Chapter 43
Escaping “The Box”
(Originally posted September 20, 2012)
Walking away from the gates at Hollywood Studios, we tried to decide what method of transport to use to get to our next destination.
It was almost 5:00 and we had plans to head to Epcot for dinner. We knew we could easily walk there, but instead opted to take a Friendship Boat. We got to the dock and noticed several turtles swimming around in the water.
After waiting for about ten minutes, the boat pulled up and docked and we climbed aboard. The Friendship Boats are such a funny mode of transportation. They take so long to get anywhere and securely dock that it would almost always be faster to walk. Still, they’re nice and relaxing in the middle of a hot day.
Right about now is when our plans for the evening needed to start taking solid shape, so I need to take you back for a moment to earlier in the day. This was Wednesday, and as every faithful WDW Radio “Box Person” knows, Wednesday nights at 7:30pm are the home of the WDW Newscast that Lou does every week. Starting relatively recently, he usually does these live video broadcasts from somewhere on WDW property. We knew that if we hoped to meet up with the person responsible for us winning our trip, finding Lou during the Newscast would be our best shot. On the bus to the Studios that morning, I tweeted Lou:
@loumongello Newscast from WDW tonight? Hope we can meet up with you!
He quickly replied:
@tayalltheway Not sure as yet… Will Tweet out where I’ll be if on property and hope to see you there if so!
That was at around 8:00am, and despite checking regularly we hadn’t seen any tweets about the Newscast yet. As we rode the Friendship Boat, we thought it was funny that the captain’s name was Captain Mike. We thought, of course, of Mike Beckerman who made several appearances on Lou’s 40-hour live show in October 2011. He had been a Friendship Boat captain, but apparently wasn’t the only Captain Mike. After laughing about this to ourselves for a minute, however, Tracy and I overheard the people a couple rows behind us talking about the SAME THING! They were asking each other if they knew what was up with Mike Beckerman, saying they hadn’t seen much of him since Lou’s 40-hour show, and joking about how there are multiple Captain Mikes at the Friendship Boats. It was such a coincidence, but it really highlighted how small this Disney fan community is when it comes right down to it. It really is a small world after all… Had we not been eavesdropping, we would have introduced ourselves to the WDW Radio fans behind us, but we didn’t want to seem too creepy.
Our boat passed by the Epcot area resorts.
I want to stay at the Yacht or Beach Club someday just to be able to use Stormalong Bay.
We decided to disembark at the Beach Club rather than wait until we got all the way to Epcot. We could walk the rest of the way.
We were admiring the great views of the Swan and Dolphin across the way.
As I was walking, I refreshed Twitter one more time to see if there was anything from Lou, and suddenly this popped up:
At a table across from Ghirardelli in Downtown Disney for tonight’s WDW Radio LIVE! In the area? Come by, grab some ice cream & say hi!
We were… bummed. Downtown Disney was NOT in our plans for that evening at all… We had planned to eat dinner in Epcot, cover the part of World Showcase that we had had to hurry through on our last visit, and then make our way back to the Studios for the 10:00 showing of Fantasmic! After a few minutes of trying to figure out what we wanted to do, we decided not to change our plans for now. We would still eat in Epcot as planned and then regroup. After all, if we didn’t meet up with Lou on this trip, he was going to be in NYC just two weeks later, so at least we would be able to meet him then.
We got the requisite mouse ears shadow picture when we noticed the sun was in perfect position.
Entering Epcot through the International Gateway, we noticed that it was much less crowded than the other day we had been there.
We pretty quickly moved past France, having spent a while there on our last visit.
Moving onto Morocco, we took a seat to decide what exact order to do things in.
It was getting to be a pretty long day, so Tracy was tired.
There’s a good smile.
After sitting for quite a while in Morocco, we made our way toward Japan.
We realized there wasn’t quite as much we really HAD to do in these middle countries, so mostly we just walked through them a little more slowly. We still hurried right by The American Adventure because the Voices of Liberty were done for that day anyway…
In Italy, we decided to make a quick pit stop.
We had decided to change our dinner plans for the next night and were scrambling to figure out a replacement. Originally, our ADR for Thursday evening had been for Cape May Café. Between my aversion to seafood, however, and the fact that we had already done several buffets/family-style meals, we decided to cancel that one. In lieu of Cape May, we thought it would be fun to go to another restaurant in World Showcase. We checked the Disney Mobile Magic app and weren’t thrilled with the selection of restaurants available at the usual dinner time, so we figured there wouldn’t be any harm in walking over to Via Napoli (our first choice) and asking if they had any other reservation times available.
Unfortunately, they didn’t… So we called Disney Dining to see if THEY had access to any other times. They didn’t either.
In the end, we sucked it up and took the only available reservation time for the following night—8:15pm. We figured it was better than nothing! All of that settled, we made our way back out onto the World Showcase promenade.
At this point, I had a bit of a change of heart and brought it up to Tracy. “How would we go about getting to Downtown Disney?” I asked. She thought (correctly) that we’d have to get to an Epcot resort and then take a bus from there. “Do you really want to go?” she asked. I decided that yes, I thought that meeting up with Lou and getting to thank him for our trip while we were ON our trip was important enough for me to want to change our plans. “You know that means missing Fantasmic?” Tracy asked, knowing that Fantasmic! is my favorite of the Disney nighttime spectaculars. I reasoned that we’d seen Fantasmic! on all of our previous trips, including the Disneyland version not too long before this trip, so I could go without it.
“Well then,” we realized, “we’d better go to dinner now so we can make it to Downtown Disney STAT!”
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