Magic Kingdom: Disney World’s Crown Jewel (Part Four of Five)

Our last three days at Disney World, our trip was mostly focused on the Magic Kingdom. That wasn’t necessarily by design initially; I used crowd predictors to pick parks for each day, and our Magic Kingdom days ended up getting pushed to the end of the trip.

Thursday morning, we were able to get the kids up and fed in time to be able to get through security at the Magic Kingdom in time for a 9 am “rope drop”.  My daughter loved the welcome show, but my son and I found that it was a great opportunity to make a dash for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train at opening. The wait turned out to be only about 15 minutes.  We then got another ride in at Buzz Lightyear then redid Splash Mountain.  I checked the time and realized that at park opening, my son was able to redo his entire first afternoon in less than an hour with much less standing in lines.

But as the morning went on, the lines started to get longer. We took our obligatory ride on “it’s a small world” which is just as annoying as you might have expected. (The best solution I’ve heard for this ride is to bring your own headphones and pipe your own music in over that damn song.)  Then came lunch time and my daughter’s favorite part of the trip: Lunch at Cinderella’s Castle. This is probably the most popular character meal at Disney World, and certainly the nicest setting. It’s so nice, in fact, that I had to prepay for everything when I made our reservations 180 days earlier.  I only paid for my daughter and I to go; I figured my son had zero interest in seeing princesses.  (And I had even less interest in spending $60 to listen to him complain.)  He and his mom went and ate waffles for lunch at Sleepy Hollow; from what I could see, her lunch looked better than mine.  I had a roast pork served with some fancy beans… yep, an attempt at a high-class pork and beans, all for my $60+.  For what it’s worth, my daughter loved her “royal” chicken nuggets.

This is where I repeat:  You don’t go to Disney World for the food. And this lunch wasn’t about the food (although the chocolate pie I had for dessert was really good), but about my daughter meeting the princesses. And she adored it. What surprised me were the number of adults eating lunch there without children, but another thing I learned at Disney World is that everyone kind of becomes a kid again.  While we were eating,

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