pyesetz | Disney World 2015, day 10: Magic Kingdom / Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party

Our room. Day 4 dose 1 of Kid #2’s ear drops.

Landscape of Flavors (12:12pm). Lunch.

Ink and Paint (12:45pm). Single-dose DayQuil for $2.45. Kid #2 is coughing. Also, get a sandwich-cutter for $6.34 that makes white-bread sandwiches look like Mickey Mouse’s head. Our kids are too old for such foolishness (and have never attended public school), but we can buy it anyway!

Ink and Paint (12:57pm). Two Entenmann’s Apple Pies. Obviously there is no way we can eat up all the “snack” credits during this vacation, so we have to start accumulating snacks that will travel well so we can bring the excess food home.

Our room. To prepare for today, Wifey spent months making herself a Minnie Mouse costume. Part of the costume consists of old shoes to which she laboriously applied many coats of yellow paint. But the shoes feel tight and today’s schedule includes massive quantities of walking and Wifey’s knee is already feeling gimpy from previous days’ exertions, so she decides to be prudent and not wear the special shoes that she worked so hard on.
Wifey insists that I wear a Haunted Mansion T-shirt. Kid #2 does not dress up at all.
Kid #1 wears her Dr. Who outfit. She also has a Winnie the Pooh fursuit (open-face) that we didn’t bring because obviously it would be too hot for Florida. But even the tweed jacket for her Who suit seems like too much for the 90° weather, so she leaves that item in our room.
Kid #1 also brought her Winnie the Pooh doll, but it spends the entire trip in her backpack and no pictures are taken of it at the park, where we had bought it as childless newlyweds in hopes of someday having a baby to give it to. Well, after a year of fertility treatments, we got our wish! Considering how many years Pooh spent as her go-everywhere favorite doll, it is in remarkably good shape.

Magic Kingdom Park (3:40pm – 12:00am). It’s Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party!
Regular park hours run until 7pm, while special party tickets are for 4pm to midnight. They have started to accept special tickets but then the revelers are being held in a pen until the stroke of 4. Since we have excess park tickets because of our skipped days, we decide to “waste” them by entering the park 20 minutes before everyone else in our class. The ticket collectors find this hard to believe, but they let us do it. It feels so luxurious to engage in such “conspicuous consumption”; we are spending an entire day’s ticket just to get 20 minutes of extra park time! But there is nothing else we can do with these nonrefundable nontransferable tickets. Maybe for our next trip (if there ever is a next trip), we’ll buy park tickets for only half of the hotel days.
Attractions visited today: Various trick-or-treat spots, Main Street USA photo spot (photo, 3:48pm), Confectionary (take-home, 3:57pm), Crystal Palace (dinner, missing receipt), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Big Top Souvenir (take-home, 8:56pm; actual souvenir, 8:58pm), Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor, Astro Orbiter (Kid #1 and I), Tomorrowland Transit Authority, Haunted Mansion, “Monsters’ Dance Party”, “Happy Hallowishes”, a popcorn cart (snack and souvenir, 10:47pm), Big Thunder Mountain (kids only), Aloha Isle (snack, 11:05pm), and Mickey’s “Boo-to-you” Parade (kids and parents on opposite sides).
At the Main Street USA photo spot, Wifey wants a family photo with Cinderella’s Castle as the backdrop. I suggest taking two photos with three people each, then stitching the digital photos together back home, but it seems unlikely that this would work well. A pair of other park guests who are walking by offer to take our family photo for us. Yay! So now we need a photo frame.
At Confectionary, we get 3 additional boxes of shortbread cookies imported from Scotland and shaped like Mickey’s head. Paying customers would be forking out over a dollar each for small ordinary cookies — but for “free” we’ll take them!
Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor. This is totally different. You see animated characters on a big screen, but clearly there are live comics working behind the scenes at this show who are making up jokes on the fly. Periodically they shine lights and cameras on individual audience members and put these live video feeds on a big screen with funny captions below them. Only a small minority of audience members get this treatment. They point the camera at me with the notation, “What do you get when you cross a human with a chia pet?” Presumably this refers to my beard, which is a different color from my scalp hair. Unfortunately I am unable to think of a funny dance to do while the camera is on me.
The Crystal Palace buffet costs $202.88 for dinner (actual money, not on our meal plan; can’t find receipt so price taken from the final-accounting email sent by Disney after our trip is over). The food isn’t worth quite that much, but this restaurant includes meet-and-greets with various Winnie the Pooh characters. Wifey takes photos of our kids with Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, and Pooh; she tries to get them to strike the same poses as on previous trips, but this is physically impossible because the character fursuits are the same size but our kids are now much bigger.
At The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh exit shop, we find out that Winnie The Pooh® brand honey is no longer offered, so we can’t buy it, so Wifey can’t check off this item in her giant list of “Things to do at Disney World” formed during the two years of planning. Oh well.
At Big Top Souvenir, Wifey gets two containers of cheese goldfish and a bag of pretzels. We have way more dinner-credits than we can use, so she trades one dinner for these three snacks. Big Top is one of the few in-park stores that offers this conversion feature, which is usually done at the hotel food courts. Wifey is so focused on the snacks that I have to remind her to get a fridge magnet for our collection! I say, “If this is the ‘trip of a lifetime’, shouldn’t we buy a fridge magnet?” This probably sounds rather silly to the store staff. Anyway, I select a small picture frame surrounded by “Walt Disney World 2015” with both magnet and kickstand features — only $10.60!
The Monsters’ Dance Party is very loud and has bright lights; guests dance along with cast members who are wearing fursuits. Wifey and Kid #1 join in, while Kid #2 and I sit it out.
Astro Orbiter is a kiddie ride. Kid #1 and I share a vehicle, which was fine ten years ago but quite cramped now.
As we exit from Haunted Mansion, the “Happy Hallowishes” fireworks display starts up, so we sit to watch. At one point, half the visible sky is filled with exploding fireworks! We’ve never seen anything like it.
At the popcorn stand, Wifey uses a snack credit for bottled water (another luxury, since water fountains are available but bottled water is cold and we might as well use the snack credits). She gets a souvenir bucket of popcorn for $6.00 (popcorn is a snack, but souvenir buckets aren’t; Kid #1 eats the popcorn). On one of our previous trips we got souvenir buckets which the kids then used in their sandbox at home — but they are too old for that now.
At the trick-or-treat spots, cast members give out handfuls of fun-size candy which are not as impressive as the full-size candy bars we can get with our snack credits. At one spot, the cast member greets me and Kid #2 by name (since we are wearing our 15-year-old nametags). She greets Wifey as “Minnie” due to her costume. I don’t remember what she called Kid #1, but it wasn’t “Dr. Who”. I remark to Kid #1 that Minnie Mouse is a Disney property but Dr. Who is a BBC property, which may explain why the cast member couldn’t refer to it. On at least two other occasions today, some other guest we passed by uttered the passphrase “bow ties are cool” which is a Dr. Who reference, but Kid #1 didn’t hear them or couldn’t think of a reply.
At Aloha Isle, I get pineapple juice, which is tasty but isn’t Dole Whip® which is one of the fond-memory foods that Wifey had wanted to eat on this vacation. But here we are on day 10 and she still hasn’t had any, because we’re never near the Aloha Isle when she’s hungry. There are definitely some downsides to this eat-all-the-time dining plan; also the excessive heat is suppressing our appetites. Anyway, Wifey shares some of my pineapple juice while we watch the parade, thinking that the kids are enjoying themselves on Big Thunder Mountain.
Meanwhile, the stand-by line for Big Thunder is unexpectedly long, so our children get in only one ride and don’t feel like standing in line again, but the parade route cuts off the Big Thunder/Splash Mountain area of the park, so the kids just stand there and watch the parade, then rejoin us after crossing the street becomes possible.
The “Boo-to-you” Parade is supposed to be one of Disney’s best. Ho hum. I guess we’re just not parade people. This is the first parade in 25 years that we actually sat and watched instead of avoiding at all costs. It is probably also the last.

Our room. I apply five drops of ofloxacin to Kid #2’s ear. This is day 4, dose 2.
My wife and I will probably never again visit the Magic Kingdom for as long as we live. Our kids are all grown up now and the expected delay until grandchildren arrive is greater than our remaining life expectancy (although you never know). I has a sad. In fact, I have a sad repeatedly over the next several days. I think my first visit to the park was in 1972; Wifey’s first visit was later that decade. We just don’t have the money to bop down here without a good reason such as a grandchild or a hefty inheritance.