January 28th:
I woke up at 3:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I woke everyone else up at 5.
We all got dressed nice and warm for the Pro Bowl 5k and then headed out to the car.
It was a quick and easy drive over to the Epcot to park and get over to the race corral.
There certainly wasn’t the crowd or the same excitement as a true runDisney race but the kids were excited for the race which made up for some of that.
Once we got going we started fairly slow and stuck together but as time went on K would decide to run ahead so I would pace with her and Heather would run slower with T. Then K would have to stop to walk and T and Heather would catch up and we would travel together for a time.
The kids were hugely excited to be in Epcot that early in the morning (just after dawn) with all the music playing and the big torches lit up.
Before we got to Imagination I could tell that K was getting burnt out and she had to make a bathroom stop. After a wait she came out and she had taken her sweat pants off since she was too warm. Luckily she had on a pair of shorts underneath.
We caught back up to Heather and T and T was raring to sprint to the finish at this point but K was still tired. So I paced ahead with T and Heather stayed with K.
Then we did the loop around Spaceship Earth and out the back stretch towards the finish line. We ran dawn the home stretch together and got our medals and bottle of water.
We headed back out to the car and back to the hotel to have some warm showers. It was sunny but cool – a great morning for a run!
Overall the race was fun but definitely lacking in the splashy and magic of the runDisney races – the course was the standard 5k race path for the runDisney races but there was no on course entertainment and no characters to see. Just some happy Disney cast members cheering folks on.
And the medals were pretty cool.
Very proud of the kids and how well they did – and we didn’t get swept – so that is a bonus.
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After a shower and a change we headed back out to the car and went off Disney property for breakfast. Heather had a desire to hit IHOP so we did that and had a big breakfast.
We then hit another grocery store to get some cold meds before heading to get some gas put in the rental car.
Then we dropped the car at the Dolphin and headed back to the room.
After a bit of a rest we headed into Epcot and ran into a meet and greet with Elena of Avalor – K and her had a chat about dresses as K had on her Christmas Bell dress that is a similar colour to Elena’s.
After glancing at a few of the Festival of the Arts items and booths we made our way through to hop on the monorail to Magic Kingdom.
We made it to Magic Kingdom and got onto Space Mountain with 10 minutes to spare in our Fast Pass.
Crowds were crazy – it must have been people in for the Pro Bowl because I have never seen it that busy in January.
We used our last special fast passes to ride Space Ranger Spin and then we wandered over to get in the really long fast pass line at Mine Train – they had had a 4 hour outage on the ride earlier in the day and it was backed up. At one point while we were there we saw the standby line jump to over 3.5 hours.
After mine train we did some wandering around to see what else we could ride and the wait times were just insane. We did get into watch the Enchanted Tiki Room show though which is always kitschy fun.
So we wandered and killed some time and it was finally time for our reservation at Be Our Guest. They were backed up about 15-20 minutes but it wasn’t too bad. It was here that we got confirmation that they couldn’t text Canadian numbers either.
Once we were in the service was fantastic and the food was great. I definitely ate too much.
It was still fairly busy after supper and it was getting colder but we weren’t ready to quit yet!
We decided to split up – K and Heather went to meet Ariel and T and I went on Dumbo.
After that we got our wires crossed and Heather and K got on Dumbo and T and I ended up heading closer to Cinderella’s castle. Heather and K got to see some Wishes while on Dumbo and T and I watched it near the castle.
T and I took lots of pictures.
Afterwards Heather and K caught up with us and we decided to head to see if the wait times were down for Goofy’s Barnstormers and on the way Kaia realized that she was missing her magic band. I did the wander back and forth over our path and couldn’t see it (the kids rode Barnstormer while I did that) and reviewing pictures we determined that she almost had to have lost it on Dumbo.
After a bit the cast members on Dumbo had found it and we were able to breathe a sigh of relief (it was a special Aurora band).
A quick ride on the tea cups.
Then we wandered over and rode Pirates of the Caribbean before realizing we were just done. At this point it was after 10 and everyone had been up since at least 5. Even though we would have loved to take advantage of the reduced wait times, at this point we were just too tired.
So we wandered out to the buses and after a short wait (as we were waiting it started to rain – leaving was the right call) we were able to get on the bus back directly to the Boardwalk Resort.
On the bus ride K realized she had lost her glasses – after a chat with T and K we were able to determine that she had taken them off and put them in the pouch for riding Barnstormer. And then after the ride they were so concerned about seeing if we had found her magic band that she forgot her glasses. We will have to talk to lost and found at Magic Kingdom on that one. (after several checks with lost and found and with the main lost and fount at TTC we never did get them back unfortunately)
Back to the hotel and a quick stop at reception to pick up Heather and the kids’ annual passholder magic bands (2.0) – we can’t get them shipped to Canada so we have to get these at the hotels – I had gotten mine shipped to the Boardwalk during my Goofy Challenge trip so I had mine but we couldn’t order the others until their annual passes had been activated (which was done on our first full day of the trip). So as soon as we had activated them we had them shipped to the Boardwalk as well. But we hadn’t seen a shipping letter to say they were on the way so we had gotten concerned we weren’t going to get them while we were here. But during supper I checked the Disney site and it indicated that they were at the hotel waiting. Whoohoo!
Sure enough they were also the 2.0 bands that Heather was hoping for.
We then got the kids to bed and they were out quickly.
So was Heather.
I read for a bit and then crashed out myself. It was a long but good day!
