Walt Disney World

Favorites From the New Skipper Canteen Restaurant at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom

Skipper Canteen Restaurant

Just a quick update today… I finally got around to eating at the new Skipper Canteen Restaurant in the Magic Kingdom last week. I found the food and the service good.

I will, however, confess that the attempts at “skipper humor” by the staff sometimes left me feeling a bit awkward in the small-audience setting of guests sitting at a single table. (Somehow you can just cringe at the skipper’s jokes when you’re in the larger setting of the Jungle Cruise ride itself. But when your waiter is looking right at you expecting a reaction to his corny joke, you sort of feel obligated to laugh, even if you’re still just cringing inside.)

At any rate, I was able to share lunch with Josh at easyWDW, and I’m sure he’ll be posting much better pictures than my lame cell phone pictures below, along with a more full review.

However, in the spirit of the Jungle Cruise from which the restaurant’s theme is taken, I WANT TO POINT OUT A FEW OF MY FAVORITE DISHES:

Skipper Canteen Restaurant Appetizer

This one.

Skipper Canteen Restaurant Appetizer II

Here’s another.

Skipper Canteen Restaurant Dish

And this.

…

Now… PLEASE GET OFF MY BLOG.

Magic Kingdom Fifteen Attractions Before 2:00pm — Follow Along LIVE Tuesday on Periscope

I had enough fun earlier this week using Periscope briefly to live-stream a ride on Expedition Everest, that I thought I’d next try something a little more ambitious.

So, in that spirit, I’ve created a Magic Kingdom RideMax plan for Tuesday, January 19th, that should allow me to visit fifteen attractions by 2:00pm. More significantly, I plan to live stream the entire visit on Periscope. I’ll have my extra phone batteries (and leg muscles) ready to go bright and early Tuesday morning for park opening.

What is it that appeals to me about Periscope for this? Three things, really.

First, Periscope will allow me to show off this RideMax plan in a real-time setting. And since it’s a *live* video, you know that what you see is what you get.

Second, I expect to keep broadcasting even as I’m walking from one attraction to the next, and while I’m standing in line. And although if everything works out the lines should be fairly short, if anyone viewing the broadcast has questions you’d like to ask over Periscope during this lull between rides, I’ll try and answer what I can as I’m moving about the park.

Finally, I’d like to be able to share some of my favorite tips for visiting some of the attractions, and live video seems ideal for doing this.

If you want to join in but don’t want to spend all day watching for your favorite attraction, here is the plan I intend to follow, and yes, I already have those FP+ reservations lined up:

MagicKingdom15Rides

As you can see, the day begins with what might be the ultimate rope-drop challenge in all of Disney’s theme parks, visiting the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. I’ll try to show you how I navigate the crowds for this to (hopefully) end up near the front of the line. That 10-minute estimate may look optimistic, but it all depends on how you make your way into the park, and hopefully the live-feed video can allow me to show that.

Looking at this plan you may be wondering if I plan to take a lunch break, and the answer is yes, sort of. I guess I’m cheating a bit by virtue of the fact that, based on the current weather forecast, I expect Tuesday to very cold, and that 31-minute estimated wait for Splash Mountain will instead be closer to 5 minutes. This should give me time for a lunch break somewhere in that timeline, probably right after Pirates.

I also decided I wouldn’t attempt to broadcast a ride on Space Mountain, as there wouldn’t be too much to see in the dark, so it’s omitted from the plan. In addition, Buzz Lightyear is scheduled to be closed for refurbishment, so that doesn’t leave us with much to see in Tomorrowland. Then again, I do have to admit that simultaneously driving and filming the Tomorrowland Speedway should be… interesting.

At any rate, if you want to join in the fun, be sure to follow me on Periscope. I’m new to “scoping” and don’t have a huge following there; this should make it easier to answer your questions as we hit those 15 rides.

I expect that the Magic Kingdom will open at roughly 8:45am, and I’ll start the scope just prior to that time.

I hope to see you on Tuesday!

Quick Postmortem for Animal Kingdom RideMax Roulette

DisneysAnimalKingdomDeVine

This is just a quick follow-up to my previous post from Tuesday’s round of RideMax Roulette at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. (And yes, I did meet DiVine, shown above, shortly after entering the park!)

For those who were wondering, Tuesday went really well in terms of low wait times and a decent touring plan. About the only downside was that I lost my prescription eyeglasses on Expedition Everest while trying to ride and simultaneously video stream the experience on Periscope. (I have to admit I thought it was fun to “scope” the ride, though, and I’ll have a longer follow-up post on Periscope later today or tomorrow.) All’s well that ends well, as Disney has found my specs and promised to put them in the mail today.

Anyway, as a recap, here’s the RideMax plan I followed Tuesday during this round of RideMax Roulette:

RideMaxRouletteDisneysAnimalKingdom

After seeing this plan, some of you may have been wondering about that second green line, the FP+ at Primeval Whirl. This was my second ride on that particular attraction, where I also began my day.

I’m guessing some of you were wondering if it wouldn’t have been faster and involve less walking to just do that second ride on Primeval Whirl right after the first one, rather than coming back to it later in the day?

And if you were thinking this, you’d be right.

This is a case where using FP+ actually *hurts* the overall efficiency of the plan. In fact, RideMax estimates that I’d save about eight minutes of walking (with a similar amount of waiting) if I just hit Primeval Whirl again the second time right at the top of the day, rather than using FP+ and coming back later.

One big reason that using FP+ for the second ride on Primeval Whirl is less efficient is that when you make your FP+ reservations, you’re forced to “space out” the reservations so that they don’t overlap, and RideMax knows about this restriction when it creates your plan. So, because I already had a FP+ for Dinosaur that ran from 9:05 to 10:05, the earliest time slot available for that second ride on Primeval Whirl was sometime *after* that.

There are a couple of lessons I draw from this.

First, it pays to play with your options in RideMax before settling on a final plan for the day (and this especially applies to your FP+ options).

Second, maybe you really *do* want to use the plan the way it’s outlined and use FP+ for that second ride on Primeval Whirl. Why would you do that? If you really do plan to leave the park as soon as the plan is finished, then you probably shouldn’t. If, however, you’re trying to get a fourth FastPass for the day and want to visit attractions after the formal plan is finished, it might make sense to follow the plan and “burn” that FP+ anyway. Remember, you can’t get those fourth (or fifth…) FP+ reservations until you’ve actually used your first three.

I hope this helps reinforce the idea that experimenting with options in RideMax is a good thing. And thanks again for following along on this latest round of RideMax Roulette!

RideMax Roulette Tuesday at Disney’s Animal Kingdom

RideMax Roulette at Disney's Animal Kingdom

I’m heading out tomorrow (Tuesday, January 12th) for another round of RideMax Roulette, this time at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Feel free to follow along as I send out live tweets and Facebook updates throughout the day. Who knows, I may even try out that Periscope thing for a ride on Expedition Everest or something. You can find me at the Periscope username @RideMax4Disney.

For those who’ve followed the blog for a while, you know that RideMax Roulette is a sort of game where I choose a set of attractions at random, and plug them into the RideMax optimizing software. I then take the resulting plan to the park to see how well it works out. Playing this game gives me a good chance to test the plans RideMax comes up with, as well as — quite frankly — forces me to visit attractions I might not otherwise be all that inclined to see.

One additional goal with tomorrow’s plan is to check out the new Pizzafari restaurant, something I haven’t done since it came out of refurbishment a little over a month or so ago. Josh over at easyWDW did a write-up on this recently, which has me intrigued.

My random number generator came up with the following list of attractions for tomorrow’s visit. I’ve listed these in alphabetical order:

Dinosaur
Dinosaur again (yes, we’re doing this one twice)
Discovery Island Trails
Expedition Everest
Finding Nemo, the Musical
Flights of Wonder
It’s Tough to Be a Bug
Maharajah Jungle Trek
Primeval Whirl
Primeval Whirl (yes, also twice — hopefully no barf-bag required)
TriceraTop Spin

This may seem like sort of a “softball” list of attractions, as I’m expecting tomorrow at Animal Kingdom to be fairly uncrowded. Tomorrow is a RideMax “recommended day” for Animal Kingdom, coming off an Extra Magic Hours morning day today. To make things even easier, Kilimanjaro Safaris didn’t even come up in the list of attractions I’ll be visiting. I decided to push ahead anyway. 🙂

For FastPass+ selections, I decided to tell RideMax I wanted to use FP+ at Dinosaur, Expedition Everest, and Primeval Whirl. I also plugged in a lunch break at Pizzafari, and RideMax came up with the following game plan for the day.

RideMaxRouletteDisneysAnimalKingdom

We’ll see how this actually works out in practice, but on paper, it looks pretty decent, with just an estimated 64-minute wait to visit 11 attractions, or just six minutes per attraction. Even if you take out the two zero-wait “walking” attractions — Discovery Island Trails and Maharajah Jungle Trek — the average wait is still just a hair above seven minutes each, and that assumes we arrive 20 minutes early to wait for Finding Nemo. Overall, this looks like a great day with very little wait.

Continuing on with the planning, as a further confirmation of my expectation of low crowds tomorrow, I didn’t have any trouble securing FP+ reservations at the times recommended by RideMax on this plan, even though I made the reservations this afternoon, just one day before my visit. Here’s a really big picture taken from my phone, just to emphasize the point (and because I’m too lazy to size it down lol):

AnimalKingdomFastPassPlus

Note that if I hadn’t been able to secure the FP+ reservation times shown in this RideMax plan, I would have used the new feature added recently to RideMax which allows me to specify the times at which I want to use my FP+ reservations, and had RideMax recalculate accordingly.

So, wish me luck on my quest tomorrow. Again, feel free to follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or (possibly) Periscope @RideMax4Disney. I also welcome any guests for lunch at Pizzafari if you’re free at the lunchtime shown on the RideMax plan.

Here’s looking forward to tomorrow!

First in Line for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train: Hyperlapse Video

Here’s a raw Hyperlapse from this morning’s park opening at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, where I made my way from the park entrance to the first in line for 7DMT.

The video has no sound at this point — I’ll likely be adding some verbal “tips” and moving this to the RideMax subscribers area in the next few days, but in the meantime, I thought this would be fun to share.

Warning: This is running at about 8x normal speed, and with all of the camera movement it might make you dizzy watching it. Also, just to clarify, this shows the *walk* from the entrance to the 7DMT boarding area, not the ride itself.

Enjoy!

First in Line for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train: Hyperlapse Video from Park Entrance to Ride from RideMax LLC on Vimeo.