Friday May 5th 2023

The nice weather continued today. The only change was the wind direction. It is now out of the east bringing a little more moisture off the Atlantic Ocean. The temperature peaked in the upper eighties.

My day began with some grocery shopping and ended with a trip to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Overall it was a very busy day filled with traffic. I left my RV home just before 4PM with a plan to get to the Magic Kingdom in time to watch the 5PM Flag Retreat Ceremony in font of the railroad station on Main Street. It is only about 16 miles to the parking lot, but I didn’t take construction and traffic into my calculation. The best routes have ongoing construction. I made it to the parking lot by 5PM, but it took another twenty minutes to get across the Seven Seas Lagoon to the Magic Kingdom. The ceremony had just ended when I arrived.

Crowds were much better today than Monday. The wait times were all significantly less. I got to ride some of the more popular rides with reasonable wait times. Peter Pans Flight was listed at 50 minutes, but was a bit less. Haunted Mansion was thirty minutes. Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin was twenty minutes early in the evening and only ten just before the fireworks, so I rode it twice. The Journey of the Little Mermaid was listed at twenty minutes, but it was a walk on. Walking the entire length of the queue without stopping took more than a couple of minutes, but it was a lot shorter than twenty minutes.

I watched the fireworks from behind Cinderella castle. It doesn’t give you the whole light show on the buildings and the perfect framing of the fireworks above the castle, but it is much less crowded. You are actually surrounded by fireworks. The small stuff close to the castle is on one side of you and the big aerial bombs are in the other.

The trip home from the Magic Kingdom took longer than trip to the kingdom. The big hold up was getting to the parking lot. The lines for the monorail and ferry boats were both long. I can only imagine how bad it would have been right after the fireworks. I waited close to an hour before I departed.