Marvelous Magic Kingdom - Disney World

Visiting Magic Kingdom at Disney World invokes many comparisons to Disneyland, if you were lucky enough to visit them both. But at Disney World, Magic Kingdom gives you more elbow room, and the lines are shorter -- possibly because Disney World has several other parks to compete for a families attention...

After our earlier Disneyland experience we showed up to Magic Kingdom with a game plan. We knew which rides we were going on, and a general sense of when. If there were fastpasses available Jonathan went ahead of us, and picked them up. You could only be in possession of one fastpass for a specific time period. So if you had a fastpass that is good for a ride at 1 pm, and you wanted to get a second fastpass for another ride, you needed to pick it up at 1 pm (not before). We layered our fastpass rides with rides where we knew there would be a short wait, like the Haunted Mansion, or Pirates of the Caribbean.

We started our day before the park opened up with breakfast on site at the Crystal Palace with Winnie the Pooh. It was a splurge, a breakfast buffet ($30 for adults, $15 for kids), but it gave us plenty of photo opportunities with the characters. The breakfast was really good, and the chocolate Mickey Mouse waffles were wonderful.

Jonathan secured the first fastpasses of the day to the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh ride where you got to bounce around with Tigger. Disney World offered a special second fastpass to Mickey's PhilharMagic (which was a lot of fun) show ... ending with Donald Duck crashing through the projector in the back of the theater.

Then we proceeded to the Haunted Mansion while Jonathan got fastpasses for the next ride. During the day we road on the Jungle Cruise, Peter Pan's Flight, Prince Charming Regal Carousel, and attended the Monster's Inc. Laugh Floor (Xander's joke was picked and included in one of the monster's acts) and watched the Dream-Along with Mickey show in front of Cinderella's castle.

The boys favorite though was Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin, where you got to shoot at Emperor Zorg. By the way it is not a spinning ride.

We ended the day at the Celebrate a Dream Come True Parade on Main Street. Overall it was a lot of fun. We left at around 4 pm, just before the boys hit the wall, and they slept happily in the car on the ride back to Fort Lauderdale.