Whitney Writes...: about our Disney day trip (part 1)

Warning: this post is long and full of pictures and Disney things you may not care about. Feel free to skip.

Disney World.

It's funny to me that one time when I was little girl, I actually cried when my parents said we were going to Disney World. That might be a good Friday Flashback story for this week.

I think you all know by now that Aaron and I love Disney. Anything Disney, almost.

I mean, we aren't fans of any of the "Buddies" movies or the eyesore that is Home on the Range. Nothing like that.

But, anything else that Disney puts it's name on is basically gold, we think.

And Disney World is in our top five favorite places to be together. As often as we can go, within reason, we go.

Especially before we have kids.

We totally have a Disney budget. Hey, one day, we might not be able to. We might as well while we can.

You might think we're crazy, but we can name bigger Disney fanatics than us. It's all relative, right?!

So, anyway, since we were within two hours of Disney World, we made a plan to pay a visit to our friend Mickey Mouse.

Now, Disney World is actually home to four theme parks. You can splurge for the park hopper and visit all four in one day, but we opted not to fork over the extra money. Besides, we've both agreed on our favorite park. It took me a year to convince Aaron, but he's finally sided with me.

It's The Magic Kingdom for us.

In order to make the drive and money and day worth it, we woke up at 4:30am on July 3rd to make the trek to Orlando from Homosassa. Now, you might be thinking, July 3rd?! Isn't that the busiest day of the whole year?! Because that's what we were thinking! The crowd tracker that Disney has online said that Magic Kingdom was predicting a crowd level of 9.6 out of 10. We figured it was going to be insane. But, oh well.

When we saw this:

We didn't care about crowds.

We drove into the Magic Kingdom about 45 minutes before it opened. Then we parked and took the Monorail to the entrance wearing our excited faces. And sparkly Minnie ears in my case.

We were pleasantly surprised that the crowd out front was dare-we-say small. We tried not to get our hopes up though. We watched the opening show, and waited in anticipation for the gates to open.

The guy we bought our tickets from thought we seemed so happy to be there that he gave us "I'm Celebrating!" buttons. It often presented a problem though since we weren't really celebrating anything. Our answer when asked varied between "Disney World!," "The opening of Lone Ranger since it came out that day, and "You, of course!"

When the gates opened, we hurried down Main Street, USA, and rounded the corner to a sight that just never gets old.

Like any smart Magic Kingdom go-ers would do, we made a beeline for Tomorrowland to go to Space Mountain. We walked right on with no wait. That seemed easy enough, but we were still counting on chaos to start at any minute.

In space...

We left Space Mountain and decided we should make our way to Fantasyland on our way to Splash Mountain, eventually. Splash Mountain was closed when we were there in January, so we wanted to make sure we rode it this time.

Before we left Tomorrowland, we noticed that the Speedway was without a line and we had never done it before due to long lines. We hopped on.

The park was still not crowded at all. We made our way through Fantasyland, hitting all the rides we cared about.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Peter Pan's Flight

We got to do Enchanted Tales with Belle for the first time.

Aaron got selected to play a soldier...

So he got his picture with Belle...

And a cool bookmark sourvenir.

Under the Sea: Voyage of the Little Mermaid

Prince Charming's Regal Carousel

It was time for lunch after that, so we went to our new favorite Disney restaurant, Be Our Guest.

And then before we left Fantasyland, we had one more stop at Mickey's PhilharMagic.

Leaving Fantasyland, we saw another new thing since January.

I love Tangled.

We passed The Haunted Mansion, and seeing the wait said 5 minutes, we hopped in line. We were really starting to get excited how absolutely easy the day was so far.