Memories, Magic Kingdom, and Memorial Day

I know I have missed a few days on the blog. But as you know both of my sons are getting married {within 3 weeks of each other} and my baby girl is graduating from high school! Whew! We are one crazy bunch around here right now. We had wedding number one last weekend, graduation this weekend, and wedding number two in 2 weeks! However, all that has not stopped us from visiting our favorite place – Walt Disney World!

Many people kept telling us we were nuts for going on Memorial Day. I kept hearing people say the crowds would be crazy and very long lines. But we are troopers and had made plans to make this visit a celebration of my baby girls graduation. Therefore I pose the question is it too busy to go to Walt Disney World on Memorial Day?

My baby girl – a true princess

While driving to Disney I always check my app from touringplans.com which tells me which park is the best to visit and which park is the one to avoid that day. It also gives a crowd level rating with 10 being the most packed.

Here is a screen shot of yesterday I took to show you what it looks like. It’s a great app. You can use it even more to plan your trip and get wait times by subscribing with them for a year. {More info here}

Touringplans.com screen shot

According to the app Magic Kingdom was the best park to visit that day however it reported the crowd level was a 10 out of 10 so we prepared ourselves to do only a few rides we really wanted to do and to be content with that.

Upon entering the park my grandson gets excited because he thinks the monorail is a ride. He calls it the monorail train! I believe it is because of the Disney Junior show Chuggington. This “ride” is one of his favorites and he was especially excited with our monorail because it was wrapped for the new Iron Man 3 Movie! To him we were riding the Iron Man monorail train at that point and he was so excited!

Excited as we boarded the “Monorail Train”

Once in the park we noticed that the crowd level did not seem too bad! We headed straight back to the new Fantasyland to do a few rides there. To our surprise there was not even a line for Dumbo! Disney now has two Dumbo rides however a nice feature is the new air conditioned playground which sits under the Big Top Tent! This is a way to pass the time while waiting. When you enter a cast member gives you a pager which alerts you as to when its your turn to get in the line towards boarding the Dumbo ride. We however did not even have to stop at the playground but went right through and waited just long enough for those in front of us to finish their ride! Quick indeed!

Entering the Big Top Tent at Dumbo’s playground

We did end up getting to ride everything in the new Fantasyland including the new Under the Sea ~ Journey of the Little Mermaid which is an enclosed ride on a “clamshell” which carries you through Ariel’s underwater realm moving you through scenes featuring the characters and songs from the 1989 movie. We all really enjoyed this new attraction. {We did FastPass this attraction}

Ariel on the outside of the ride

All day long the crowd level never really seemed to grow, or at least it was not unbearable. We never waited longer than 20 mins to ride any of the rides and the ones which had a longer wait time we were able to use our FastPass for the Peter Pan and Buzz Lightyear rides. At the end of the day I had counted up that we had rode on over 20 rides plus saw the Celebrate a Dream Come True parade at 3PM and the Main Street Electrical Parade at 9PM! We finished our day off with the great fireworks show which my grandson and daughter sat right in the middle of the street in Liberty Square {That’s how low the crowd level was!} When we were ready to leave after the fireworks {even though the park closed at 11PM} there was the line! People trying to get on the monorail to leave was a very, very long line. However, it did seem to keep moving! It did take us longer in that line than anything we did all day long.

All in all it was a wonderful Memorial Day at the Magic Kingdom! Would I go on Memorial Day again – YES! The crowd level really was not bad and the only thing which we were disappointed about was not being able to find my daughter the Mickey Graduation Ears she wanted; they were completely sold out in the park and she was disappointed. But what a great celebration we had!

A really great free app from Disney is the new Story app  which gathers your special pictures and video moments and helps you transform them into stories that are easy to personalize, save and share. Take a look at mine here!

Today I am also linking up with Mouse House Memories at TheMomMaven.com

Thanks for stopping by today and as Mickey says, “See you real soon!”

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