Monday 12/28
Our Monday started with a suit fitting for the two groomsmen (I had made Evan's suit knowing nothing in their stock would ever fit him). Once the guys showed up "fashionable late" to the fitting, Evan and I ran over to Franc's to drop off some last minute items.
We had asked about getting tickets at our hotel, but they said for any discounts we would have to do it at the gate. So, Evan and I got our free annual passes when we got back to MK and waited on the others to arrive. Now, I knew that there was some sort of wedding discount, but not much else. And the hotel had told me the parks could do that. We also had AAA , military, and DVC. I thought that somewhere in that arsenal we'd get a discount. Nope. Wedding had to be done through Franc's (we were just there!), military was only good every day but the holidays, and AAA & DVC were only annual passes or something of the sort. Of course, it took the guy at the counter forever to explain/understand all of this. But eventually we made it in and I managed to pull our bridal party through Magic Kingdom. I think we hit every ride we wanted to except Space Mountain. The crowd was really bad that day, and by the time we got around to that side the Fast Pass was 11 pm. We got them, just in case, but we were way too tired to come back that late. On top of that, our entire wedding week was not more than 55 for a high, and we were all freezing at night! I kept making/receiving wedding phone calls all day. Most were from the Roots: apparently Jensey had an issue with her leg and was on crutches! So, Nathan managed to find another photographer to work with him. I was disappointed, but I think Jensey was more so! (It all turned out wonderfully in the end, of course!). We were also trying to set up an engagement shoot since this was the only time Evan had been down there to do it! It ended up being a honeymoon shoot really.
I think the park cleared out after the 3 o'clock parade. Evan and I left at that point to go back to the room to change for dinner. Transportation was running extremely slow for some reason, so it was actually fortunate that my mother mixed up our O'hana's reservations and thought it was an hour earlier than planned. We all barely made there on time!
The rest of the bridal party stayed in the park for a bit longer, then took the monorail over to the Poly. My mother and the rest of my family left from the Beach Club and took almost an hour to get there. Evan and I took even longer since we seemed to have the cursed bus trip.
We were waiting outside at the bus stop in the freezing cold (I had made a hawaiian '50s style dress thinking it would be warmer) for about 20 minutes. Two buses for MK finally pulled up at the same time. One was unloading a wheelchair and a lot of people, so we grabbed what we hoped would be the quicker of the two. Well, last minute we had to load a
scooter (no big deal, just adding on to time). We no more than got up to the stop sign after taking off, then the bus begins to beep/screech at us. Apparently there's a problem with tire pressure or something. We sit on the bus for ten minutes until he backs up and lets us off at the bus stop again. I'm not sure if the beeping or the cold was less pleasant. They call another bus, we go through the loading process again and finally take off more than forty minutes after we got the bus stop. We did make it on time to dinner, by about two minutes. Of course, the whole thing was terribly frustrating. Things like that never happen when were just going to a park- only when there's a reservation!
Moving past that, dinner was wonderful. Everyone loved the food and my BMs and I got to get up and learn the hula. The ukulele guy even played us a special song! We had things timed to see the MK fireworks as well. The only problem was that our waitress forgot the bread until we prompted her half-way through the meal. And my family has a not so small bread obsession, so we really wanted it!
We all changed back into warmer clothes at the Poly before heading back to our hotel (we had brought them just in case we went back into MK). It was late and cold, so we just hung out in the rooms instead. I kinda wish it had been warmer, since I wanted to go see the holiday Wishes show, but I really couldn't disagree with them about it too much!