Friday, 11/1
I think Friday may have been my favorite day. It was also the day we spent the most money on souvenirs.... but, that's what we get for being huge Harry Potter nerds and going to Harry Potter World. To be fair, most of the things we bought we gave away to family, so, if we hadn't need to buy things for them, we wouldn't have spent nearly as much. We couldn't very well go to HPW and return home without wands... so we went to Ollivander's. Ollivander's does a live demonstration of the wand choosing the wizard, so you have to wait in line because the shop only holds 30 people at a time. I don't want to ruin the experience for anyone else who goes, but Ollivander picked me!! It was probably the highlight of the day for me. Seriously. I was all decked out in my Ravenclaw Quidditch Team Captain shirt and was bouncing around and had this stupid huge grin on my face, which, I'm betting is why I was picked. I'm completely okay with this, haha.
We went on all the rides in HPW, one is a baby coaster (Flight of the Hippogryff), a real coaster where your feet hang (The Dragon's Challenge) and then a crazy indoor flight simulation type thing (The Forbidden Journey). When a ride says "if you get motion sickness don't ride this ride", I ignore it, because they usually just do that as a precaution. This one? Definitely got a little motion sick, but I didn't want to shut my eyes and miss anything!! (yep, I'm 4.) And, of course, it takes a picture right as an enormous scary creature (won't spoil it!) pops out at you. So, our picture is horrible, lol. We didn't get it.
We walked around Honeyduke's and Zonko's, and got butterbeer. It is SO TASTY. Though, if you don't like drinking super sweet drinks, don't get it. It was delicious, though. We ate lunch at The Three Broomsticks, which was also the first meal we had that wasn't HUGE. It was great.
We walked around the rest of Islands of Adventure, but didn't ride anything else. We park-hopped over to Universal Studios and went on a couple rides there (Shrek and Transformers), and then went back to Islands of Adventure for one more pass through the shops in Hogsmeade. We were pretty wiped out, so we left around 5. (We got there at 8, the park opened at 9.)
For dinner that night we headed, once again, back to Downtown Disney. It was so easy to get there from our resort, all we had to do was hop on a little boat and 15 minutes later, we were downtown. It was great, and so we took full advantage of it! We went to this little Italian place we had passed by a couple times and decided to just make a reservation there the day before. It's called Portobello. Our server was AMAZING, and you could tell he was so relieved to have a table without any kids at it. We took forever with our meal and just enjoyed being with each other. We had wine and a delicious appetizer, and soooooo much food (again). Our reservations were at 8:30, and I don't think we left the restaurant until like 10:45 or 11. It was perfect.
Saturday, 11/2
We spent Saturday half in EPCOT and half in Magic Kingdom again, because we took every day pretty laid back, we didn't see everything the first time. We definitely had 3-flavor margaritas at 11am in Mexico, it was great. We had our earliest dinner reservation that night. Pretty much all of our dinners were at 6:30, except for Portobello which was at 8:30 and this one, which was at 5:20.
Honestly, the only thing that really stuck out about Saturday were two things: 1) we got to see a tiny little high school marching band before the 3pm parade, and, 2) dinner. I got to cheer for the single mellophone player who was probably really confused, and it was great. And dinner... well, dinner was in Cinderella's castle, at Cinderella's Royal Table. I was definitely a princess at dinner that night, and it was AWESOME. We met Cinderella (and had our picture taken with her!) and then went up to the dining room. Tiny little spiral staircase up and up and up. Awesome. (I think I saw an elevator too, but the stairs were worth it.) Anyway, that meal was by far, the fanciest one we had the whole trip. We were "those" people and took pictures of EVERYTHING including our food. Here are pictures of our desserts:
After dessert, we got to meet some of the princesses!!! Jasmine, Snow White, Aurora, and Ariel visited with us. Which was unexpected, and awesome! We stuck around MK after dinner and watched the fireworks show there that night. Well worth it.
Sunday, 11/3
Sunday was our big "park hopper" day. We started in Hollywood Studios, then went passed through EPCOT on our way to MK, then back to EPCOT for the fireworks that night. It was actually kind of fun, because we managed to get from HS to MK without getting on a bus! We had lunch at Pizza Planet, yum yum yum. Then we got on a ferry boat to EPCOT, and walked through EPCOT and got on a monorail, then transferred to another monorail to get to MK. It was great fun! Most people would have called us crazy, but we had a good time. Got to see some resorts we wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Then we walked around MK until dinner time, which was at 6:30. We had dinner in Beast's castle that night!! Oh I really wish I had our Disney pictures right now, because the photographer got a shot of me hugging Beast. I had to. He's Beast! We got to meet him after dinner, which was awesome. Dinner was delicious. I had "the grey stuff" for dessert - and it WAS delicious! (I trusted the dishes, and boy am I glad I did!
)After dinner we made our way back to EPCOT for the fireworks. If you ever get the chance, the EPCOT fireworks show "Illuminations" is a must-see. It was better than MK's fireworks display. Granted, they lit up the castle all pretty and stuff, but EPCOT's was more about the fireworks, so it made our inner pyros very happy. After fireworks we went back to the resort and reclaimed our luggage so we could hop on the bus back to the airport. From there, we called a shuttle to our hotel for the night. Made it into bed, with our suitcases stuffed completely full, buy 1am.
Monday, 11/4
Monday was travel day. Our flight was at 8:50am, so we got to the airport at like, 6:30. The shuttles ran every half hour, so, fine. We got on the 6am shuttle. It worked out, though, because they had some comfy chairs near our gate. Anyway, the flight home wasn't bad. We landed back in Indiana and picked up our rental car, and drove back to his house. That's when the fun started... we had to pack up all of the wedding stuff and cram it into the car. It was pretty exciting, I have to admit. We could not see out the back at all, it was crammed in there pretty good.
We started the drive to MD around 2pm, and got into bed at home about 2:15am. And yes, I had to be at work the next day. Lucky for me we were still in the temp office which is 5 minutes from home, rather than at the job site which is 20 minutes from home.
So, overall, a really fantastic trip. It is good to be home, though. It was very good to see the kitties again (they stayed in Indiana while we were gone), and it's very good sleeping in our bed.
I think that covers it. CD blogging is great fun.
Now hopefully eventually we can get ourselves unpacked and cleaned up, and actually living in the house...