It’s trip report time once again! Check out all the posts from this report here. Onward!
After a successful Wine & Dine 10K, Erika and I hit the showers, waking up late arrival Becky in the process but she seemed okay with it. 😅 Normally I like a nice nap after an egregiously early runDisney wakeup call, but as we needed to go to bed early for the half the next day, we elected to skip it and head straight out into the park.
The park in question? Epcot! When you stay at a gondola resort, it’s so hard not to stick to gondola parks, and our time at Pop Century saw no exceptions.
Our first order of business was to check out the new Moana – Journey of Water attraction. This little walkthrough is super cute! I wouldn’t skip Cosmic Rewind for it, but the water features and greenery are gorgeous. The musical water alone could entertain me for hours, and the group wave is fun. The Te Fiti topiary in particular is lovely. Oh, and if you’re concerned, you really don’t get that wet unless you’re trying to.
From there we made the logical transition from the water to The Land, where we rode the newly-reinstated (and superior!) California version. I’m pretty sure we also rode Living with the Land? I mean, I was the Sullen Tomato Girl just that morning, after all.
While we were in the area, we also stopped by The Seas to get our pictures with Finding Nemo characters. We had to, you see, as we were rocking our awesome Nemo Disneybound outfits!
Next up? The Epcot Food & Wine Festival booths, of course! Obviously there’ll be a dedicated F&W food review post coming. I am nothing if not predictable.
Once temporarily sated by festival snacks, Becky peeled off to pick up her bib from the expo. Erika and I kept the food booth party going for a bit longer, then chilled in a shady corner for a bit – it’d already been a pretty long day!
Becky texted at one point to report that the last-expo-day bib pickup line was nuts, but she was back in the park in short order; we met her by the International Gateway just about as we were being called back for our Cosmic Rewind virtual queue time. (I picked up a boarding group on the race bus that morning – turns out sometimes I can multitask!) For this iteration we wound up with “Conga,” which is not my most favorite but it’s certainly better than some other possibilities.
We met up with a friend of Becky’s briefly before it was time for our Shiki-Sai reservation over in Japan. Review to come!
And then we went straight back to the hotel, as we all had an early morning race wakeup call to look forward to. Although we did stop briefly to investigate the gateway gift shop. I feel like that store often has a more interesting variety of items than others?
Back at the hotel we futzed around with our respective preparations, setting out costumes, chugging water, and eventually sleeping… in theory.
Erika and Becky slept. I laid down to sleep, at which point my body thought hey – you know what would be fun right about now? A panic attack! So I spent the next couple hours freaking out, which was fun. But eventually I did fall into a not very restful sleep for a couple hours.
Was it enough hours? Tune in next time find out – my Wine & Dine Half Marathon recap is coming up!
Don’t forget, you can follow FRoA on Twitter @fairestrunofall and on Instagram @fairestrunofall. If you have any questions or thoughts, leave a comment or email fairestrunofall@gmail.com. See ya real soon!