Star Wars Dark Side Half Marathon April 2018 Day 1

Wednesday April 18th:
Ryan and I were off to head to WDW for another Run-Cation! I will be running my 10th Half Marathon and he will be running his 8th half marathon!
2:15am alarm. On the road at 3:15am for the hour drive to the airport. We found a close parking spot right away and there was no line at the check-in counter! Our flight is at 6am so we had time to grab breakfast burritos after getting through security. We had a layover in Austin but didn’t have to change planes. We landed in Orlando at 12:30pm! We never get to land this early! I received the text that our room was ready at Port Orlean’s Riverside. We were in teh Acadian House Room 8404. We were on DME at 1pm and were the 2nd to last to board. So we were on our way pretty quickly. Staying at PORS we are the 4th drop off, so it takes a bit to get there. But we were dropped off by 1:55pm! We stopped in the food court and shared the Bayou Burger and bought our refillable mug for the trip. We then went to our room to drop off our carry on bags and change real quick.
We got our pack ready for the park and were to the bus stop by 3:15pm. We literally waited 1 minute for our bus to AK! We got to the park and Scott (@nascfan) & Kathy were waiting just beyond the turnstiles for us! Big giant squishy hugs and squeals! It was great to see them again! On our walk into the park, we saw Baloo and Luie! We had a fun interaction with them! They had a blast with Kathy! We got back to our Safari FP at 3:25pm. We had lots of stops due to animals. But we saw quite a few! Our next FP was Flights of Passage, but it was down so we saved it for later. We then went to Dinosaur and it was a walk on. After our ride back in time, we happened to walk by and catch the Carnival dance party. We weren’t real impressed with what we saw and kept walking on. We went to Starbucks for caffeine! We then stopped for pretzels and cheese. I had promised to get Kathy one over Dopey week and totally forgot! But I made up for that this time! We sat and ate our pretzels and Ryan and I sipped our caffeine. We chatted about how the Race Expo works and what time we would meet there and such. We looked at the time and saw that we might be able to squeak in for the 6pm show of the Lion King. So we all power walked that way and made it just in time. I really noticed all of Timon’s interactions throughout the show this time! So fun to watch him! Scott, Ryan and I then used our Everest FP’s while Kathy used her Kali FP. We then had dinner in Pandora. Ryan and I got the chicken and beef bowl with rice plus the cheeseburger pods. Always delicious! While we were there, FoP came back up! So we used our FP’s with very little wait! I LOVE this ride so much!! We took some night pics within Pandora before heading to Everest for a night ride! It was around 9pm and it was a walk on! We should have rode it again! We worked our way to the front of the park and watched a bit of the Tree Awakening. Then said goodnight to Scott and Kathy. We were at our bus stop at 9:30pm and on a bus at 9:40pm! We got off at the main drop off to refill our mug with Sprite before bed. We walked to our room, enjoying the beautiful relaxing grounds of PORS. We were in our room by 10pm and unpacked our luggage that was dropped off for us. Lights out just after 11:15pm.
Miles logged 9.9