Disney World trip

We took our 2nd trip to Disney World, Orlando, Florida in December 2019 after 8 years. I was not too sure about going back to the same place since I prefer visiting new places, but we did end up having a great time. This post is about our Disney World trip, which was so much fun!

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Our Disney World vacation was planned and finalized less than 2 weeks before the winter break. Since we love taking road trips, driving was no issue but as we started looking for fast pass options for the Disney World theme park rides, we realized that visitors plan their trip 6 months to 12 months in advance! Wow, we really didn’t know that. We enjoy traveling but seldom our vacations are planned more than a month in advance:) Oh well…

We got our SUV loaded and packed the night before, but of course, we had the last-minute additions and were ready to head out at 5:30 am on Dec 24. Now, this is early for us, really early; but we had made up our mind to get the best use of time so we can actually enjoy the 7 days we had planned at the Disney World resort visiting all of the 4 parks. We reached our resort at around 8:30 pm, with a couple of breaks in between for getting lunch & filling gas. We went to bed early after dinner, as we had planned for an early next day at the Animal Kingdom.

We used the Magic Hour at Animal Kingdom from 7 am -8 am on the 25th, Christmas Day, and used that time for the Avatar ride. It was worth waking up early, and also the line was short. We enjoyed other rides at the Animal Kingdom park including DINOSAUR, Expedition Everest, It’s tough to be a bug, Kilimanjaro Safaris, and Na’vi river journey. Our favorite ride for the 1st day was a tie between Avatar and the safari. The lunch options were vegetarian meals every day for us and there was no issue finding as there are lots of eatery and restaurants inside all the parks. We ended the day by eating dinner at the resort, which had a good dining option.

26th Dec was spent in Epcot. We watched the Disney and Pixar short film festival, and the rides we did included Living with the land Mission: SPACE, Project tomorrow, Soarin’ around the world, Spaceship earth and Test track. Epcot is a fun place to be, and I took pictures in front of the Spaceship Earth sphere that serves as the symbolic structure of the sphere, to compare them to the pics from Dec 2011 when we had last visited!

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) World Showcase features 11 “pavilions” themes where you can satisfy your taste buds by trying different dining experiences and attractions. We took the ferry boat to go to the other side, but it is totally doable on foot if you want to explore more. It is difficult to choose our favorite ride at Epcot as they are all equally good!

The next 2 days 27 & 28 were spent at Hollywood Studios where we did multiple rides: Rock n’ roller coaster, Alien swirling saucers, Millennium falcon, Slinky dog dash, Star tours, Toy story mania, and Twilight story mania. Our comparison pictures:)

The next park was our favorite- Magical Kingdom. We spent the last 3 days 29, 30 & 31st exploring the many attractions it offers and did few rides multiple times. The fast pass was handy and helpful in all the parks we visited, but especially the Magic Kingdom as none of our ride lines were longer than 30 minutes! The rides included the Astro orbiter, The barnstormer, Big thunder mountain railroad, Buzz lightyear’s space ranger spin, Country bear jamboree, Dumbo the flying elephant, The hall of presidents, Haunted mansion, Jungle cruise, Liberty square riverboat, Mad tea party, The magic carpets of Aladdin, The many adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Mickey’s PhilharMagic and Monsters, inc. laugh floor. Our kids are 16 & 12, and we did all the rides together as a family! We also did shopping at Disney Springs, it has quite few outlets and great options for clothing as well as souvenir shopping.

The Magic Kingdom castle looks indeed magical at night, and around New Year time it was more breathtaking. We enjoying the NY fantasy in the sky fireworks on both the evenings as well as on NY eve. After welcoming the new year 2020 at midnight, we headed back to our last night at the resort. We left on Jan 1st at 7 am and were back at our sweet home by 9 pm.

We had booked the resort and our theme park passes through a travel agent just like the last time and we had a good experience. Overall it was a wonderful family vacation, a well-deserved break for all of us!

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