This is part 3 of our Disney World Vacation. Catch up on post 1 and post 2.

Disney World Vacation (Post 3)

At this point we were hitting our Disney stride. The rains were getting annoying, but that was the about to be least of our problems.

Day 6 (July 01, 2021) – Bowling, Friends, and Rain

We planned this to be a nice slow day. Everyone slept past 7 am and had a nice slow morning. We headed over to Disney Springs around 1030 and met some friends from Tampa for bowling and lunch at Splitsville. We had a nice visit. The food didn’t really blow my wig off, but it was reasonably priced for Disney Springs. After bowling we all strolled around Disney Springs for an hour or so. Our company had to get back on the road. We sent them off and headed back to Fort Wilderness and Maddie.

We came back to the trailer and enjoyed some more quiet time and watched several patches of rain come and go. The sun finally peeked out so we jumped on our bikes for the pool. After about an hour, the sky darkened and the wind picked up. The kids hurried out of the pool, we grabbed all our stuff, and we jumped on our bikes.

Just as I was putting the last bungie cord on the tarp over the bikes, the skies opened up. It rained very steady for the rest of the night. We stayed hunkered down and cooked in the camper.

Day 7 (July 02, 2021) – Hollywood Studios and Epcot

Planning for Elsa, Not the Disney Character

Since we arrived at Disney World, the news was warning about the possibility for Hurricane Elsa to hit Central Florida. The cone was very wide and looked like the storm could potentially miss landfall all together.

Hollywood Studios opened up at 9 am this day. So we spent a few hours in the morning weighing options. Our original plan was to stay at Fort Wilderness for 10 nights and go to the parks for 6 days, then head to Port Canaveral for some beach time. We looked around at some options and booked a back up stay in Gulf Shores. We also moved our Disney World park reservations around so we would use all of our 6 day tickets and spend the rest of our time at Disney World lazy at the Fort. Elsa’s path was still quite unknown, but we decided we didn’t want to get caught hastily running away from the storm with no where to park.

Hollywood Studios

We started the day off hitting some of the big rides since the lines were still low just after rope drop. Our first stop was Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway (one of the family’s favorites for the whole trip) and then over to Toy Story Land for Toy Story Mania and Slinky Dog Dash. Of course, we started dealing with intermittent rain again. Fortunately we had a lunch Advanced Dining Reservation (ADR is Disney World speak) coming up at another family favorite, 50’s Prime Time Café.

This time, “grandma” was fun and made our meal. “Grandma” wasn’t as feisty as our “aunt” from our last visit, but she still kept all of us “kids” in line. She did come around and hand out “clean plate club” stickers to Jack, Erin, and Will, but took Will’s and gave it to Jack when Katelyn revealed that Jack ate a piece of Will’s chicken for him. Of course, Katelyn was promptly admonished for being a tattle tale. All in good fun. It was funny to see the kids sit up straight and over emphasize all of their table manners when she came around because they watched her give another table the business earlier in the meal.

After lunch, we made our way to a few more rides until we had enough of wet socks and darting between cover when it really started raining. Around 2 pm we grabbed a bus back to Fort Wilderness to dry out in Maddie.

EPCOT

After hanging out at the camper for a few hours the rains cleared for the rest of the day. We headed for EPCOT as it was the first night that the weather was good for fireworks (Disney World resumed fireworks shows on 01 July, 2021 as COVID-19 restrictions eased). Our last trip to EPCOT, Test Track was shut down off and on. So Test Track was our first stop.

After Test Track we headed over to the World Showcase to grab some snacks and scope out some real estate for the fireworks. We walked the whole perimeter, stopping at Mexico for the Three Caballeros, and then settled near Canada to watch the show.

The EPCOT Forever didn’t start until 10 pm. It was nice to see fireworks at Disney World again but that was a late night. The kids enjoyed the show and thankfully the line for buses back to Fort Wilderness were easy.

We got back to the camper pretty late, but we planned to sleep in some so we could get another late night in the next day. Thanks for reading along.

-See you out there.