"Disneyworld: Day Four"

10/25/2001

WEDNESDAY: Magic Kingdom
I am awakened by a very excited CL because today is the day I said we'd go see Mickey Mouse at Magic Kingdom. This time we take a monorail from the parking lot (Minnie Mouse lot for those of you keeping score at home) to the front gates. After going through security (they make you open all your bags when entering any of the parks now) we look for a place to rent another motorized cart for Mom. They are out of electric carts so we rent a wheelchair instead. Unfortunately we have to do something as my maternal unit is not really capable of walking for any length of time.

From there we go up to board the train that will take us around the park and to Mickey's Country Fair. We get off the train and find the House that Mickey Built right away. We go in the front door and tour the different rooms of the MouseHouse. Then we go out the back and through the garden to another building where we stand in a long line. Finally we get admitted to the "Holiest of Holies" and meet Da Mouse!

We parked Mom in a restaurant and headed off to ride some rides (Goofy's Barnstormer rollercoaster, Mickey's Grand Prix racecars, etc) and tour Minnie's house. After about an hour and a half we retrieved Mom and headed towards Frontierland because CL (and okay, me too) wanted to ride Splash Mountain even though we kept getting rained on. The rain would only last for about 5 minutes at a time though.

On our way across the park, we happened to run into the afternoon parade of Disney characters in front of Cinderella's castle. A huge crowd had already gathered so it was hard to see, but I did manage to get pictures of some of the floats. The lines for autographs were too long for us to wait so CL didn't get to meet any other characters then, but we got close enough to see most of them. After a fair amount of time gawking, we continued on our way.

Once again, we parked Mom and went off to do Splash Mountain. The line was surprisingly short and we were sailing through Br'ar Rabbit's neighborhood. We got to sit in the front, which was cool for the picture they take of you, and CL kept reminding me to hold onto him lest he fall out. *g* He screamed going down the last big hill and we got pretty wet. That was fine since it was hot that day and we dried off fairly quickly. We went to the gift shop afterwards and bought the picture they took of us and a nice frame for CL's mother.

After collecting Mom, we headed for the front gate because everyone wanted to go to the Pirate Adventure dinner theatre. We did some more shopping on the way out. Instead of taking the monorail back we decided to take the ferry. From there we took the tram back to the parking lot (do you remember which one it was??). As soon as we stepped off the tram, the skies opened up and poured buckets on us. Luckily we were only about 30 feet from our car... but we still got soaked. We pulled out of the Minnie Mouse lot (did you remember correctly? *g*) and headed for home.

The Clanlad looked particularly put-out while in Minnie's house... i think it was all the *pink*! and did they always put the Disney characters in plastic bubbles ala the PopeMobile for the parade? I dont remember ever seeing that before.... odd. oh well. you're all home safe. :) ~ Ani @ 4:25 p.m. EST on 10/25/2001