Not Terribly Exciting.

As planned, yesterday I took the day off from work and headed out to Disney World. It was a pretty cold, miserable, rainy day--but it still beat working! I got to Hollywood Studios about 15 minutes before 9am, when the park opened. They let us in a few minutes early, and I made a beeline to Toy Story Mania, which I'd never actually gotten to ride before. As one of the first folks to get there, I got on very quickly, and it was a heck of a lot of fun! I kinda knew what to expect, because we have the very-similar (and frankly rather mediocre) Wii video game, but the mechanics of the "gun" and the nature of the ride really made it fun. After riding it once, I thought I'd grab a FastPass to do it again later, so I did. But "later" turned out to be 5 minutes, so I took a brief stroll and then went back to go around again. And I'm happy to say my score improved quite a bit from the first to the second time!

After that I did the Tower of Terror (with hardly any wait!), then the Rock'n'Roller Coaster (only a couple minutes' wait since I used the single-rider line), then the ToT again (much longer wait that time, for some reason). And after that I was actually pretty satisfied, but it was still early so I headed over to Star Tours for a quick ride since I had a FastPass for that as well. Then the weather was still miserable and it was getting close to lunchtime, so I figured I'd call it a day. I decided to skip the Magic Kingdom and plan a visit for all of us this weekend instead, and that will be it until we decide to get a new round of passes sometime. I need to get some more photo gigs to pay for that, I think!

Speaking of FastPasses, this was also my first time trying the new FastPass+ system, which is replacing the old FastPass program. Under the old system, you could only have one FastPass at a time, and you generally had to get it near the attraction itself. So, for example, if I wanted a FastPass for Toy Story, I'd have to go over there, put in my ticket, and get the little slip of paper telling me the time window to come back--and I couldn't get a FP for any other attraction until that window had passed. So it made for a lot of backtracking and was a bit inconvenient, even though it did save some time waiting in line. With the new system, you can get FastPasses for 3 attractions at once, and (to an extent) you can even choose the times you want. Eventually you'll be able to do all this online even before you enter the park; for now they have self-serve kiosks or cast members with tablets to walk you through the process. It was pretty easy, and worked very well--except there's no hard copy to remind you of the times (at least not when using the cast members with tablets, maybe the kiosks do provide something?), so I had to snap a shot of the tablet screen with my phone, which was pretty kludgy. But anyway, overall I think it's an improvement over the old system, though for now we won't have much opportunity to experiment with it!

Anyway. After I left Disney I grabbed lunch at Firehouse, and then stopped by Home Depot on the way home. There were some hanging-stuff-on-the-walls projects I'd been neglecting, so I got the stuff I needed to get that done and spent a little time on that in the afternoon. Not much of a day to do much else! Though it was pretty active at my birdfeeder for a change--several tufted titmice, a cardinal, and a couple other little brown birds. I was glad to give them a snack on a chilly day!

I did get a few decent photos at the Studios, despite the gloom. ( Have a look? )