Ok! I’m back!
Day four was the COOLEST day at Disney I have ever spent. And that is NO exaggeration. We signed up to do the Keys to the Kingdom tour – and it did NOT disappoint. I learned SO much about Disney World and Walt Disney and how they run the park… PLUS we got to see stuff behind the scenes, and even got to go down into the Utilidoor system (the tunnels!) – which actually aren’t underground. They are ground level. The entire park is on the 2nd level. The more you know…
We got to the park before it opened, and had a chance to snap some pictures of the castle before it got crazy…
(I’ve never seen Main Street so empty!!)
Dad also got some quality time with his favorite…
I can’t even begin to write about all the things we learned. A part of me wants to, so I don’t forget… but then a part of me doesn’t want to, so if you ever decide to take the tour you’ll be just as captivated as we were. We plan on doing it again one day, because we’re sure that a new tour guide will have new stories and it was seriously THAT MUCH FUN. I do have to say it was kind of tough towards the end though… a LOT of walking and my hips were really starting to hurt.
I do have to tell you one thing though – all of the names in the windows have meaning. They are all important people in building the park. This window was my favorite – M.T. Lott (empty lot….) and all the “subsidiaries” on the window were the names of the fake corporations set up to slowly buy all the land to build the park. It was pretty funny, they knew if Walt Disney started to buy land, it would all go up in price. So Florida knew something was going on when all this land was getting purchased, but didn’t know what. There were all these theories, and Disney was one of them! So during an interview, a journalist straight up asked Walt if they were building a park. His response was “absolutely not! Florida is too hot, you cant build on a swamp, there are bugs and alligators, blah blah blah blah…” and went on for a while about why he could never build a park in Florida. When the journalist got home she thought to herself “why on earth would he know so much about Central Florida?!?” so the next day she announced that yes, they were building Disney World in Orlando!!! That forced Disney to announce early that she was right, and those were the plans. Unfortunately they still had one more land purchase they needed (the last 10%) and that last 10% ended up costing significantly more than the entire other 90% put together!! (he gave us numbers but I can’t remember…)
During the tour we also learned about Pin trading. Boy oh boy was my Dad excited…
Needless to say, by the end of the trip we all had LOTS of pins, and had a LOT of fun trading them. Dad still brings his pins over to my house when he visits to try to trade me…
After the tour we decided we really needed to cool off, so we hopped on the monorail and ended up finding a bar at the Contemporary Resort to hang out at for a bit. Then, back to the park! We rode some more rides, I got my pretzel, we met Tinkerbell, and before we knew it – it was fireworks time!
The jury is still out for me if the Fireworks Dessert Party was worth it. The deserts were only so-so, and we were so stuffed from eating all day we didn’t even really eat much (I don’t think Dad had anything at all…) but the main point of us doing that was so we had a reserved place to watch the show. We definitely had a nice, uncrowded view of the castle……. but it wasn’t my favorite view. We were kind of off to the side, so the fireworks were next to the castle instead of behind it. I only got one decent fireworks picture…
So, I guess it’s a recommended spot if you don’t want to stand on Main Street and wait. But if you stand on Main Street… you’ll get the BEST view. I prefer the view from Main Street, but for this trip I MORE preferred sitting down in a chair. So it’s really a toss up! It was also much harder to hear the music from the terrace party, which was kind of a bummer. And there was a grandpa talking to his kid about how that was Mickey Mouse’s house and I wanted to stop him and say NO THAT IS CINDERELLA’S HOUSE NOT MICKEY’S HOUSE… but I just bit my tongue.
Final recap coming next!! (can we go back now, please?)
Absolutely Ridiculous 