And now for something completely different

OhioStateBuckeye

DIS Veteran
Joined
Sep 7, 2007
Think of all the joy you'll find when you leave the world behind and bid your cares good bye - Peter Pan

Hello disboards!

I am Rachel:



and that is my boyfriend Brian.

We have been together for a looong time now...I believe 9 years. Yikes.

Time for the back stories!

Sorry, they are a bit long and I don't have a lot of pictures for this part.

So be patient, but it is important for you to know us :thumbsup2

My parents took me to WDW twice when I was little, then once during college. I always loved Disney growing up. I remember watching the Sunday night Disney movie with my whole family. We also got to go to the movies twice a year. Once for a Christmas movie and the second time for the summer Disney movie.

My favorite Disney movies are Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Mulan.

My favorite Pixar movies are Up, Monster's Inc and Cars.

And just because I love him, here is a picture of my favorite Cars character:



That is from Radiator Springs Racers in DL.

I really can't even go into my favorite ride because I basically love all of them...

POTC, HM, COP (yep, that's right, Carousel of freakin Progress), Soarin, Maelstrom, JC, Splash, PP, Figment, KS, Dinosaur, 3 Caballeros, ST, GMR, TT...yeah, there are a lot

If I had to pick one though

PHILHARMAGIC! Love love love this ride. It really signifies what WDW means to me. Nostalgia, songs, special effects, wonder, happiness.

My favorite park is whichever one I happen to be in at the time of the question.


Now on to Brian's back story.

He went to WDW once with his parents when he was really young. All he seemed to remember was staying at the Poly (lucky, like anyone could forget that) and riding astro orbiter.

We started dating junior year of college. When I was halfway insane from my second year of law school we decided to take a trip down to WDW after my finals in December.

We stayed at All Star Sports and I began my obsession with WDW, and Brian really had a good time (phew) so he came along.

Since then we have stayed at: All Star Movies, Port Orleans Riverside, Caribbean Beach and Coronado and Pop Century in a split stay. Our favorite by far is Coronado. And that will probably stay our favorite because Art of Animation never has availability and we don't have enough money to stay at a deluxe right now.

His favorite Disney movie is Robin Hood and Pirates of the Carribean. I think it is safe to say he is insanely obsessed with the POTC movies. I got him the special box set for Christmas last year and he watches them all constantly. He also made a Halloween costume of his favorite POTC character, as you'll soon see.

His favorite Pixar movies are Ratatouille and Wall-E.

Brian's favorite rides are POTC (obviously), Tiki Birds, Soarin and Living with the Land (no lie). The boy loves his plants.

His favorite park by far is Epcot.



Our original plan was to head to WDW to attend our second Tower of Terror 10 Mile. The trip ballooned from there (as these things usually do) and pretty soon Brian's mom and younger sister (Stephanie) decided to join us.

They signed up for the 5k and used the trip as motivation to lose weight. And I am happy to report that when the trip rolled around, they had both lost tons of weight and had done an excellent job getting in shape for the 5k!

His mom had been twice, once on her honeymoon and again when they took the kids.

His sister had been once, but she was a baby and didn't remember WDW at all.

I did most of the planning! Yay planning! Love it :goodvibes

By the way, I feel like this TR is really missing pictures, so here is a random picture of my Halloween costume:



I am dressing as a Haunted Mansion ballroom dancer :)

So without further adieu, here is our itinerary (with free dining! yay!):

Wednesday October 2: everyone arrives around 11 am, we get checked into Coronado and have an ADR at T Rex for dinner

Thursday October 3: MK day. Breakfast at Chef Mickey's and Ohana for dinner. Mary (Stefanie's friend, arrives for the weekend).

Friday October 4: Cinderella's Royal Table breakfast. Epcot. MNSSHP.

Saturday October 5: Brian and I were relaxing for the 10 mile race, everyone else was going to run the 5k early, go to AK, then meet us at the Villain's Bash After Party.

Sunday October 6: Mary leaves early, then we all go to Epcot. Dinner at San Angel.

Monday October 7: Epcot day with lunch at Biergarten and Garden Grill for dinner.

Tuesday October 8: rest day and La Nouba.

Wednesday October 9: DHS day with dinner at Sci Fi.

Thursday October 10: rest day and another MNSSHP.

Friday October 11: MK day with lunch at Liberty Tree Tavern and dinner at Be Our Guest.

Saturday October 12: AK day with early breakfast at Boma and late dinner at Tokyo Dining.

Sunday October 13: Epcot and MK day. Lunch at Coral Reef and the dessert party at MK.

Monday October 14: departure day. Epcot and MK.

Everyone study the itinerary real well?? OK. Now throw it out the window.

Here is where the something completely different comes in (any Monty Python fans??).

I've done a few trip reports before (on DL and Arizona), and I don't really feel like telling this one chronologically.

So I'm going to do whatever I feel like.

Yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me. And all that.

Mostly the chapters will be about events. Like one chapter for MNSSHP, one for the Tower of Terror 10 Mile, chapters on dining, and so forth.

I am excited to try this new format and I hope some of you will be too!

All right, time to get some pictures uploaded to photobucket so I can get started!

If you want to follow along just head for the second star to the right and straight on til' morning.
 


In keeping with my theme of randomness, I have decided to make my very first chapter on Characterpalooza!

What is Characterpalooza, any sane, non-obsessed Disney person may be asking right now.

Well, Characterpalooza is this insane explosion of characters at DHS.

They come out depending on the full moon and the position of the tide and if Mercury is in retrograde...

Ok well maybe it is not that complicated but it seems like it, it is really dependent on Fantasmic showings.

I am going to pull this next part directly from Kenny the Pirate's web page (he is an awesome character hunter, if you don't know him you should).


With two Fantasmics at 8:30 and 10:00, there will be ONE Character Palooza at 5:30 PM on Streets of America.
With one Fantasmic at 8:30 PM, there will be TWO Character Palooza meets. The first at 4:30 PM on the Streets of America and the second at 5:10 PM on Streets of America
With two Fantasmics at 8:00 and 9:30, there will be ONE Character Palooza meet at 5:10 PM on the Streets of America
With one Fantasmic at 8:00, there will be TWO Character Palooza meets. The first at 4:30 PM on the Streets of America and the second at 5:10 PM on the Streets of America
With TWO Fantasmics at 7:30 and 9:00 PM, there should be ONE Character Palooza at 4:30 PM on the Streets of America
With ONE Fantasmic at 7:30 PM there should be three Character Paloozas at 3:00, 4:00 and 5:10 PM on Streets of America


Not complicated at all, right? :badpc:

We fell into the 2 Fantasmics at 8 and 9:30, so we got 1 shot at Characterpalooza at 510.

We knew it was supposed to be somewhere on the Streets of America, but we weren't quite sure where so we ended up hanging around the little snack station outside of Lights Motors Action.

Another woman wondered up and we started talking and she was also waiting for the characters to come out, so we waited together. We were all nervous that LMA was going to let out and there would be millions of people to take away our secret characters.

They ended up coming out a little late. They came out of a backstage entrance and they were really not that hard to spot (being about 20 characters, they kind of stuck out).

We knew we had to pick out our favorites fast so we could get them out of the way before the entire park learned of their presence.

Stephanie was on a mission to meet all the princesses, so we immediately rushed to Pocahontas and Meeko, who were being adorable and walking and talking together.



Stephanie was talking to Pocahontas, Pocahontas had noticed her henna tattoo that she got earlier at AK so was asking about her cool 'tribal' tattoo.

Meanwhile Meeko and I were having a truly engaging conversation about crackers and why I didn't bring him any.

Most of the characters didn't have handlers or photopass so we had to split the group and take our own pictures.



I love this picture because it looks like Meeko is looking in Brian's cup to see if there might be something for him in there.

I just love Meeko so much. Look how excited he is!



Next up was another princess, my personal favorite:



Mulan! Too bad Mushu wasn't there. Mulan was just standing around by herself :confused3 At this point Characterpalooza hadn't really been discovered by the masses yet so we knew we had to move fast.

Mulan and I had an awesome talk, she asked if my BF was my bodyguard and I replied that I could take care of myself but that he always had my back. So Mulan was like oooh so he is like your Mushu.



Next up:



Bolt! So cute.



Stephanie noticed that he even has his lightning bolt marking in his fur.

By this time the masses had discovered Characterpalooza and Pocahontas and Mulan both had very long lines, so I think we chose wisely.

There were about 3 army men marching around.



The characters had lines by now so we waited a minute or 2 for Hook.



Hook was a gentleman, though I must say I prefer the Once Upon a Time Hook.



Next up we found this happy fellow wandering around:



You can kind of get an idea of the crowd at that point.

Our last character we had to chase down.



He is Pinocchio, hes got no strings to hold him down, after all.

There were a couple other characters that we didn't get pictures with.

Chip and Dale were there, but we'd seen them earlier, same with Minnie.

Jessie and Stitch were also there but they were kind of around the corner and by the time we made it to them their lines were long and we needed to be heading to Sci Fi for our dinner reservation. Which was OK because Jessie really kinda creeps me out. Maybe it is the whole no neck thing... :confused3


So anyway...Characterpalooza is a great time!

Here are my tips for success:

1. Use Kenny the Pirate's website to find out when Characterpalooza is going down.

2. Prioritize Prioritize Prioritize. The princesses lines were huge by the time we were done. Know who you want to see the most and go to them first.

3. Be ready to take your own photos, only 1 or 2 had handlers when we were there.
 
I think i commented on one of your TRS before but we are very similar! Named Rachel, graduated from OSU, and have been with my bf for 10 years!

Reading along!:)
 
Well that very quickly went off the rails, geez.

We had a sort of spur of the moment Christmas trip, so this trip report got shelved for a bit. Now that I am back home and dealing with 0 degree weather, I think I'd like to go back to Disney.

I am going to keep updating this, next update will be about MNSSHP!
 


We were able to enter the Princess line at 6:45 for Rapunzel and Snow White.

We were the 4th party in line so we settled down on the ground and I took some bad pictures of the waiting area while we talked with the people in line ahead of us.



Yay Mulan! I wish you were here.



This is me in my HM ballroom dancer costume:



We were ushered into the character area right at 7.

Here are Snow White and her prince dancing together and being charming:





Rapunzel and Flynn were awesome. I asked Flynn about Maximus and asked if they were getting along any better. He kinda shrugged about it and Rapunzel assured me they were friends and that boys will be boys.

This was also the start of 'dead' jokes. Since I was dressed as a ghost, I told Rapunzel and Flynn that I'd been dying to meet them. Flynn, without missing a beat, said that he thought I'd waited a little too long.



Then later he joked about making sure he was in the dead center of the picture.

Snow and Charming (I think of them as their Once Upon a Time iterations) were really sweet and cute.



Next up we decided it was high time to ride the HM.





I wanted to get a picture with 'my ride' CM.



Then we only had a few minute wait until we got our photopass magic shots:



There was no wait for the hitch hiking ghost location so we got that taken care of:



We peeked inside Woody's dance party:



Looks a little like an alien abduction is going on.

We went through the shortcut to Adventureland and were going to ride POTC...





Until we saw that Jack Sparrow's line was only about a 10 minute wait. We couldn't believe it so we got in line.

Jack and I had a very animated conversation. He asked if I'd seen Blackbeard (since Blackbeard is dead and I was a ghost) and wanted to know if Blackbeard was mad at him.



Jack is definitely a charmer.



We stopped at the Tiki Room to trick or treat.



We had about a 10 minute wait for Jasmine and Geenie:





We wanted to make sure we got decent seats for the fireworks, so we headed towards the castle and were right on time to see a Villains show.



Now really, the show makes very little sense to me, but you get to see a bunch of villains and I really enjoyed the Queen of Hearts dancing to that 'off with her head' song.

Half our party got in line for Maleficent, I got a picture with Frollo, who had no line.





Then Brian and I got in line for Cruella. We talked to the woman behind us who was dressed as Cruella and super excited to meet her. When our turn was next it was announced that we were the last guests to be able to meet Cruella, so of course I had to give up my spot to the woman behind me. She was so grateful and honestly, it made me feel better to give her my spot than it would have felt to meet Cruella.

Next we had the absolute best fireworks experience EVER. We were towards the end of the front courtyard space, and everyone sat down and stayed seated...so we were able to sit and relax and have an awesome view of the fireworks. Which you will see in the next post.
 

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