The Frog That Says 'Meh'
So when we last left off Jem and I were leaving Main Street and headed towards Fantasyland. We were trying to beat the rain and ended up at dinner way too early to check in so we scurried down towards Gaston's tavern for cover. We hid under the umbrellas set up for the Photopass photographers that are lucky enough to hang out with Gaston. I took a few pictures:
DSCN0206 by
wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
And while we were standing there a CM walk past to go backstage. She told me that she liked my shirt. Me, being me, kind of just assumed that she was talking to Jem. Jem gave me a very pointed look; she was wearing a dress and I was being oblivious, as usual. I was wearing a purple tank top with Meg's outline that had her I'm a damsel, I'm in distress, I can handle it line on it. Once I realized she was talking to me I called out a hasty thank you to her back. I don't know if she heard me so, a belated thank you, Miss CM, for the nice compliment.
We finally had killed enough time and trekked over to dinner before the sky opened up like it was threatening to do. I popped in line to check us in, and we were quickly ushered down and told we could wait inside so we didn't get rained on.
Can you guess where we were going?
DSCN0208 by
wildvictorian, on Flickr
DSCN0209 by
wildvictorian, on Flickr
If you didn't guess Be Our Guest, then I want to know what other restaurant has gargoyles because I want to go to there.
We were sat after about ten minutes or so of standing and just in time too the skies started to open just as we slipped into the castle walls. We were seated by a southern young man who was completely baffled by the fact that we lived in a suburb of Boston (the most common phrase I've heard throughout college and graduate school was but you don't sound like you're from Worcester/Boston/America) and we chatted amiably as he showed us the different rooms as it was our first time there. We were seated at a two-top in the ballroom near the West Wing and our waitress quickly came.
As you'll notice throughout, I basically never took pictures of Jem's food. This isn't because I was being polite or anything I actually only took pictures of my food to send the pictures to my parents. My mother and I share pictures of our food whenever we're in Disney. It's our way of putting an image to the description of the food that we give each other, and we can know if it looks like something we'd like to eat next time either of us goes to Disney. This is also my way of saying that some of them are pretty blurry and horrible too. Because my mother doesn't care she just likes to know what I'm eating.
Oh! And this might be a good place to tell you we got the Deluxe Dining Plan. We like to eat. A lot. For two small young women we are big on the food. We had originally gotten the regular
DDP but after a lot of agonizing we upgraded. For us, it's great. But that's only because we like to use our meals as our break times though it's not so true about the summer, whenever we go in March/April we tend to never go back to the hotel until we're ready to drop for the evening, so our meals are our time to sit and decompress for an hour or so. We also really like TS meals more than CS so for us D+DDP makes sense.
Anyway! Back to the TR!
For an appetizer, Jem got the French onion soup. She really enjoyed it. I'm not a connoisseur of the French onion soup. When we went for dinner at Chef du France for our friend's 21st birthday I got lobster bisque while the other two got French onion soup. But she said the soup at Be Our Guest was nice and cheesey.
I had potato/leek soup:
It was good. I enjoyed it. I don't think I tasted too much of it by the time we got in I was starving. It was really good with the bread service though. I'm a big fan of dipping bread in soup. Nom.
Our entree showed up fairly quickly afterwards. I think we were still finishing our soup when it appeared, that's how quickly it was. Jem got the pan-seared salmon on leak fondue and enjoyed I.
I got the thym-scented pork rack chop:
The au gratin macaroni was different, but good if I bit dry. The meat was delicious one of the better pork chops I've had in a while. And the green beans were yummy. There was red wine au juis in that small cup on the platter, and the meat was great dipped in that. I just put a forkful in at a time so I could have some with more or less depending on my mood.
We decided before we showed up at Be Our Guest that day that we weren't going to try the Grey Stuff for dessert because we had heard that the Master's cupcake was a better use of it than what they had at dinner. Jem ended up getting and enjoying a lemon cupcake while I got:
A strawberry cupcake. It was really yummy but at the same time I love anything with the word dessert attached to it.
We paid our tip and wandered around a bit. Neither of us had ever been inside before. Last year we tried to get to Be Our Guest but because our trip was planned too close. So this time we took full advantage of the fact that we could look at everything.
DSCN0210 by
wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
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wildvictorian, on Flickr
After our quick tour we got in line to meet with the Master of the castle. (Ah, that was originally master of the house but my brain continued and I had to stop.) We took pictures with the Beast but I'll admit after getting up at 2 am and being on the move continuously for something like sixteen hours at this point we were not the most attractive people ever so I'll spare you. I did snap this fun picture of the suits of armor while we were waiting in line to try and recreate a similar picture I took at a church in Dublin a handful of years ago:
DSCN0254 by
wildvictorian, on Flickr
This is pretty much where the pictures for the day stop (sorry! I get better as the week goes on, promise!). We walked out into a wet but much more tolerable Magic Kingdom somewhere in the vicinity of 8ish. We meandered through Fantasyland but everything was still pretty busy, so we hung a left into Liberty Square. Haunted Mansion's wait was 20 or so minutes so we hopped in there. Minus some of the worst bottle-necking I've ever seen (the entire 20 minute wait was trying to squeeze two roomfuls of people into one queue again) we had a good ride and were glad we had gotten to do it on our first night! It's one of our top must do rides every time we're in MK and we were a bit sad we hadn't gotten to do it all day.
The parade route was clogging up pretty horribly (a theme for every time we walked through Frontierland) as we were coming out of Haunted Mansion so we took the rather slippery widow's walk route over to Big Thunder. Riding Thunder Mountain at night is my all time favorite thing to do in Magic Kingdom, so when the line was under forty minutes Jem suggested we get in and enjoy the ride. And enjoy we did! Someday, I'll take pictures of the view you have at night, but every time I'm on I just get too wrapped up in how pretty it is to remember pictures. Also, you know, roller coaster.
The parade was just about to start when we got out and we barely made it over to Adventureland.
Truth talk time: I hate Main Street Electric Light Parade. Honestly. I would give anything to avoid it and its music. It was a novelty to see when it first came back, but I'm over it and I mourn the loss of Spectromagic every day. I grew up with Spectro. (I do like the Japanese version of MSELP though). Jem feels pretty much the same way since 60% of our trips to Disney have been together, so neither of us were upset with missing it.
Pirates had a ten minute wait so we easily got on. The father behind us in line was trying to keep his rapidly fading kids awake to do this one last ride before they headed home. He was reading all the signs to them, and when he got to the Spanish explosives containers he mispronounced it as explosive-o's. Jem and I started cracking up. It sounded like a cereal, so we started making up a commercial for it.
We got up to the front of the line and the woman shoved us into the front of the boat with a woman and her adult son. If someone suggests this to you, even if you are two tiny women (we are not Jem is, I'm a fairly average-sized young woman) don't do it. I was shoved next to the other woman and was very uncomfortable the entire time. Jem was on the left-hand side of the boat. When we went down the hill, she didn't just get wet she was as wet as she got on Splash the next night and was yelling I ate Pirate water! I told her she was probably immune to a ton of diseases now.
We continued down our very cramped boat ride through the Caribbean and played the bumper boats game. The kid in front of us who was about 4 I'd say started putting his hand into the water, right next to the mechanics, and the boats kept shifting and moving. When the mom didn't say anything and we began to lurch forward I think all four of us panicked at the same time remember this is like 2 weeks after the man got his hand caught in pretty much the exact same spot by doing the same thing because at the same time Jem, the mother/son duo, and I all blurted out get your hand out of the water! and scared the kid enough to pull his hand out. His mother turned around to us looking peeved and yelled it's fine! in a very irritated manner. I usually hate doing that kind of thing but it just slipped out. We tried to explain about the guy and his fingers and everything but the mother wasn't interested.
It was around 10 when we got out of the Pirates giftshop. Jem's shoes were soaked and we were both exhausted so we headed back to the hotel. We didn't have to wait that long and we were some of the only people on the bus at that time, since everyone was waiting for the fireworks, and we were the first stop!
While we were walking back through the parking lot to our room the frogs were singing. There was one that sounded like it was saying meh; the father walking behind us said to his daughter that it was a frog just like her. It was an adorable little moment!
As we walked we ended up having to walk around the Jamaica section for a good ten minutes before finding our room again. We had taken a turn in too soon since all the buildings look the same and we've never been there before. We finally made it back to our room just before 11, showered, and put ourselves to bed we had a really early day the next day!
Before I go, I want to leave you guys with two pictures I forgot to upload earlier. Like I (probably) mentioned, our room was newly refurbished. For anyone curious, this is what it looked like:
(I had claimed my bed with my Duffy, in case you were wondering)
