Disney Day 3--Epcot

Our third park day was Epcot.  We took our time getting ready and arrived a little after park opening.  We went on a few rides, and then had a late breakfast/early lunch at Akershus.

Choosing our character meals was hard.  Originally I really wanted to eat at the Bon Voyage breakfast (coming up tomorrow!), but we could not get reservations.  So when I saw an opening for one at Akershus, I snagged it!  It had 5 princesses, so it was the next best thing.  Later when I got the Bon Voyage breakfast, I fully intended on cancelling this one.  But for some reason I just could not let it go...  Almost all of the character meals have a set price.  It's usually around $60 for an adult and $30ish for a kid.  You are paying for the food, but you are also paying for the character interaction and the experience.  I had budgeted out all of our meals ahead of time and had more than enough gift cards to cover everything.  So at the last minute I decided to keep it.  Once in a lifetime, right!

We packed our lunches and ate breakfast in our room so that we could splurge on things like this.  Balance!

Here's another tip--you may be wondering why some of my pictures are way higher quality than others.  Disney offers something called a photo pass, and you can pay for a Memory maker.  It's where you can have access to all of the pictures they take and link to your magic band.  It costs around $150 if you do it over a month before you go.  Otherwise it's close to $200.  But you can share this with other people, as long as they are going to be there within the same 30 days as you.  I ended up having 2 friends from the Bump that were there roughly the same time as us. We all split it, and I got hundreds and hundreds of pictures for around $50.

We met Ariel 3 different times!

By doing these breakfasts, we were able to meet a lot of the characters and get signatures and not have to wait in the long lines.

Snow white was so good!

We left breakfast and went on the Frozen ride, which was really cool.

Baymax!

We spent the majority of the day riding rides and going to shows.  We didn't get to the World Showcase until later in the evening.

We stumbled upon Jasmine right before 8 when she was to be done.

Since she was almost done for the day, the line was short.  She just sat right down with the kids and read her page out of autograph book to them. She, of course, added her two cents to it...

I am telling you, those chubby cheeks and dimples won the week!

Using their Tinkerbell gifts of notebooks and a fun pen while they waited.  We also added fun blue LED lights to our stroller.  (We already had them, so I just threw them in our bag!)

We were there on the very last day of Food and Wine Festival.  Michael and I tried a few little things to eat.  Olivia really wanted sushi!

The line for Elsa and Anna was long all day, so we waited until the very end.  It still said 30 minutes, but we didn't have a choice at that point.  Luckily, it was much quicker than the 30 minutes posted.

I'll go ahead and say, we experienced a lot of magic while on our vacation.  There were so many over the top good character interactions that met or exceeded our expectations.  Elsa was not one of them.  Lets just say she took her role as Ice Queen a little too seriously.  She was my least favorite.  It was quick, not very friendly, and uninspiring.  It felt like she didn't want to be there.

Granted, it was the end of the day.  She was probably ready to be done.  And my kids didn't know the difference.  But I will say that the local 17 year old who dresses up as Elsa is HANDS DOWN a better option.  She looks more like her, even.

We didn't have a fast pass for Soarin', so we waited until the end of the night.  Logan wasn't all enough, so we had to get a rider swap.  Michael and Olivia had to wait in line for a bit.  It took so long that the park actually closed and they were still somewhere back on the ride.  As the cast members were roping the area off, I asked what happens if you have a rider switch for the ride but the park closes.  Are you just out of luck?  They said, no, that if I had a rider switch I could still ride.  They said they try to honor the fact that a family member had to wait and couldn't ride.  Michael and Olivia came out at 9:10.  They let Olivia and I go back in. It was literally just Olivia, myself, another mom and her daughter who also had a rider switch.  They told us they would give us the best seats in the house.  How fun!  These are the kind of things that sets Disney apart!

After our day at Epcot we headed to our new place to stay, which was Wyndham Bonnet Creek.  It was a two bedroom, two bathroom condo with full kitchen.  It was so nice and big.  The kids loved it!