Disneyworld

As we arrived at Epcot in towards the end of the afternoon, it was already noticeably quiet compared to other days of our trip, with more people heading out as we ere heading in (presumably to escape the rain).

We headed straight to Imagination with Figment, which we were able to board directly… only for it to promptly break down whilst we were in the room with the bad smell effect. As it happened the couple sharing the car with us were from the Rhondda; we had a pleasant chat with them about how Americans struggle with Welsh accents. Sadly in the other cards people were a little cross and weren’t very pleasant to the cast members. The ride did eventually move on, but with the sound track synchronisation messed up so we experienced a lot of in strange silence - but we were all given an extra fast-pass to make up at the end of the ride.

After that we we hit basically all of the attractions in ‘Future world’ with out much in the way of waits. We stumbled across a Mickey meet-and-greet with no wait, got onto Soarin’, the Land, The Seas and Spaceship Earth all in a few hours. We happened to visit the seas whilst one of the back-stage SCUBA tours was going on, so we got to see a dozen or so very unusual ‘fish’ in the aquarium tank.

By the evening things were still cold, but the rain had mostly cleared up. We headed to World Showcase, where we intended to ride the Mexico Three Calliberos ride, but found it closed, so we headed to ‘Morocco’ for a quick service meal. The food in the Tangerine cafe is good (lots of tasty hummus) but Dan was suitably appalled when asked if he wanted his mint tea iced :o. After dinner we headed to Frozen Ever After, and were able to get on after a short wait (a queue which had been 90mins to two hours most of our trip) and were out in time to get to the fastpass viewing area for the "Epcot Forever" fireworks show.

The show is 10 minutes of great fireworks, lasers, clever use of kites and unapologetic fan service, with call backs to some past Epcot favourites like horizons, the universe of energy and the tapestry of nations parade. Most of the show is set to a version of ‘one little spark’ from Journey into the Imagination. It was a great and memorable end to a day that had been really fun, despite the rain.

We shared a Skyliner gondola home with some Disney super-fans who told us about a new documentary series on Disney+. One of them was a huge fan of Rattatoulie, and was a bit dissapointed the new ride wasn't open yet in Epcot's France pavillion, so Dan gave them a pin from the Disneyland Paris version.Read more