Wednesday September 27th:
3am alarm. On the road to the airport, an hour away, by 4:30. We hit some rain on the way but still arrived at the airport by 5:30am. Plenty of parking and found a spot right by one of the shuttle pickups so we didn’t get too wet. There was no line at check in and no line at security today! We were thru security by 6am. We grabbed Starbucks and burritos. Our 7:05am departure was on time. Bonus, it was a half full flight so no one sat next to us!!! We had a layover in Houston and landed on time with a 40 minute layover. We grabbed last minute second breakfast at Wendy’s because, unfortunately we have a 2nd layover in Memphis. Thankfully we had no plane change. It was a quick and easy layover, they let everyone off that needed to get off and then the people boarding immediately started coming on the plane. Before they boarded, Ryan and I moved up to the 2nd row because we were near the back of the plane on the prior leg. That’s what’s nice on Southwest is that there are no assigned seats and I could move! We landed 10 minutes early in Orlando, 3:30pm. Quick potty stop and then went to the Magical Express pick-up where we walked straight onto our bus! I think we waited about 15 minutes until our bus was full and then we were on our way! We were staying at PORS on this trip, therefore we were the 4th bus drop off. We checked in and discovered our room was in the Acadia House building again! We have stayed in this building on all 3 of our stays here! But we’ve been in different areas of the building each time! We were in room 8405 on the 3rd floor. Before heading to our room, we stopped by the food court to buy our refillable mug. We went to our room to change and get our Camelbak filled with ice water and got our pack ready for the park. We went out to the bus stop to catch a bus to EPCOT. There was a MK bus pulled up and another bus was behind it and it said EPCOT. Based on prior experience, the 2nd bus will wait until the front bus moves before loading (unless it’s before park opening). Well the driver of the EPCOT bus opened his door for one second, closed it and then drove off! Ryan waved at him to flag him down, but he kept going. So we watched the board for the next arrival time. It kept getting pushed back. In the end, we waited over 30 minutes for the next EPCOT bus! When we were driving out of our resort, we did see a bus in the resort getting towed. So we have a feeling that was our original bus (this was the first of at least 3-4 buses we saw throughout our trip getting towed!).
We were thru the turnstile by 6:25pm. We were HUNGRY by now! So since Food & Wine was going on, our first stop was the Canada Booth for Filet Minon and Cheese Soup!!! Our favorites and must eat on every F & W trip! We heard that the Italy pizza window was open again so we ventured that way. The window was there and everything set up, but it was closed. As we walked by the American Pavilion, we caught a few Sugar Ray songs! We grabbed a Strawberry Lemon Sunset Slushie with Vodka (alcoholic strawberry lemonade), soooo good!!We swung by the UK for Fish & Chips (it was going to be a very hot trip and we figured that since the sun was down, this was out best time to have it. Yummy as always! We then booked it to Soarin to catch the end of our FP window at 7:35pm and our window ended at 7:40pm. After our flight around the world, we then booked it all the way to the America Pavilion to catch the Sugar Ray Concert, we just missed the first song by the time we got to a spot to watch, we could hear it was we were walking though. It was a good and fun concert!! We then went to the Odyssey building and saw some of the video of some of the old EPCOT pics. We totally forgot to walk around and look at the original artwork concepts! We decided to end our night with a ride on SSE at 8:50pm with a 9pm park closing. We had no plans of watching Illuminations on this trip and we didn’t want to deal with the bus line. We were off of SSE at 9:15 and Illuminations was still going. So we worked our way to our bus stop and there was hardly anyone there at 9:20pm. The line behind us grew quickly as we waited. We were back to our resort before 10pm. We went to our room to get our mug and water bottles. We walked to the food court to fill them. Our luggage was waiting in our room. We unpacked and had lights out just after 11pm.
Miles Logged 8.2
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