So here comes one of my big regrets of the trip. Early magic hour was at 8:30 am. I really wanted to be awake for this, but we were dragging a bit this morning. We didn't end up getting to the park until about 8:45. There was about a 5 minute long line to scan our tickets in, and Main Street already looked pretty crowded when we entered. We had wanted to focus on characters this morning, since we had seen some really long waits the day before.
So we headed to one of our must dos: Chip and Dale in holiday gear! Except in France they are called Tic and Tac.
Their line was already looking pretty long, but we got into it anyway. Tic and Tac were having nice long interactions with everyone, which is fun when it's your turn, but it does make the wait long. In DLP, people who used their disability pass could also use it on the characters. In the US parks that only works when characters have a
Genie+ pass available, like the Fairytale Hall Princesses or Mickey at MK.
I know I'll get some flak for it, but those passes were annoying. I understand there is a reason people have them, and that to have their issues is more annoying than having a longer wait for characters, but it was still annoying that every third group almost was a disability pass group. It made the waits a lot longer.
In the end, we had a really nice interaction with the Chipmunks and ended up waiting 40 minutes. Probably not the best use of our early morning hour, and the next day we'd have a much better time when we managed to get to the gates on time.
As we left Tic and Tac we noticed that poor Iliak was having a rough day. He was doing a lot of head tossing and prancing (not the good type of head tossing and prancing, either).
The man in blue was a CM.
They finally got Iliak settled, but I'd never seen a Disney horse that unsettled (besides the video with the horse Merida was riding, but he got a balloon tangled in his leg and I think that would freak out any horse). I hope Iliak is ok.
Fantasyland was our goal for the rest of the morning. So, full disclosure, I did buy the Premium access that morning on the app. I had always planned on using it to maximize the short trip, however, I didn't realize how expensive it would be for the full access. I went ahead and bought it in a moment of panic, but I will never admit to Brian how much I paid for it. Which is fine, he never reads these trip reports. I still felt pretty ashamed randomly throughout the day for how much I paid. It had always been my plan to buy the Premium Access, but somehow I never did see how much it cost. And while I do think it helped us get on a lot of attractions, some of those attractions weren't priorities anyway. Like, we probably never would have rode Buzz if we didn't have the Premium Access. I was happy to have it for other attractions, but in retrospect, I should have just done a la carte and paid for a handful of attractions.