Araminta18
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2016
Goodbye Art of Animation, Hello Magic Kingdom! - Monday, August 14, 2023 (part 1)
It was checkout day at Art of Animation - goodbye to the Skyliner! But I wasn't sad because we were moving to the Contemporary. Super bougie.
I got up at 7 and was ready to try for a Tron boarding group, but my stupid phone blacked out right at 7 am (i have the brightness turned all the way down in the mornings; normally my phone display will dim after 20 seconds and then turn off after 30 seconds, but when the brightness is all the way down I don't have that visual signal that the screen is gonna turn off). AAAAH! Definitely panicking! I did still manage to get a boarding group (BG 75), but I wasn't sure if it would be called before I had to go to my class, so I bought a fastpass for Tron (for 11:05), as well as one for Seven Dwarves Mine Train. No Genie+ for us today, since I was going to be in class and Trevor was ok without it.
We packed up and were ready to head out by 8:15, but when we called Bell Services to see if they could bring us a luggage cart (cause we were soooooo far away from the main building) they basically said nope, tough luck. So rather than have someone (let's be real, Trevor ) do the 15/20 minute roundtrip to get the luggage cart and bring it back, we (me) just decided to grab the bags and walk them to the front.
But! We got super lucky - there was a luggage cart just hanging out right by the elevator, on the ground floor (we were on the third), so we got to use that.
Trudging to the front.
We got there, dropped off our bags at Bell Services for them to be transferred over, said a last goodbye to the Art of Animation...
Love that gorgeous chandelier!
And then off to the bus stop to head to Magic Kingdom! The plan was to do the morning at Magic Kingdom and then head over to the Contemporary for lunch before I had to check in for my class. So off to the bus stop we headed; we were on a bus by 8:40am and were on our way!
Someone was having a bad day though - right near the MK we passed a car crash. I hope everyone was ok!
We got dropped off a little after 9 am, and made our way through the MUCH NICER security checkpoints - seriously, the new security is SO much nicer. Love it.
Then we found these lines at the tapstiles...which makes sense, the park opened at 9, we were getting there just slightly after...it's our own problem, really.
I once again picked the slower line, but it was still only about 5 minutes. Not too bad! And then we were inside!
The Dapper Dans were just finishing up their set...oh well!
Love them, even if we did miss most of it (almost entirely all of it).
We didn't really have a plan, so we just started meandering over to Haunted Mansion. Cause why not?
Look at that pretty castle, with the Mickey pumpkins!
We found a photographer there by the bridge, and got some pictures.
I like this new magic shot with Naveen - fun!
Over at Haunted Mansion, it was posting at 15 minute wait, so of course we hopped in line!
I grabbed this pic of Tom Sawyer Island while walking through the queue. It was a walkon, as it should be that time of the morning.
We had a great ride with the ghosts, as always.
I took a couple clips.
And for our ride photo, we decided to do the tea party.
I appreciate how Trevor leans into it.
As we left, they had a photographer out in front so of course we had to stop.