DisneyWorld and Disney Cruise - Day 8 - Another hot, hot day!

September 4, 2013

Well, we haven't gotten used to the heat yet.  It's been 8 solid days of hot, humid weather and it's starting to wear us down.

We spent a lot of time in indoor attractions today to try to stay cool.

We slept in this morning (that's how I really know that it's too hot out, otherwise Kyrie would have us at rope drop every day!) and then we walked over to the Magic Kingdom.  I expected the park to be pretty empty since it's after Labor Day now, and it was kind of quiet, but really there were still a lot of people there.
Really it's the MagicBands with the ability to pre-book fast passes that allowed us to sleep in (and by "us", I mean them.  I gave up trying to sleep at 4:30 after being up all night between a cranky 2 yr old and a teething baby.)  We had fast passes booked every hour from 11am to 2pm for the main attractions including Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Haunted Mansion, and the very coveted Enchanted Tales with Belle which had an hour wait in the hot sun when we walked right up and in at 2pm.)

The kids took a ride on the Magic Carpets with Kyrie.

We then walked over to Pirates of the Caribbean and the Enchanted Tiki Room, because we already needed to get indoors!

 Then we headed to Frontierland for rides on Big Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain.

Zach, Zoe and I ducked into Country Bear Jamboree to cool off and rest while the big kids rode those big rides.  Then Zoe had a meltdown over jelly beans before we finally decided to get some lunch.

We had a quick lunch at the Pecos Bill Cafe.  After lunch Kyrie took the 3 older kids on rides, while I was going to take Zoe and Zach on It's a Small World.  Well, Zoe had had enough by then and simply laid down in the restaurant and refused to get up.  I was already holding Zach, so just picking her up wasn't really an option.  She just laid there and complained for like 10 minutes until finally I asked her if she was going to wear her shoes on the wrong feet.  She liked that idea...sat right up...put her shoes on the wrong feet...and walked with me right out to the stroller!  I doubt that will ever work again, but I was glad to finally be leaving the restaurant.

Here's us getting off the ride.  She's still got her shoes on the wrong feet.

After that, it became our mission to get Zoe a nap before our 4:00pm dinner reservation.  We started with Haunted Mansion since it's dark and it's a long ride.

That didn't work because she was too nervous about the ride.  Then we moved on to the Hall of Presidents.

That would have to work - it's like 30 minutes in the dark about a subject she couldn't possibly be interested in.  Nope, no luck.  Somehow she stayed awake and we finally gave up.

Just a stop to re-group

There is a new area in Fantasyland themed for Rapunzel.  You can see the tower high in the sky and a little village.  The funny thing is that this well themed area just houses restrooms.

We really appreciated our MagicBands today when we practically walked right into the Enchanted Tales with Belle attraction with our fast passes when i had a line over an hour long in the hot sun for everyone else.

 

We took in several more indoor attractions before it was time for our dinner reservation.  We ate at the Be Our Guest restaurant for the first time.  The restaurant is very large.

 

The Beast's Castle far in the distance at the entrance to Be Our Guest restaurant

This is the main dining room and then there is the east wing (where we ate) and the "forbidden" west wing:

Main Dining Room

This must add a lot of dining capacity to the Magic Kingdom, so hopefully that means other restaurants are easier to get reservations for now.

East Wing with a music box centerpiece

The atmosphere at Be Our Guest is excellent.  You can't see it in our picture, but the back of the main dining room has tall windows that appear to show outside the castle and it's snowing!  It looks really cool.  The east wing just has a giant music box and some nice paintings from the Beauty and the Beast movie.  The west wing has some enchanted artwork - I didn't actually see what that meant.  Here are a couple pictures from inside the restaurant.

The food at Be Our Guest is very good and is a good value if you're using the dining plan.  It's pretty fancy.  Kyrie had steak and I had a pork chop.  The kids meals are not good.  I personally think that Disney should do something about their kids meals.  I know my kids are picky eaters, but it has been really hard to find them anything that looked like a decent meal except at the buffets.

The dessert tray was hard to resist - and we didn't!

Various flavors of cupcakes and creme puffs

After dinner we left the park and managed to get on the monorail just before a storm hit.  We've been so lucky with that!

Here's the cute picture of the day: