Grand Floridian Visit - Part Three
On Thursday, we are scheduled to be at the Magic Kingdom. Our fastpasses for this day are spread out from about mid-morning to mid-afternoon so we just head directly to the park.
We end up in the park shortly after opening. Haunted Mansion only has a 15 minute wait so we do that. It's a Small World still has a short standby line so we do that one. Now, lines are starting to build. We have paper fastpasses for Pirates of the Caribbean (We had done two rounds of "A Pirate's Adventure" a couple of weeks before with a group from our community which earned us paper fastpasses to Pirates which were good through the end of May) so use them for a Pirates ride. It's now time for our Big Thunder fastpass. We still have some time before our Peter Pan fastpass so we head into Philharmagic. After Philharmagic, we head directly on Peter Pan.
After Peter, we still have a couple of hours before our fastpass on 7 Dwarves. I check to see if we can pick up a table service reservation within the Magic Kingdom but we are hungry and the times available are too far away so we head to the monorail and get off at the Contemporary where we have a nice, relaxed (and cool) lunch at Contempo Cafe. We both have burgers which are huge!!! We agree, that next time, we'll order one and split it!!
We monorail back to Magic Kingdom but still have time before our 7 Dwarves fastpass so we use the second paper fastpass we have for Pirates. With still more time to spare, we ride PeopleMover (The Tron track is really taking shape now) and then head over to 7 Dwarves. I guess our timing was good and the system hadn't caught up with us yet because, as we were walking out of the Magic Kingdom, I received notice that 7 Dwarves had gone down and we could use our fastpass on an alternate ride.
After returning to the Grand Floridian, we hang out in our room for a little bit. For dinner, we decide to see if there is any availability at the bar at Citrico's and, if not, we would go to Gaspirilla's. There was plenty of room at the bar (though we actually could have been seated at a table since the restaurant wasn't very busy at the time). We each ordered the short ribs which were very yummy!!!
After dinner, we sat in the lobby downstairs to listen to a set by the Grand Floridian Band before returning to our room.
We watched the Electrical Light Parade from our room and, once again, walked over to the dock and watched the Magic Kingdom fireworks from there.
On Friday morning, we packed up our belongings, loaded our car and returned home!
