Come and join us for another installment of the WDW-Memories podcast, where we relive my Walt Disney World Memories. Today we’ll start a new memory of a day spent in Walt Disney World, hopping between the two original Disney World parks, catching our favorite rides and finding some new ones, but first we have to get into the parks.
Podcast Type: Binaural Audio
Podcast Length: 27:07
Well here we are at the start of a new memory. I can’t believe I’ve been doing these podcasts now for 12 years. Rather inconsistently I might add, but 12 years none the less. For those that want to go back to the beginning, you can download all past episodes from the WDW-Memories.net website. At the bottom of the website is a Blog Archive, where you can drill into each memory and click the Download link at the top. But that’s the past, let’s look to the future, and start a new memory day at Walt Disney World shall we?
Since we’re starting a new day in the parks, let’s begin by talking about the general setup of the day and things that will play into our decision making throughout the day. First off, we are just spending 1 day in the parks. We already have Park Hoppers with no-expiration that we purchased years ago, and have been coming back to Walt Disney World one day at a time and using them up. It’s the Thursday just after Labor Day, and we have decided to leave the beach and do a single day at the parks. The interesting thing is this is just before Hurricane Irma hit the Florida peninsula, and it’s already impacting peoples planning. Throughout the day, we would be standing in line, and folks all around us are checking the weather, looking at the news, or checking on the many flight cancellations that are already impacting their plans. Our plan at this point is to begin driving early Saturday and hopefully get out of Florida ahead of the storm. If you want to know how we did, let me know and maybe I’ll write up a special blog post about our adventures with Irma. In any case, it’s a very warm day, with temperatures reaching the mid 90’s. Crowds however were expected to be light according to TouringPlans.com, and they were (predictions was a 1, and it ended up being a 2). I have built a touring plan in hopes that we might make it to the Animal Kingdom to experience the new Pandora land, however as our day progresses, we’ll see that the lines at Flight of Passage are significantly longer than we want to wait, especially when we can do so much with the shorter lines in the rest of the park. So instead, we’ll start out by parking in Epcot, taking the Monorail to the TTC and then to the Magic Kingdom park. After noon, we’ll park hop back to Epcot, and finish out our day doing as many of our favorite rides as we can, before filling up on gas and heading back towards Clearwater Beach, which we find out during the day has announced mandatory evacuations, so gas will become hard to find.
To start off, we will join our memory as we are arriving at Epcot, almost a full hour before park opening. Epcot is having morning Extra Magic Hours, but we can’t participate because we aren’t staying on property. We have magic bands from a previous stay, and decide to check out if they still work before getting to a gate, and discover that our tickets are all screwed up. We then get to spend the next 30 minutes explaining to some poor cast member in guest services how this went wrong. They end up fixing it finally, so we turn around and sprint for the monorail to the TTC, to try to get to the Magic Kingdom ASAP. We’ll finish off this memory as we finally arrive in the park, about 15 minutes after park opening, which isn’t too bad really. Now, don’t worry, you won’t have to listen to all that boring stuff. Instead, we’ll focus on the fun of the Disney Transportation. I’ve heard it said, the Monorails are just as much fun, and are a great way to begin the magic as you arrive at the parks.
Now sit back. Relax. Close your eyes. And come with me as we start a new adventure in our favorite vacation destination.
WDW-Memories: Relive That Walt Disney World Magic 