorowland/Fantasyland passage right near where Merida hangs out. I mention this to give context for my egregious photos of the neon Tomorrowland flowers.

Next up, Winnie the Pooh!

Surprisingly enough, the line was just about as entertaining as the ride. The ride wins though because Kanga and Roo are in there.

It’s really tough to get clear photos on that ride, so I saved you the eye strain and didn’t upload my horrifficly blurry images.

After that, we went to the Philharmagic.

No photos of the show because the screens are 3d, sorry.

Have some posters!

We noodled for a bit, and then it was time for our first fast pass: It’s A Small World!

Have you ever noticed that the sign has the ride name in quotation marks? It makes me uncomfortable.

There’s like 50 photos from this ride so maybe scroll for like 25 seconds? If you don’t wanna see, of course.

White room!

After that, we had more free time.

So we got peter pan floats! To my knowledge they’re vegan aside from the white chocolate feather.

We then went up to the front of the park to see Tinker Bell!

My photo with her doesn’t look great so I’ll keep that one for me.

You won’t believe what you’re about to see though…

The line to get a drink at Starbucks was like 30 minutes. I know that because I waited in it…

My mom needed coffee, am I supposed to say no?

We were back in the hub and had reservations at the Skipper Canteen relatively soon, so we went to my favorite part of the Magic Kingdom…

The tiki room was just opening up for another show, so of course we had to go in.

I don’t know if I’ve said it before, but the tiki room is my favorite thing in all of disney world. Followed closely by the China pavillion in Epcot, the Tower of Terror, and Festival of the Lion King. (I have a favorite in each park! I never noticed!)

We noodled about more and then it was time for another fast pass across the park.

The 7 Dwarfs Mine Train!

(yes, it’s dwarfs not dwarves. I didn’t make that choice)

The ride was a roller coaster, so I didn’t get any pictures, but the mine scene was super cool. Highly recommend if you have a fastpass. I don’t know if I’d wait in a more than 1 and a half hour line though (the line was 4 hours when we rode it).

After this we decided to go to Fronteirland and watch the Country Bear Jambouree, but we were foiled by…

the parade.

It took forever to walk. The people trying to walk were completely stagnant because the parade viewers weren’t doing us any favors and the cast members were directing traffic in a pretty nonsensical way (this will be a theme today).

YOU GOTTA LOOK AT THIS

They were giving out free hats and “tooters” (that’s what my mom and I call them, they’re just paper horns) and because of that, I flipped off a stranger for the first time.

There was a line where they were distributing the goods and I was in it when suddenly a lady with a stroller rams into my ankles and tells me to move. I tell her I’m in a line and she makes a face at me and says “act like it”. What’s that supposed to mean? I’m just standing. You know, like one does in a line? And she pushes her stroller into me again to get her point across, so I flipped her off…

I feel kinda bad about it.

So something really interesting that they did was a New Years fireworks show at about 18:00. I thought that was nice so that the people with little kids don’t have to keep their kids in the park so late. They must feel exhausted after doing 2 huge fireworks extravaganzas…

You know how I mentioned the way crowds were being directed? Here’s where we call back to that.

My mom and I had reservation at the Crystal Palace which was semi-near where we were if we cut through Adventureland. We walked all the way through Adventureland (the Crystal Palace is like 20 feet from the sign) and right a we were about to exit, they changed the crowd direction. The thing is we were literally the last people walking in that direction, so the guy directing crowds made specifically the 2 of us turn around and not just walk around but walk a specific path through the back of Adventureland, past Pirates of the Carribean, OUTSIDE the park, through the staff parking lot back to the front of the park and down Main Street to get to a restaurant that was 30 feet away at most. We weren’t the only people walking that route, but we were the only people who were stopped and turned around. My mom was livid.

We barely made it to our reservations on time and later in the evening my mom went to guest services to complain (the gave us 6 all purpose fast passes though so yay for that).

Crowd check.

Dinner was nice. They had really good bread and a pesto pasta dish that was labeled vegan! Exciting!!!

I ate a ton of pasta…

After our dinner, my mom went to guest services and told me to go do something (she felt like she was ruining my fun, she wasn’t), so I decided to ride the peoplemover since it pretty much never has a wait. Well… It did today. The wait for the peoplemover was 35 minutes long. To give you context for that, the average wait time year round is 5 minutes…

After all that, we were in the home stretch. We found a spot for the fireworks.

They were letting us sit until we had to be packed like sardines, so I sat on the ground cross-legged and fell asleep… hahaha.

I normally go to bed at like 21:00.

 

I hope you can tell what’s happening in the video. They shot off fireworks 360 degrees all around the park. It was amazing. It was like it was sunset for a little because of all the light.

That can’t be good for the environment though…

But yeah, after that we left. It took about 40 minutes to walk out of the park because of the bottleneck of all the people leaving from the same exit.

We took the bus back to our hotel and pretty much fell asleep the second we entered the room.

Thanks for reading! (all 1800 words hopefully)

See you soon!