Leah’s birthday eve!
We started the day off at Magic Kingdom, on a lovely Florida winter day.
Leah rode Space Mountain for the first time after a very tense decision made in the ride queue. She asked us to hold onto her during the ride, which made for an incredibly awkward ride photo lol. Aly rode the TTA and got a hot chocolate while we were on Space.
After that, Leah and I rode Goofy’s Barnstormer, then we watched Philharmagic and headed over to Pirates.
After lunch at Pecos Bill’s, I took Leah over to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad so she could see it and decide if she wanted to ride it later.
Then we rode Pooh, followed by the TTA, where Leah asked to have one side to herself. We obliged, squishing ourselves in the other seat.
From there, we rode the monorail back to MK parking and drove over to Epcot.
The park wasn’t very busy, so we rode Spaceship Earth, saw a cool Muppets robot, then did the Seas, The Land, and Soarin’ in short order, before heading over to Test Track for our first Epcot FP of the day.
We then had a lovely dinner at Rose & Crown in the UK section of Epcot. Even though it was freezing at this point, we were seated in an outside area that had heavy plastic curtains to mostly insulate us from the wind, and heaters above us that made everything very red.
Three of us had the excellent potato leek soup, I had a great burger, Rachel had Bubbles & Squeak, and Aly had a puff pastry with lamb and potato filling. Our server was from Edinburgh and she was charming. Great time all around.
From there, we were off to the Japan store to buy some more Hi-Chew and a few early birthday presents for Leah, then we had a FP for Soarin’ to close out the night.
As I mentioned, it was very cold at this point, so the park was fairly empty. As we made our way around World Showcase, all the Photopass photographers were standing around with no lines, so we hit a bunch of them for goofy pictures.
We were hoping the Frozen Ever After ride line would be short, because it had still been 90 minutes while we were at dinner. It said 30 minutes and we decided to chance it, which was great because it was only about 10 minutes.
We just missed getting on a second time, because it was 9:01, but that meant the start of the Illuminations nighttime show while we walked back towards the front of the park. Leah wanted to stay and watch, so we did, from the area near the Baby Center, which is a great spot for viewing.
Leah wanted a picture with Figment to close out the night, so we grabbed that and headed out to the car.
9.7 miles walked on this day, and the overnight low of 30 degrees making us a bit worried about what time Leah was going to make us swim tomorrow on her birthday.
