Disney World, Part III

We saved the last day for our tried and true park, Magic Kingdom. We were all excited about this day for two reasons.

One, we had heard that the park would be decked out for Halloween, which it was.

Two, Saturday was one of the days where Magic Kingdom stayed open until midnight. Nighttime is my favorite time at the park, and we were determined to make the most of our extra hours.

After checking out a few things and securing our first set of Fastpasses, the male family members headed for the Tomorrowland Speedway race cars and my daughter and I hopped on the tea cups nearby.

The boys were still on the race cars when we finished, so we squeezed in a quick merry-go-round ride before meeting them back at the Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin ride.

This ride was a favorite on our first trip to the park, and ended up being popular this time as well.

It seems we’re all not so much about Buzz as we are about competition when it comes to racking up points with our laser guns, so we ended up returning to the ride multiple times, in attempts to beat our previous scores. LCB told me later he looked back at me at one point on one of the rides and couldn’t believe the intense look on my face. I don’t know. I was just focusing on bumping up my numbers.

Even my daughter got into it at one point, wrenching the laser gun from my hand so she could shoot. And on one round, the ride stopped for a few minutes due to some technical difficulties, so we were able to rack up additional points with the added time, a definite highlight.

I also made a point to take my daughter on Snow White’s Scary Adventures, since somewhere I read that the ride is closing soon.

The one main disappointment with the rides occurred early afternoon, with, of all things, the “it’s a small world” ride. In our limited experience, Disney typically overestimates their wait time. However, on “it’s a small world” the wait time posted was 25 minutes, but it ended up being 45 minutes, which almost ruined the Fastpasses LCB and my younger son had for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

Then, to add insult to injury, after telling my daughter how much I liked “it’s a small world” after riding it with my mother when I was a little girl, she looked around for all of 20 seconds after it started and proclaimed it “dumb.” I was flabbergasted. And when I tried to sway her, by pointing out several of the details that I thought she’d think were cute, she solemnly bowed her head and refused to look up for the rest of the ride.

Wasn’t that just precious?

Not so much, really. I now wanted my 45 minutes back.

Later on in the afternoon, we all headed to another favorite ride, the Pirates of the Caribbean. Afterward, I think the small people had as much fun dueling in the store as they did on the ride.

And of course, we had to ride the Jungle Cruise, where my younger son was eager to see his favorite part he remembered from last time, where the rhinoceros pokes the guy in the tree in his “rare end.”

One smaller but understandable disappointment was the fact that the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse was closed for maintenance. We just watched the Disney movie of Swiss Family Robinson the weekend before we left, and the small people were enthralled and asked if we could go live in a treehouse on a remote island somewhere. So they were naturally disappointed to find the treehouse closed, but they conceded that foregoing it for this visit would be better than potentially having the walk-through turn into a ride in the downward direction were one of the rope bridges to collapse from lack of maintenance.

Last time we “met” the Disney Princesses, so this time baby-girl decided she wanted to meet the Disney fairies, despite the fact that Tangled’s Rapunzel, her character of choice for Halloween this year, was also available to “meet.” She decided to head for Tinker Bell first then, and we thought we’d see if we had time to meet Rapunzel later.

In a fashion most typical for my daughter, she initially froze when we got to the fairies,

but after a minute of hard work on the first fairy’s part, she warmed up.

As always, Magic Kingdom lived up to its name at night. It’s a simple concept, but there’s something about the pink lights against the castle at night that make it look magical indeed.

Rapunzel proved to have an earlier bedtime than my kids do when they are on vacation, so we didn’t get a chance to see her, but we did see her little section of the castle.

We spent the last hour using several Fastpasses, including extras offered to us by Disney employees, to ride the Peter Pan’s Flight ride and the Buzz Lightyear ride multiple times each.

Then, at the stroke of midnight, we slid into the last showing of Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor.

We took our time leaving after that, walking slowly down Magic Kingdom’s Main Street, looking at the lights and the décor, peeking in the windows of shops still open. We soaked up every last moment of it.

No need to wish upon a star.