Tokyo Disneyland Day 1

So after almost 26 straight hours of travelling, we finally arrived at Tokyo Disneyland Hotel just after 12.30am Sunday morning. I was totally and utterly exhausted, and unfortunately it had all taken a toll on my poor little body, and after just two short hours of sleep I was awake again with stomach pains, and promptly spent the next few hours feeling rough as hell, and heartbroken at the thought of being too ill to head into the park for opening.

Fortunately, it didn’t take too long for my system to flush (if you get my drift!), I scraped a little extra nap and we got straight down to business!

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

So we’re staying at the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel, which is literally 100m walk from the entrance to Tokyo Disneyland (and also the monorail station that connects us to DisneySea), so we were in the park within minutes, and first priority was breakfast, so we hit up The Great American Waffle Co. in the World Bazaar before starting our park exploration. Naturally, as we were out that way, Pirates of the Caribbean was our first ride, and from there we worked around the park clockwise: Adventureland to Frontierland, to Critter County for Splash Mountain followed by a quick Mickey churro before continuing on to Fantasyland and onwards.

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

Still running on definitely not enough sleep as a family, we began to flag early afternoon, so we sat down to eat at Queen of Hearts Banquet Hall, a restaurant I’d read about while researching the trip and was desperate to try, and it did not disappoint! Food was on point, theming was on point; we were impressed.

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

At this point, we decided to take the rest of the day fairly easy; we were tired, feet were sore, so we opted to finish up the main rides, watch the  Dreamlights Electrical Parade, which we did nomming on a Mickey burger (the bomb), and call it a night so we can get a head start on DisneySea in the morning!

°o°

Last Disney Day :(

With a 2.25pm Magical Express waiting to take us to the airport, we didn’t have a whole lot of time left for park action (although I think everyone else was feeling a bit Disney’d out), so we spent our morning enjoying one final character breakfast at Ohana, in Disney’s Polynesian Resort. The breakfast was served family-style, where a selection of food was brought to the table and we all helped ourselves, while we got visited from Mickey and Pluto, as well as Lilo and Stitch, and drank way too much ‘Stitch juice’ (yum!).

We then headed down to the dock and took the boat across to the Magic Kingdom for a final trip down Main Street USA, last minute souvenir shopping, and a last viewing of the Move it, Shake it Street Party, before making our way to the buses for the last time 😦

See ya real soon Disney World!

°o°

Day 13: Last Park Day :(

So this will be my last post from the happiest place on Earth 😦

Looking at the positive side, from here this blog will blossom into a beautiful site of Disney World planning, tips and more!

It did mean that today was my last day in the Magic Kingdom, my home away from home. So today we had a chilled day of meeting characters, getting autographs, snapping pics etc, as well as having our last few trips on our favourite rides.

It also meant last Festival of Fantasy for me, a parade I would watch every day if could. We stood on the other side of the road this time, purely for Flynn Rider (he winked at me omg), and while I said I wouldn’t take as many photos, I took more..

SONY DSC

We had dinner at Chef Mickey’s before heading back into the park for a last Celebrate the Magic and Wishes *sobs* and now as a family we have the phenomenal task of attempting to pack all our suitcases to include all our fabulous Disney purchases!

Tomorrow we’re having a final character breakfast at Ohana with Lilo and Stitch before catching the Magical Express to the airport for an exciting (not) 8 hour overnight flight back home..

Catch you on the other side dreamers!

Day 2: Magic Kingdom

Today was the day I’d planned to be totally magical; for a first day in Disney World you’d want nothing less, and I was going to make sure of it.

Although it may seem crazy over-organised, we booked our first day breakfast almost 6 months in advance to ensure we got it: Crystal Palace, 8.15am. The beauty of this is that the park doesn’t actually open until 9am, and therefore our reservation granted us early access to the Magic Kingdom, so we could make the first turn onto Main Street and see this..

SONY DSC

Main Street leading up to the castle, almost entirely uninterrupted.

Well worth and early morning (left our resort on the 7am bus to get to the park in plenty of time).

Breakfast was fab, and we were joined by Winnie the Pooh and his friends who visited and signed our autograph books before posing for numerous photos in varying poses.

photo 4

Tummies (and bags) full of food (buffets are great), we headed into the park.

I won’t list all the rides we went on, cos quite honestly we didn’t get a chance to do them all in the one day, especially not with Snow White’s Mine Train and Peter Pan’s Magic Flight wait times never dropping below and hour (we’ll Fastpass them on our next day in MK), but we were incredibly lucky with queue lengths, not waiting more than 30 minutes for any ride.

SONY DSC

In between rides we caught a few shows, and set up camp on Main Street for the Festival of Fantasy Parade, only for it to be cancelled last minute due to the threat of rain, which was a bit of a disappointment 😦 but we made up for it with snacks!

photo 3

If I’m honest, I was a little let down by the Main Street Bakery, expecting it to be what it says on the label, but really it was just a glorified Starbucks, which I’m really not a fan of, but I managed to pick an Olaf Cake Pop up from a few shops down.

More rides, more time passing, girls are getting more and more tired..

By 9pm, the Main Street Electrical Parade, Liv was unconscious and Soph not far behind, so despite my hopes of them staying for the whole parade and the following fireworks, they headed back to the hotel for the night.

(I’ve spent all day alternating between my camera and my phone for photos, and as my phone takes better night time photos, I’ll sort those out another time to fully glorify the beauty of the evening)

After the parade ended, we simply turned to face the castle and plonked ourselves on the floor, and I think I’m going to struggle to describe the beauty and true magic of what followed..

Celebrate the Magic was everything and more. Don’t believe me? See it for yourself.

The show consisted of a series of projections, set right onto the castle itself, and wow. Just wow. It had me tearing up, mouth gaping open, eyes fixed on the beauty before me, and totally speechless afterwards.

It was followed by the Wishes fireworks show, but unfortunately we were sat a little too close to the castle to fully appreciate it as the fireworks are mainly fired behind it, but it was still beautiful, and a man sat a few rows in front even proposed right as the show was going; totally beautiful.

Drained, we called it a night after that spectacular end to a magical first day of our trip.

Final stats:

Steps: 18159

Distance: 7.58 miles

Calories burnt: 2365

Stats provided by my Fitbit Zip

°o°

Day 1: A Very Long Day

I am not a morning person, not in a million years. For Disney, however, I can make an exception.

Alarm goes off 5.15am GMT, rush around doing the last of the packing and sorting the house before piling into the car for the 2.5 hour car ride to the airport.

Lots of waiting in queues and sitting around before boarding our plane at about 10.30ish for an 11.15 departure.

We felt pretty excited to be travelling Virgin Airways from previous experience well in the past, but man were they a let down! While the entertainment system was fairly decent and the films weren’t awful, the food was. I know plane food isn’t highly rated but this was a real poor effort..

With the majority of passengers being families travelling to Disney, you’d expect kid friendly meals, right? Nope. Beef chilli, chicken in some form of a sauce with liquid mash potato, or mushroom pasta as a veggie option. Our girls aren’t fussy, but the poor things hardly touched it.

But who cares?! Its Disney time!

Once past security, baggage claim etc, we simply skipped on down to the Magical Express bus terminal at the airport, hopped onto a bus, and about 25 minutes later arrived at our home for the next two weeks: the Caribbean Beach Resort!

For a big group of us, with some complex arrangements, the girl who checked us in was lovely; explaining everything clearly without patronising, got us celebration buttons and even arranged for our rooms to be moved closer to each others before bring out our Magic Bands..

SONY DSC

From there we got dropped to our rooms, did some settling in and exploring before The Disney Fairy visited to deliver goodie bags for everyone (see here), and as our bodies were set to around 10/11pm GMT, while it was only 5/6pm EST, went to grab some noms at the resort food court and test out our dining plan!

Wow. Quick service meals are huge.

For one QS credit, I got:

IMG_1798-0.JPG

8 large chicken nuggets and a decent portion of fries, a bottle of Fanta and a Monkey Cupcake, as well as filling up my refillable resort mug!

By this point the girls were itching for a swim, so after a quick twilight swim (the resort is gorgeous!) we called it an early night: 8.30 EST, 1.30 GMT and body clock, bringing us to the end of our 20 hour day!

To top it off, while I’ve been writing this I’ve been darting in and out of my room because you can see the fireworks from just over the pool 🙂

Tomorrow we hit the parks hard, starting with the Magic Kingdom! °o°