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Labor Day weekend … time for our annual mini family vacation to Walt Disney World!

We couldn’t drive over to Orlando until this morning because of Friday night high school football yesterday, but we got a relatively early start and made it to the resort area by 10:00am. We parked at the Contemporary resort (since that’s where we’ll be staying this weekend) and walked from there to the Magic Kingdom. Disney has re-organized the bag check/security setup at the Magic Kingdom for the better. Now you go through bag check far before the ticket gates (so before getting on the ferry or monorail at the ticket/transportation center or right after getting off the buses). A welcome change!

Our first FastPass was to meet Mickey Mouse at the Town Hall. We were surprised that this Mickey character was interactive! He talked, greeted us, did a card trick with my daughter, even blinked his eyes! After Mickey we went over to ride Space Mountain, our next FastPass, and then decided to grab lunch at the Jungle Skipper Canteen. After lunch we had our last FastPass for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. We also did the standby lines for Philharmagic and the Dumbo Flying Elephants. By now we had received the text message indicating our hotel room was ready so before leaving the park we caught the Muppets’ “Great Moments in History (but just the American parts)!” show in FrontierLand.

We walked back to the Contemporary, checked in, got settled in our hotel room, and then took a little time to walk around and familiarize ourselves with the resort. We stayed at the Bay Lake Tower back in 2009, so we weren’t totally unfamiliar with the grounds, but this was the first time we stayed in the main tower.

Ready for dinner, we took the monorail system over to Epcot. For the first time, the Food & Wine Festival has started in September so it was already going, not a normal occurrence for our annual Labor Day weekend visit. So it was a little crowded, and shortly after we arrived some rain rolled in so the ponchos came out (another almost annual tradition for us on this trip). We had dinner reservations at La Hacienda de San Angel so we walked counter-clockwise around the World Showcase just checking out the food kiosks and making mental notes for tomorrow. The Hooters were playing at Eat to the Beat so we watched them in the rain for a bit before heading to dinner (unfortunately we had to leave before they played “And We Danced“). We would have had a beautiful view of the Seven Seas Lagoon from our table at dinner, but the clouds and rain hampered that. Still, the food was excellent (we recommend the Crema de Elote and Agua Chile de Camaron).

After dinner we took the monorail back to the Contemporary hoping to get there in time to see the nighttime Wishes fireworks show at the Magic Kingdom from our balcony. It took us a little longer than expected, though, so the show started while we were still on the monorail. We did manage to catch the end, though.

To cap off the night, we walked over to the Magic Kingdom again for a late-night dessert. We love being able to just walk to the theme park from the hotel so we plan on taking advantage of that all we can.