WDW Flower and Garden Festival at Epcot

I think I mentioned previously that our trip overlapped with Epcot's Flower and Garden Festival. This event happens every spring; there are concerts and other events, gardening displays, topiaries, and, for the last few years, food kiosks. On our trip in 2007, we arrived just after the end of the festival, so we got to see a lot of the topiaries and special landscaping. This year, we found that we weren't super interested in many of the festival events, but we did enjoy trying food from the kiosks. I think if we're ever at Epcot again when the festival isn't happening, we might find the landscaping dull--we've gotten used to seeing everything in full bloom!

One of the extra things that I enjoyed was the butterfly house:

The topiaries are really amazing, too. They are scattered around all throughout the park.

And, here's some of the food we sampled (we shared these snacks instead of having a proper lunch one day).

Duck and potato dish in France

Tamaki hand roll in Japan
(we didn't like the curry sauce)

Bacon maple cupcake
(we were optimistic, obviously, but it turned
out that this was really gross!)

Shrimp and grits--our favorite!

School bread in Norway (from their regular
bakery, not a special kiosk)

Salmon tartare on a cheddar chive biscuit in England.
I also had an excellent lemongrass iced tea.

WDW Boardwalk and Downtown Disney

In addition to the four major parks, there are two other areas to explore, no admission tickets required: the Boardwalk and Downtown Disney. We skipped both of these areas on our last trip, so I was excited to check them out again.

We didn't spend long at the Boardwalk, which is mostly shops and restaurants, because we were really just passing through on our way to play mini-golf (more on that later). It was pretty quiet there in the morning, but I imagine there's a lot more happening at night. Still, it was a nice place to take a few pics. After mini-golf, we walked back through, took some more pics, and caught a boat over to Epcot, which is pretty nearby.

On the boat...slow but scenic 

in the Boardwalk Resort

At Downtown Disney, there's also a lot of shops, including the huge World of Disney store and the Lego store, which has some awesome Lego sculptures.

our favorite Lego sculpture

one of these things is not like the others....

There are also restaurants, an indoor theme park called Quest, and a venue for Cirque de Soleil. And, we could travel to and from Downtown Disney and our hotel by boat, which we did once at night and once during the day.

the blue building is Quest; the white is Cirque de Soleil

on the boat

We set aside a few hours one day to go to Quest, which we'd never done before. Unfortunately, the second "attraction" we did there (a virtual reality thing) made us both feel awful, so although we tried a few other things, we didn't feel well enough to stay, and we completely lost interest, even in the arcade-style games that Mark probably would have enjoyed if he hadn't been so queasy! In the end, we decided that this wasn't worth doing again!

However, I would like to go back to Downtown Disney to spend more time exploring the shops, and to see how the current construction/transition to "Disney Springs" turns out. We decided that if we do another long trip, we might not buy park tickets for our first day, and we could instead spend that time exploring our hotel and visiting Downtown Disney to stroll, shop, and have dinner. (I think this is what we did on the trip that my Grandparents hosted in 2007, actually).

This might also be the place to mention the water parks. Disney World has two: Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon. We spent one morning at Typhoon Lagoon, which was Mark's first water park experience. Thanks to a swim shirt and sunscreen, he didn't get sunburned at all! :-) We had fun, but we didn't take our camera, so there are no pictures to share. If you want to get an idea of what it looks like, this blog has some nice photos. Going in the morning was a great idea--we didn't wait in any lines, and we were able to have a full afternoon/evening doing other things.

WDW Parades

In general, I'd say that Mark and I aren't huge fans of parades. However, the parades at Disney World, like so many other things, are in a category of their own. Still, there were only two parades we scheduled time to go see, both at the Magic Kingdom: the Main Street Electrical Parade and the new Festival of Fantasy Parade.

We saw the Main Street Electrical Parade on our first night there, arriving early to secure a good spot to view the parade and fireworks. We had fond memories of the previous evening parade, SpectroMagic, so we were excited. Unfortunately, we both felt like the current parade (actually a resurrection of an older one) isn't as good as SpectroMagic; it must have a big following because of nostalgia. Also, it had really annoying music, which never sits well with Mark. Still, it's pretty impressive to see the number of lights used to create the floats.

The Festival of Fantasy parade just started this year, and we were all set to watch it one afternoon, but it got rained out. I do have this one picture from our first day, when we arrived to the park just as the parade was ending.

While we were a bit disappointed that the big parade was cancelled because of the weather, our consolation prize was this rainy day cavalcade:

We also happened to catch part of Mickey's Jammin' Jungle Parade at the Animal Kingdom. This was a bit inconvenient, because we had to slowly follow the parade with a big crowd of people in order to get where we were going. But since this parade will be retired sometime this year, I guess it was good to see some of it.

WDW Fireworks

There are three big fireworks/evening shows at Disney World:

• Wishes at the Magic Kingdom
• IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth at Epcot
• Fantasmic! at Hollywood Studios

Since we had a longer trip this year, we decided that we'd like to see each show twice, and that's just what we did! After seeing them all again, I had to agree with Mark that Fantasmic! is the best, followed by Wishes, especially now that they've added Celebrate the Magic before and after. I still enjoy Illuminations, too, of course!

It's really hard to get quality photos of fireworks, but our new camera does have a setting designed for it, which at least allowed me to snap a few that weren't totally blurry! 

Here are some shots from IllumiNations. In this show, they set up barges all around the World Showcase Lagoon, including a lighted globe that spins and opens up during the show. There are fireworks, water effects, and lasers, all set to music. 

Technically, Wishes and Celebrate the Magic are two separate shows, but they happen close together, with Cinderella Castle as the focal point. We'd seen Wishes before, but this year our goal was to watch from in front of the castle. One of our longest waits for anything was on our first night there, when we staked out a place to watch the evening parade and fireworks. It turns out that this was a great place to watch the new Celebrate the Magic show. It's a bit hard to describe, but basically, they use the castle like a canvas and project different scenes and effects on it. There's music, too, and a few fireworks. It was one of my favorite things from this trip. The Wishes fireworks show has a little bit of a story line, narrated by Jiminy Cricket. The fireworks can be seen from lots of places in the park, as well as some of the nearby hotels. I think watching the fireworks from the flagpole on Main Street was really great. The pictures below show some of the fireworks from Wishes, but I was so mesmerized by Celebrate the Magic that I didn't take any photos. Here's Disney's description and a decent YouTube video.

Fantasmic!, though, is in a category of its own! It's really much more than fireworks; there are water effects, characters, boats, fire, and music, all telling an epic good vs. evil story. Of course, Mickey wins! Again, here's Disney's description and a YouTube video.

Overall, these evening events are some of the best highlights from the trip. 

WDW Characters

One of the unique activities at WDW is meeting the beloved Disney characters. While this isn't a particular highlight for Mark and me, we did have a few character encounters during our trip.

There are a few main ways to see characters:
--at designated times/places for character greetings
--at a character meal
--by chance as characters move through the park
--in parades (more on that in another post)

We had a few chance encounters, like seeing these two from the Jungle Book at the Animal Kingdom:

Toward the end of the trip, I decided to visit Princess Fairy Tale Hall at the Magic Kingdom, which had caught our attention throughout because of the ridiculous wait times to meet Anna and Elsa from Frozen (by ridiculous, I mean 300 minutes! We couldn't believe that people would actually do this, but they did...). Anyway, one evening, we saw a 10 minute wait to meet Rapunzel and Cinderella, and Mark was willing to go along and take my picture.

Some of the character meeting times are outdoors, so you can spot the characters and snap a quick pic without having to wait in line, like I did here with Cinderella's stepmother and sisters.

But our main character experience was the Star Wars Character Dinner at Hollywood and Vine in Hollywood Studios. Originally, we booked a meal at this restaurant in order to get the Fantasmic! Dining Package (basically seats in a reserved section for the evening show at the park). Later, the park announced that they'd be offering this character dining experience as part of the Star Wars weekends events. We were really interested in the dining package, so we decided to go ahead and keep the reservation. Unfortunately, we found that the food (a buffet) was underwhelming at best, the restaurant was noisy and a bit disorganized, the service was slow, and the whole thing was way overpriced (nearly $150!). However, we did get some cute pics with the classic Disney characters in their Star Wars costumes, plus a few professional photos of the characters on their own. In the end, I think we decided that character dining isn't really our thing, but for anyone who is really into meeting characters, it's a nice way to do it (no waiting in line!).