Thursday November 17th 2022

Today’s weather was a dramatic change. The sun was shining bright, but the temperature only climbed to the low sixties. It was more than ten degrees cooler than Wednesday and closer to fifteen degrees cooler than the average over the last couple of weeks.

I slept in this morning. My visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom yesterday was tiring. It involved a lot of hurry up and wait type activities. The heavy crowds drove wait times up to very high levels and even the non ride activities like watching the parade and the fireworks required a lot of waiting.

I arrived at the park around 1PM and made my way down Main Street checking out the decorations. The Halloween decorations I saw less than three weeks ago were all replaced by Christmas decorations. The town square area was dominated by a huge Christmas Tree. Scarecrows were replaced by wooden soldiers and Micky Jack-o-lanterns became big green wreathes with big red bows on all the lamp posts. It was a very festively decorated.

The Jungle Cruise ride is “replaced” by the Jingle Cruise ride this time of year. I waited in line for about eighty minutes to see what the Holiday overlay is all about. Perhaps if the wait was shorter it would have been more enjoyable. Disney has added Christmas lights and decorations to most of the structures along the ride. The decorations fit in well and the boat skippers weave them into the story. The skippers also add a Christmas element to their puns and comedy. It wasn’t bad, just not great.

The Enchantment Fireworks show was at 8:15PM. The crowd was two thirds of the way down Main Street when I locked in a spot to watch the parade at 7:30PM. I didn’t move more than six inches until the show was over more than an hour later. People completely unaware of their surroundings tried to push and bump me out of my place more times than I could count, but I made it through the show. It is really nice show and I was in a very good place.

After the fireworks many people left the park. I pushed through the crowds deeper into the park. It was open until 11PM. Most of the ride wait times had not improved. I got a chance to ride the People Mover with only a twenty minute wait, but other rides still had waits in excess of sixty minutes. Even some of the theater style attractions were backed up.

After the People Mover, the cold temperature got to me. The temperature was in the sixties and I had a short sleeve shirt. Earlier in the evening I looked to buy a sixty dollar sweatshirt, but I couldn’t find any in the correct size that weren’t pink or adorned with a character graphic I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing. It was time to head home.

Getting home was another adventure. The waits for the ferryboat or the monorail were long. I finally got on the second ferryboat across the Seven Seas Lagoon. My next adventure was finding my car. It wasn’t where I thought I parked it. Luckily, I always take a picture of the row number when I park. My memory said I parked in row 316, but the picture said it was 314. Grey vehicles in dimly lit parking lots become invisible two rows away.

For my trip home I took yet another route. Traffic was some of the worse I’ve seen leaving the Disney World area. I couldn’t get across four lines of traffic to take a left turn onto a road I knew was going to be plugged with traffic because of construction. I went further west before turning south adding five to ten miles to my trip home. It was after 11PM when I got home. It was a fun, but exhausting day.