In come the crowds...

Rising before 6am every morning and heading to bed late for what seems like every day over the past month has finally taken it's toll. I didn't set an alarm Monday morning and decided to wing the day with Sylvain. The only thing that we had set were dinner reservations later in the evening. After having cereal for breakfast, we boarded the bus for Magic Kingdom -- the park that Sylvain had the least amount of interest in.

Just like on Sunday, we arrived just after the park opened and had to battle virtually no crowds. We first made our way to Tomorrowland and rode the Astro Orbiter; not sure why, but we just did. Next stop was Space Mountain, which we grabbed Fast Passes for, but was able to ride twice without them. Sylvain wasn't interested in a third go, and we probably would have cashed them in by then because the crowd was catching up with us.



Next, we by-passed quite a few attractions, headed for Liberty Square and toured the Haunted Mansion, rode the Big Thunder Mountain coaster in Frontier land, and took in the Pirates of the Caribbean tour in Adventureland. The day turned from bright and sunny into muggy with dark clouds bringing a threat of rain. By lunchtime, we were started to have low expectations of the normal counter service cafes and opted for a Mexican lunch counter called El Pirata y el Pierco. The "choices" were meat tacos, bean tacos, and taco salad. Yes, that's it. Sylvain left me with his request for a taco salad and headed off to save us a table. We arrived just before they opened, and I was third in line to order. The person taking the orders was great, but the person putting the orders on the trays kept getting confused. The two guys ahead of me and I couldn't help ourselves by cracking jokes about it, but I was quite amazed at how inept this particular server was. I truly hope that it was her first day. Needless to say, her delay allowed me to check out the tacos and I was glad that we didn't order them. They had sat long enough in their trays that grease has seeped out of both taco ends (and maybe even thru the bottom). At least the taco salads had the saving grace of lettuce to sop up that mess; had we ordered the tacos, I would have come away with a spattered shirt for sure!

After lunch, we toured the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse, where Sylvain was spit on by the toddler in front of us and whose parents didn't do anything, so I yelled at him myself. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am not above being mean to bratty kids, even while at the "Happiest Place in the World". After dealing with the human sprinkler, he decided to put some distance between us and them by heading over to Toontown and rode Goofy's Barnstormer coaster.

By then, the park was getting pretty crowded and we had enough of the humidity and dealing with other people. Our last attraction at the Magic Kingdom was to visit the Monster's Inc. Laugh Factory show. I really enjoyed it, and thought the interactive animation was cleverly done. Afterwards, we both were ready for naps, so we headed back to the room to rest before dinner.



For dinner, we had reservations at Nine Dragons at Epcot. The restaurant was nice, but the food was standard Chinese. Since we were on the dining plan, we had the option of ordering an entree and dessert from the menu or ordering a 4-course limited option dinner. Sylvain chose to have fried rice, a cheesecake eggroll for dessert, and an add-on dumpling appetizer. I went with the 4-course route with: appetizer of two dumplings and two eggrolls, hot & sour soup, General Tso's chicken w/ white rice, and ginger ice cream. All of my concern over keeping my shirt clean was for naught as a piece of saucy chicken landed on a corner of it. Even though I was able to clean it off okay, I guess I was bound to happen were at least one food item this trip no matter how studious about keeping neat I was.



After dinner, we headed off to Downtown Disney, thinking that we may be able to get into the ESPN club for the big MSU-UNC game because it didn't start for a few hours. I'm not sure how I did it, but I had confused Downtown Disney with the Disney Boardwalk. Once we realized that the ESPN club wasn't where we were, we boarded the correct bus to the Boardwalk, but soon lost our zeal for going there. By the time the bus reached the Boardwalk, the game had begun and things weren't looking good for MSU. We were kept up on the game by messages Nestelynn was texting with score updates. Rather than walking the Boardwalk, we decided to head back to our room to finish watching the game, which meant more buses and more wind quickly emptying out of our sails. The rest of the night was pretty disappointing with MSU's loss and us being just plain pooped. Maybe we need a vacation from our vacation....