Chapter 27
Our New Orange Friend

(Originally posted August 12, 2012)

While still celebrating our luck, we decided to hop on board the Walt Disney World Railroad.

We rode around to the Frontierland station and got off without much of a plan as to where to go next. We passed by the end of Splash Mountain and saw some people going around the corner, soaked as usual.

We ended up deciding there really wasn’t much we wanted to do in Frontierland at that moment, so we walked back toward Adventureland.

It had already been three days since we paid a visit to our friend Jack Sparrow, so we waited in the still-short line for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Perhaps I should note at this point how exactly we planned our trip in terms of which parks to go to when. In the past, we always did what I suspect the majority of uninformed Disney-goers do, and chose our parks based almost solely on Extra Magic Hours. We would always go to the park with the extra hour in the morning, and usually go to the one with evening hours as well. Before this trip, however, we discovered the Touring Plans website through their partnership with WDW Radio. We subscribed sometime last year, and used many of the features on their site to plan our trip. As you can tell from reading this report, we’re definitely not the kind of people who could follow an actual “touring plan” that told us where we needed to be at all times and dictated our entire trip. We need more spontaneity than that in our vacations. We did, however, use the Crowd Calendar feature on the Touring Plans site to find out the predicted crowd levels for each day in the entire resort as well as in each park. We used the overall crowd level predictions to decide when to book our trip, and we used the individual park predictions to figure out which parks to visit on which days. Touring Plans predicted this day to be a 4.0 out of 10 in the Magic Kingdom, which was easily the lowest of any of the days we would be there, so that is how we decided to spend this whole day in that park. Anyway, the point of this whole explanation was to point out that the crowds at Magic Kingdom were on the lower side this day, and that’s why we were able to do quite a lot!

After Pirates (dead men still told no tales), we were getting pretty hot and a little hungry, so we decided it was snack time. We made our way to the Sunshine Tree Terrace, where we had a new friend to meet.

Lou had talked about the Orange Bird in several podcasts over the years, and it was really hard for me to get a good image of him in my mind. While he was still an extinct character, he just sounded a little bizarre. But then a couple months before our trip, this peculiar fellow made a triumphant return to Walt Disney World and his association with the Sunshine Tree Terrace was renewed. Once we started seeing him in different places around the park, we quickly became enamored. The Orange Bird reminds me of Duffy—a bit of an oddball, a bit of a simpleton, and very endearing.

We also had heard rave reviews of the frozen treat the Orange Bird brought with him—the Citrus Swirl. We knew we needed to try one and decide how it compared to the famous Dole Whip.

I felt quite positive about the Citrus Swirl on the whole. Whereas the Dole Whip is pretty sweet through and through, the Citrus Swirl has a little more of a bite to it. The orange juice has some bitterness to it which is nicely offset by the vanilla ice cream. I liked it. I also liked this shirt and it quickly found a place near the top of my shopping list for this trip.

Our appetites sated for the time being, we tried to plan what to do next. Tracy did not want to get spat on by this wacky camel.

We went back to Frontierland with the ultimate goal of hopping back on the train so we could check out the new Fantasyland station. In Frontierland, however, we saw Donald in his frontier outfit and got in line.

I’m a big fan of seeing the fab five in outfits specific to different lands or parks. One of the most fun things for us at Disneyland last year was getting to see everyone in their Halloween costumes. This Donald was one of the best ones we’d encountered in his interactions with us. He liked the balloons on my shirt.

After meeting Donald, we got a bit of a shock when we checked the time. Not only had the return window for Tracy’s Space Mountain Fastpass opened, it was about 5 minutes from closing. And we were on the other side of the park. It was time to try out that fifteen minute grace period we had heard about to see if the cast members would honor her Fastpass outside the given hour. We briskly walked back to the Frontierland train station to take it around to Fantasyland.

The train pulled up almost immediately, though we were already about 5 minutes past the end of the Fastpass window, giving us only 10 minutes until we knew we would be out of luck.

We rode past Big Thunder Mountain. Still not showing any signs of opening…

We arrived in Fantasyland with literally two minutes until the end of the grace period, and Tracy had basically given up. We power-walked through Fantasyland and into Tomorrowland, however, and arrived at Space Mountain about three minutes after the grace period should have been over. We lucked out this time, and the cast member barely glanced at Tracy’s Fastpass before letting her through.

I went into the gift shop to wait for Tracy to come out the other side of the ride. While I was killing time checking out the merchandise (and getting a pressed penny), one of the survey-taking cast members came up to me and wanted to know if I would answer some questions. He wanted to know about my experience in the gift shop/arcade, and since I really hadn’t done much exploring of either, I doubt whether my opinion was a great help to the company. After about 20 minutes, Tracy’s space flight landed and she met up with me. Apparently she was in the same seat this time that I had been in last time, and she had a very bumpy ride too. I guess the back row really is more whiplash inducing. After that ride, she decided that she was done with Space Mountain for this trip as well. We were ready for something a little calmer after all that excitement, and what could be more relaxing than a ride on the TTA PeopleMover?

We got to see the train going past as we went over the tracks, which was a fun vantage point.

Suddenly, as we were going through the Buzz Lightyear area, the ride came to a stop and the lights all turned on. We waited for about five minutes before starting up again.

We were finally able to complete our circuit, and after getting off we proceeded to our next Tomorrowland destination.

This next attraction held the distinction as being one of the only attractions in the Magic Kingdom that neither of us had ever been on before. We were excited, however, because we knew from hearing about it many times that it was one of the true Walt Disney classics.

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