Walt Disney World

Playing Pokémon GO at Walt Disney World (And Why a Grown Man Would Do This)

With Pokémon GO sweeping the world in the last week since it was introduced, I thought it might be fun to try playing the game at Walt Disney World, so I spent a few hours playing Pokémon GO Monday at Epcot.

For those who don’t want to read the entire post, I’ll start with a summary of how the game went, and then I’ll add more details for those who are considering trying this themselves, or who have children who are. I’ll finish with some more personal and even philosophical comments on what drew me to the game in the first place, and why you might want to consider playing as well, even if you don’t fit the typical “Pokémon-loving” demographic.

Continue reading “Playing Pokémon GO at Walt Disney World (And Why a Grown Man Would Do This)”

Arendelle Construction Progress at Epcot, Say Goodbye to the Flower & Garden Festival

Liesle & I stopped into Epcot yesterday to catch a few of our favorite Flower & Garden dishes one last time before the Festival wraps up on Monday.

I’m heading out to Animal Kingdom this evening to catch the new nighttime happenings there, but before we start focusing more on that park in some upcoming posts, I thought it might be worth a quick, three-picture blurb showing construction progress around the Arendelle area at Epcot.

Remember, the new Frozen ride is scheduled to open there in less than a month.

Above is the scene with the camera peeking over the construction wall just past the Mexico area. For those who are familiar with this area, this is almost directly across the main pathway from the spot where Mariachi Cobre performs.

As you can see, things are moving along nicely on the exteriors here. The small meet and greet building just to the left of center is much more finished than it was in my previous post covering the Arendelle construction.

Here we are viewing the scene over the wall from the right-hand side of the previous image. (And yes, I did get some “looks” taking these pictures. All in the line of duty lol…)

I’ll actually be out at Disneyland when this area opens, so you can expect my next blog post covering this scene to be available after the new Frozen Ever After attraction has been open for a bit — probably mid-July.

It will be nice to have the new attraction open, but I’m expecting it will add to the complexity of an efficient Epcot tour, especially if Frozen, Test Track, and Soarin’ all remain “Tier One” on the FP+ list.

We’ll see.

With that, here’s wishing a final goodbye to the Flower & Garden Festival.

And next year, Disney, please consider upping the portion size on those shrimp tacos. Madame Leota will thank you!

🙂

More RideMax Roulette at the Magic Kingdom, Pecos Bill Cafe Southwest Burger Review

I headed out to the Magic Kingdom this morning for another round of RideMax Roulette. The catch is that I was primarily Periscoping the experience and didn’t have my regular camera with me, so the photos in this post will be somewhat, er… limited — both in quantity and quality. 🙂

Before I get too far, I should note that you can find my Periscope feed here, though Periscope deletes the videos after 24 hours, so you may not find this too helpful, unless you’d like to follow me for future broadcasts.

For those not schooled in the great RideMax Roulette tradition, this is basically where I use a random-number generator to give me a list of attractions, which I then plug into RideMax. The software then spits out a game plan to cover those attractions, which I take to the park.

For today’s round of RideMax Roulette, I basically had twelve attractions to cover. Here they are, in no particular order:

Continue reading “More RideMax Roulette at the Magic Kingdom, Pecos Bill Cafe Southwest Burger Review”

Epcot’s Arendelle Construction Progress, Japan Children’s Day, L’Artisan des Glaces Ice Cream Review

A relatively short post today, as Liesle & I stopped into Epcot this past Thursday, May 5th, for a quick tour around World Showcase. We also wanted to eat some of our favorite Flower & Garden dishes again before the festival wraps up at the end of the month.

As you can see in the picture above, we were greeted with beautiful weather — blue skies, not too hot. A great day, really.

We first stopped in front of the construction walls outside Norway, and I couldn’t resist pointing my camera over the wall to check on the progress.

The picture below is the result:

Continue reading “Epcot’s Arendelle Construction Progress, Japan Children’s Day, L’Artisan des Glaces Ice Cream Review”

RideMax Assumptions for Animal Kingdom Plans After May 27th

In the “thanks for your patience” department, I have some good news for Walt Disney World RideMax subscribers: As of today, our Animal Kingdom park hours now reflect the 11:00pm closing time for RideMax plans created for May 27th and later (or at least through July 2nd, which is the last date for which Disney has officially committed to staying open late).

It’s always a bit tricky putting together the behind-the-scenes wait time estimates RideMax will be using when we haven’t yet seen the scenario we’re trying to model, so I thought it might be helpful to go over some of the assumptions RideMax will be using. Note that I expect we’ll adjust the estimates and the assumptions once I’ve had the chance to experience the late evenings myself, beginning with an in-park visit on May 27th.

Highlights of our current assumptions include:

Kilimanjaro Safaris and the DinoLand attractions will remain open until park closing, regardless of the time the park closes. Same goes for It’s Tough To Be A Bug.
Several attractions will continue to close around dusk. RideMax is specifically assuming that Rafiki’s Planet Watch, Pangani Forest Exploration Trail, and Maharajah Jungle Trek will fall into this category.
Expedition Everest will close sometime *before* the park closes, and RideMax plans will avoid having you get in line for this attraction after 8:30pm. The theory here is that Disney won’t want all of the noise from Everest to carry over into the new show area on Discovery River (in the same way in which California Screamin’ is closed during World of Color at DCA).

Regarding this last assumption (no Everest after 8:30pm), we’ll have to see how this plays out in practice, but I’ve noticed that for all of the dates after May 27th for which I can see FP+ availability, the latest Everest time slot begins at 7:25pm, which means the FP+ window closes at 8:25pm. My guess (and I know it’s just a guess), is that Disney wants to have everyone off the ride by about 9:00pm, so that they can “get on with the show” playing on the river.

As I said, these seem like reasonable assumptions for now, and I expect we’ll be modifying them once we’ve seen everything in practice the evening of May 27th.

Disney hasn’t yet released actual show times for the new Jungle Book show, but you can expect to see this listed in RideMax soon after the announcement is made.

Stay tuned!