Mark's College Tour with Some Disney Thrown In 2017 Day 4
We were up early and drove to Deland, FL for a morning tour at Stetson University on Wednesday, July 12. Following the tour, we drove to Walt Disney World for our stay at Pop Century (thank you Wendy @ Magical Journeys!). We stopped at check-in since I hadn't gotten any texts on our room yet; it wasn't ready. I did find out that if you buy annual passes in advance, you can only activate them at guest services/a ticket window at one of the theme parks or Disney Springs. We bought our refillable mugs and drove over to Animal Kingdom.
We got to Animal Kingdom about 12:30pm. We activated our annual passes and headed into the park. The rain started as we were crossing the bridge to Discovery Island (it would be on and off for the rest of the day, mostly on though). Sharon and Mark grabbed lunch at Pizzafari while I grabbed lunch at Flame Tree Barbeque. I had the pulled pork sandwich which was good. I ended up eating standing up due to the rain and people holding tables.
We had been unable to get Fastpasses for Flight of Passage. The wait time had gone from 180 minutes to 75 minutes with the rain, so we got into the standby line for Flight of Passage. We ended up waiting about 135 minutes. The queue line has lots of details and the attraction is fantastic! We had no issues with sitting on it. I'm looking forward to riding this again!
Next up was a Fastpass (4:45pm-5:45pm) for Expedition Everest. We had to wait about 12 minutes. The yeti is still down.
We pre-ordered our meal at Satu'li Canteen. It was not busy so we did not have to wait in a line to pick up our order. Cast members were blocking off the seating area, so you couldn't sit down unless you had food. I really appreciate that. Mark and I had cheeseburger steamed pods and Sharon had the chopped wood-grilled chicken bowl. It was all good!
We had a 6:35pm-7:45pm Fastpass for Na'vi River Journey; it was down and continued to be down until after 9pm. Our Fastpass ended up converting to a multi-experience Fastpass good for everything except Rivers of Light and Flight of Passage.
We ended up seeing the 7pm Festival of the Lion King show and then headed over to DinoLand to use our multi-experience Fastpass on Dinosaur. Dinosaur was down, which worked out in our favor later. We rode Primeval Whirl instead; we had about a 10 minute wait. We got the car spinning real good somehow!
Our third Fastpass of the day was for Rivers of Light at 9pm. We could have used it for something else since the rain cut the crowds down, but there was no way to know that in advance. Rivers of Light was a great show. I recommend seeing it.
After Rivers of Light, Mark checked wait times and Na'vi River Journey was running again. So we used our multi-experience Fastpass to ride it. We had about a 10 minute wait. We got the B version; the shaman was on a screen and not the audio-animatronic. It was cool to see, though I don't know that this will be a repeat attraction for us unless there's a really short wait.
After riding Na'vi River Journey, we headed back to Pop Century to turn in for the night. We were granted our requests for our room, first floor in the 50's section. We were not able to connect any of our devices to the in-room wifi at Pop Century, so that made things a challenge. We've never gotten good cellular signal in the rooms at Pop Century, either.
