Chapter 34
Sunsets Are Prettiest in Disney World

(Originally posted August 25, 2012)

After our merry go-round, I decided to try my hand at pulling the sword out of the stone.

Alas, I was not meant to be king, so it didn’t budge. We made our way around the castle as we started leisurely toward the park exit.

Tracy stopped to throw a coin in the wishing well.

We stopped for a few dusk Photopass shots.

Then we took a few pictures of our own.

Tracy nuzzled up to her favorite Disney pup.

And we both exhibited our newfound love for Dumbo by posing with his statue.

As was our habit, we stopped for multiple Photopass photographers as we ambled down Main Street.

We got one of them to take our picture facing the other way, so we got a different view from the usual castle.

We needed to stop at the photo center on the way out to get our parade photos loaded onto our card and pick up our free print. On the way, we made a small detour to find the Lady and the Tramp paw prints outside of Tony’s Town Square.

When we were in line at the photo center, a precocious little girl in line in front of us told Tracy she liked her Duffy ears. After Tracy thanked her, the girl continued, “Yeah I guess I like Duffy all right.” Tracy chuckled and asked if the girl had a Duffy bear. She said no and asked if we did. Tracy said yes, and as the girl turned away we heard her mumble “Lucky!” under her breath. That became another one of the things we often laughed about for the rest of our trip. We got our photos loaded and looked through them as we tried to pick out a good one to get for our free print, and after we decided on one, we made our way out of the Magic Kingdom.

Earlier in the day, we had gone back and forth so many times about whether we really wanted to give up our evening in the Magic Kingdom so as to keep our next ADR. We actually had it in our original plan to leave the park at around 5:30 to go to Fort Wilderness and take the 7:00 wagon ride around the campground. At around 4:00, however, we decided we didn’t want to give up that much park time. Plus, we figured, it would still be sunny at 7:00 and since it was such a hot day, we didn’t know if we would just end up sweating our way through the wagon ride and not really enjoying it. So it was with a heavy heart that we decided to abandon that part of the plan for this trip. What I would really like to do would be to visit during the Halloween season some year and take the Haunted Carriage Ride. In general, I bet the carriage rides are more fun when it’s a little cooler out.

We did decide to keep our dinner reservation, however, so after leaving the Magic Kingdom, we didn’t go toward the monorail or buses, but rather headed toward the launch boat to Wilderness Lodge.

We had to wait for about ten minutes for the boat to pull up, but while we were waiting, we got to see this whole area at dusk, which was really beautiful.