Day 4 – Magic Kingdom & EPCOT – Adventures By Anne

This morning, we sorta made it for rope drop at Magic Kingdom! We got there about a half hour before official park opening and they had just started letting folks into the park and onto the rides even!

We managed to ride Space Mountain twice with barely any line by the time the park officially opened! It was amazing!

That line was way out the door by the time we finished our second ride since more folks were getting there by then. Definitely rope drop if you want to ride the big mountains here, especially now when there are still no FastPasses.

We stayed in Tomorrowland and also did Astro Orbitors, which also always has a huge line during the day, Buzz, PeopleMover, and Speedway with way shorter lines than usual. All this and the park was only officially opened for half an hour! Win!

Now, if you want to do the other big mountains, definitely bee-line it over there as soon as you’re done with Space Mountain. But this morning, we saw in the app that Big Thunder was offline still, and we weren’t feeling like Splash Mountain, and Mine Train already had a 45 minute wait, so we just did the rides in Tomorrowland and then got a little breakfast snack. We were even able to place our mobile order while waiting in line for the last ride. I love mobile order!

I can’t remember if I explained Mobile Ordering before. Alot of counter service restaurants at parks and resorts are doing mobile ordering now, some exclusively, where you can’t even just walk up to order. You have to order within your MDE app. Go into the Order Food section, select the restaurant you want, select the time slot when you want to pick up your food (for the more popular restaurants, you may want to select your time slot way ahead of time to ensure you get it, esp if you want to eat at peak times), then select n pay for all the food you’ll want.

Then, when you’re within your time slot, and you’re near the restaurant, click the “I’m Here” button in your order screen and that’s when they will make your food. When it’s ready, you’ll get another notification that your food is ready to be picked up and which pick-up window to get it from.

Note: If you need to change your time slot or cancel the order, you can do that as well as long as you haven’t clicked the “I’m Here” button.

Mobile Ordering saves alot of time since you don’t have to wait in long lines to order. It’s great! Every time we did a mobile order, we usually would get the food within 5 minutes of clicking that “I’m Here” button. So, make sure you don’t click it too soon either because you don’t want your food sitting out there and they will cancel your order if it sits there for too long, and you will be charged still.

It was still bright n early and we did so much already! What should we do next?

We checked the wait times while we were eating to see what was still low. It looks like some other main rides were still reasonable, so we made our way over to do Small World, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates.

For lunch, we had a reservation at Jungle Skipper Canteen, one of our favorite restaurants in this park. It’s themed like the Jungle Cruise ride and the cast members continue the Jungle Cruise style banter. It’s pretty fun, and the foods are more interesting than the typical burgers and such, but nothing too exotic or wierd, as some people seem to think. We shared the Brazilian cheesy bread, fried chicken, steak, and cha shu pork dishes. They were all very flavorful and delicious! You should definitely try this restaurant!

Afterwards, we walked around the park some more, did some more rides, saw Tinkerbell and some other characters, and of course, had some more treats.

Can you really go to Magic Kingdom without having a Dole Whip?!?

Look at the sky! It may not even come across as severe in the pics, but huge ominous clouds we’re starting to roll in. I think we’ve done enough at this park today anyway. It was time to find someplace where we can chill a bit during today’s hurricane. We decided to take the monorail over to the Contemporary resort right next door to do some more resort exploration.

Good thing we left when we did! As soon as we got to the Contemporary, it started a torrential downpour! Holy cow!

It’s neat! The monorail goes right through the inside of the resort! We just walked around, checked out the stores, and grabbed a little snack at the Contempo Cafe to sit a bit. That peanut butter tart was a-ma-zing!

While we were waiting out the storm, we decided to change our remaining plans. We were originally slated to go to Disney Springs again, but we decided to go back to EPCOT instead for the rest of the evening. We wanted to try more of the Flower & Garden Festival kiosks instead of having dinner at a sit-down restaurant today. We love the festivals and snacking “around the world”. So, once the rain let up, we went to catch the bus in front of the resort to EPCOT.

This was actually the first time this trip that we entered EPCOT at the front entrance since that’s where the buses drop off. The past few times, we’ve taken the Skyliner and that drops off at the back entrance by France. So, of course, we had to take the obligatory pictures in front of the Spaceship Earth ball. Mickey n Minnie we’re also out waving to everyone!

It looks like the rains scared away the crowds because everything had low waits except Test Track. That was probably because it just reopened after the rain and a crowd was accumulating there the whole time. So, we went to do Soarin’ instead. We love that one! Afterwards, we rode Spaceship Earth and Mission Space before heading back to the countries.

We just did a leisurely stroll around the “world”, sharing one or two things at each kiosk that looked good. I may have missed a few, but here are the ones that I have evidence of. There were some hits n misses, but it was still good that we tried them.

As we were walking around, we ran into one of our favorite vlogger families – Sarah, Peter, and baby James of TheBrookhartProject! They were super nice and we ended up chatting for quite a bit. We’ve been watching their Disney videos on YouTube for years now. We were wondering if we would run into any of our favorite vloggers during this trip, so we were really excited that we finally met the Brookharts!

We also caught a gorgeous sunset as we continued around the park!

In case you didn’t hear, Disney announced that the new Remy ride in the France pavilion is opening Oct 1st! You can see the signs that are already up above the construction walls. It should be fun!

After the sun set, we started wrapping up the countries with a few final snacks and rides.

It was fun to leisurely explore EPCOT in the evening, with very low crowds, after the jammed-packed day at Magic Kingdom. Of course, we had to end it with some more pics of the Spaceship Earth ball all beautifully lit up, before heading to the Skyliner back to Pop. They unveiled the retro fountain in front of it not too long ago too, so it was our first time seeing it lit up like this. The entire front of the park was renovated recently, and it’s beautiful!

Another great day!