Here’s my report from Saturday, March 9th:
I had spent the morning at Epcot, enjoying some of the Flower & Garden show. I left Epcot around 12:30 pm - headed back to my room to get off my feet for awhile & rest up for the evening’s DAH at Hollywood Studios. I then took a bus from Caribbean Beach to HS, arriving around 4:30 pm. I used my AP to get in, and I had 3 FP’s booked - RnR, Star Tours, and Aliens (can’t abbreviate that one, for obvious reasons!).
At 5:30 pm, I walked by Ticket Central and saw a CM standing there with the DAH wristbands in his hand, so I popped over to get my wristband on.
When the event “officially” started, I was at RnR Coaster - which I rode 4-5 times in a row. Although the pre-show was running, the doors were open, and we could just walk right on through to get on the ride. There was really no wait at all for this, at least for the first half hour (8:30 pm - 9:00 pm) that I was there.
Not being a Tower of Terror fan, I skipped that, and walked over to Toy Story Land - picking up some popcorn and water along the way with no wait.
Arriving at TSL, I saw that Slinky Dog Dash had a 30-minute wait posted. I got in the line, but it moved quickly - we were on the ride within 20 minutes. Got off, got back in line - saw that the posted wait was now at 25 minutes - and was actually back on the ride in 15 minutes. Got back in line for a 3rd ride; the wait was now “officially” at 20 minutes, but it was 10 minutes in actuality.
After three rides on SDD, I headed over to TSM - and got caught up in that ridiculous 25-30 minute wait. I’m not sure what happened here, because at some point during the wait, we were not moving. AT ALL. Now, I get that you won’t move in a standby line during the day, when they’re sending through a million FP riders - but we were ALL standby at this point, and there’s no reason for a complete 5-10 minute stoppage - unless the ride had broken down. That’s really my best guess on to what happened this evening, as we were frankly just stopped. Forever, it seemed. Finally, the line resumed moving again, and we were eventually on the ride.
After that debacle, I decided to go back over to SDD, where I was having better luck at the line moving. So, got in line with a 20-minute posted wait - by this time, the CM’s had “abbreviated” some of the queue, so you didn’t have to walk through ALL of the maze of lines. I was in the odd-numbered queue, where I could watch the boarding, when I noticed that this ride had now...stopped. Dead stopped. GAH. What was going on??!! Well, looking ahead, I could see that apparently we had a “Code V” on the ride - someone had apparently engaged in a little too much ice cream and soda pop, with some consequences. It took about 10 minutes to get the “clean-up on Row 3” taken care of, if you get my drift. This made me wonder if this is what happened on TSM - perhaps that spinning affected someone who had indulged just a bit too much in the free snacks??!!
Anyway, the ride was eventually opened back up, and I was able to ride it another 3-4 times in a row. It was now approaching 11:00 pm, so I decided to give TSM one more chance. Headed down to see a 5-minute wait posted, and it was truly a 5-minute wait - no one in line.
After that ride, I began making my way towards the front of the park...Woody & Jessie perhaps had about a 5-10 minute line at this point, and Buzz’s line was empty. He looked sad. (Not really - can Buzz REALLY look sad??)
I enjoyed taking in the ambiance of the park at night, and snapping some photos of a near-empty park.
I didn’t ride Star Tours during the DAH, as I had ridden it twice earlier in the afternoon - once using a FP, and once with a 15-minute standby wait. I decided to skip it for DAH since it was quite a bit of a walk over there.
I think this was a great event, and felt I got more bang for my buck here than I did at the MK event earlier in the week. I got to ride my two favorite rides (RnR & SDD) numerous times, over and over, with little waits. Except for the slight snafu on TSM with the ride just completely stopped, I had no issues. I would do it again in a heartbeat.