I'm actually really glad we did go as it was a brilliant day. It's sufficiently different to DLP to warrant a visit, and some of the rides are different as well.
Before I start though, I wanted to mention the new Disney app - My Disney Experience (I have a few friends going to Florida in the next year or so, so I'm hoping to pass on a few tips if I can). It's brilliant! It has good information about all the parks and the rides (we were able to get ride heights and what they would be like before we decided to go on them or not), but you can also book your Fastpass tickets on there, book restaurants etc. It tracks your location round the park so if you need the loo in a hurry and can't see one, a quick look at the app will tell you where the nearest one is. It also shows show times and character meet and greets too. Oh, and possibly most importantly - ride wait times!
It was indispensable and made life in the Disney parks so much easier and enjoyable. You obviously need WiFi but there is free WiFi in the all the Disney parks (and Broadwalk and Downtown Disney) and it was pretty extensive, I don't remember having any difficult accessing it.
To me this is a major step forward for the theme parks, hats off to Disney! This, along with their new "paper-free" My Magic tickets (like a credit card that you just hold up to the entrance stalls and Fastpass machines) made so much difference. We tended to decide where we were going the night before, and I would book our three Fastpass choices online (the My Disney Experience is accessible via pc and tablet as well as mobile), and then keep an eye on things via the mobile in the park (there are Fastpass booths in the park that you can use to book your Fastpasses still, but there tended to be a bit of a queue for a lot of them, so much easier to sort it out the night before). We tended to try and book the busiest rides for the busiest times (eg big rides mid-afternoon), and then fit in other, less busy, rides around that. It seemed to work well. We aren't early risers so tended to get to the park late morning and stay til pretty much it closed (the hour before the park closes is especially great as lots of rides don't have any real wait times at all!). But obviously this made for very late nights, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
So, back to Magic Kingdom. And now, of course, I am desperately wishing that I'd blogged every night because I can't remember half of it! But hey ho (it's off to work we go ;)). Magic Kingdom is a lot like DLP but seems bigger (I don't know if it is or not), and seems to have more rides? The layout is pretty much the same though, with the usual Adventureland, Fantasyland, Main St., etc., and of course the princess castle in the middle.
Now, at this point I need to mention that none of us are particularly big Disney fans. Dan and I are grumpy old cynics, and the boys, being boys, aren't particularly into it all either. They used to like Toy Story and Cars, but have grown out of that. But I do think the parks are what you make them. We obviously ignored all the Princess stuff, didn't bother with the meet & greets, and didn't bother seeing the parades (rides are less busy when the parades are on!). We concentrated on rides really, especially as the last time we'd been to DLP they'd both been a bit too small to go on a lot of it.
So at Magic Kingdom we started in Adventureland and Dan took the boys up the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse, which they enjoyed (not a ride, just a mock up I believe). Then Dan, Ollie and I went on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We'd been on the DLP version and enjoyed it, so wanted to go back on it again. However, the ride here is quite different from what we remember the DLP to be like, and we were quite disappointed. The DLP one seemed to have a few more sudden drops (it's a water ride inside) and this one was pretty much just a leisurely trip round in the dark with a few pirate scenes to look at.
Toby sat out with Dad, Toby because he's scared of pretty much everything, and Dad because of his foot (although we did take Dad on it when we went back). This became quite a theme of the holiday as Toby found more and more things he was scared of!
Disney have changed their policy regarding disabled people because they found that people were hiring (!) disabled people to go with them to the parks so they got to the front of the queues! (Anyone who's pushed an adult around in a wheelchair for 10 hours might think twice about that!), but they do have a system on some of the rides that you can go to the entrance, ask for a "white card" and they will give you a time to come back that is the equivalent of the time you would have waited in the queue. To be honest I felt a little bad about using this, as Dad could easily queue in his wheelchair (although on some rides the queue wasn't wheelchair accessible). However, I hadn't realised how much hard work it was pushing the wheelchair! A lot of the queues were on slopes too, which made it harder, so we needed the white card for me and Dan, rather than Dad! lol
We then moved round the park doing other rides, such as the Winnie The Pooh ride (oh they might be 9 and 10 year old boys, but they still had to do that ride lol!), The Barnstormer (kids rollercoaster - big wait for a very short ride!), and of course, "It's A Small World" - a ride that HAD to be concieved on drugs! Dan and I have a theory that every now and then one of the boats that you go on is taken off to one side, and everyone in it is turned in to the singing dolls in the ride!
After a bit of cooling off at Casey Jnrs Splash Station (the boys had great fun pushing Dad through it in the wheelchair, supposedly dodging all the water!), we moved into Tomorrowland, and did some of the rides there (Buzz Lightyear - exactly the same as DLP, and the Speedway (very average road "race" on big Scaletrix cars). We wanted to do Space Mountain but the queues were pretty bad.
We went back to Frontierland later and did Big Thunder Mountain (Toby decided he didn't like roller coasters after all!), and Splash Mountain, a decent log flume based on the story of Brer Rabbit. Both boys loved it, and as it was quite late in the evening there wasn't much of a queue, so we went on it a couple of times (and got rather wet!). The weather was brilliant, blue skies and about 26 degrees, but at 10pm it did get a little chilly when you're wet!
I can't remember for the life of me what and where we ate, but we did make the great discovery that Disney have now let Starbucks into the inner circle as it were, so I'm pretty sure there were coffees somewhere along the line!
I must say we really enjoyed our first day, much more than I thought we would considering we'd done DLP so many times before. Some of the rides were a bit disappointing, but the overall feel of the place, the lengths Disney go to to make the whole thing more of an "experience" and the brilliant staff all helped to make up for it :)
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