The Great Character Escapade - An AKV Adults Only Trip Report

[DisneyRegulars]

Are you ready for another crazy Disney quest? Come join us as we take on our newest challenge: How many characters can we get pictures with in a single day? This challenge is part of our anniversary trip this year. That's right, the trip where we get to leave the beast child behind! So come along on our adventure as we try our hand at a new park challenge, relax, celebrate, and (*gasp*) explore a tiny bit outside of the bubble.

The Time: July 17th- 22nd 2015

The Celebration: 13th Wedding Anniversary (Really I would celebrate just about anything if it meant I could leave my beast at home. Oh geez, I'm already sounding like an awful parent and I haven't even finished my introduction.)

The Location: AKV-Kidani Studio Standard View

The Cast: Grizzly and I

If this is your first time reading one of my trip reports, WELCOME! So glad to have you along for our journey. Feel free to comment or just say hi. Let me take two seconds to introduce ourselves.

I'm in my lower thirties, as I will be for the foreseeable future. I'm an engineering professor from Upstate NY just getting through my first year, with the tenure clock quickly tick ticking ticking away. Holy cow! I can't believe it's been a whole year already. To keep life interesting this year I have taken up BMX racing. My five year old son races, so I figured I would give it a try, and I'm totally hooked! When I'm not on the track or at work I can usually be found being bossed around by my gremlin, watching tv, or more recently coloring and staring at my crochet book wishing I could learn to crochet through osmosis, so that I could get on with making the really cool alpaca I want to make. I'm obsessed with llamas and newly obsessed with escape rooms? Have you tried these? They are AMAZING. For those of you unfamiliar, you essentially get locked in a room, and have to get out in 60 minutes by finding clues and solving puzzles. I've done two up in Niagara Falls and I can't get enough of them.

Here's what we look like. The gremlin in the middle is staying home with his Nana and Pepere.

Also joining me is my far better half Grizzly. He's a big old teddy bear. With the new house he's been busy lately installing LED lights under my son's loft bed (he only soldered his hands three times) and other cool house projects most often involving speakers. When he's not at work or being bossed around by the gremlin he can often be found watching zombie shows, making me kale chips, and generally lounging around tolerating whatever garbage I have on the TV.

Here is our general schedule, as you can see, we haven't planned too much, to allow for lots of spontaneity:

Friday: Arrival Late
Saturday: The Great Character Quest (More on this to come)
Sunday: Escapalogy (Can't wait to try out this 'Gold Standard' for escape rooms down in Orlando.)
Monday: Actual Anniversary - Dinner at Cinderella's Castle because we have never been there.
Tuesday: 8:00pm Departing Flight

Coming up in the next few days: details on our newest park challenge. Have a wonderful 4th of July. See you back here in a few days.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

So Grizzly just screeched at me for having the wrong itinerary written down. You see, I was trapped in a car for 14 hours this weekend, and nothing good can come of that. Especially when you start checking dining availability, and before you know it, you have a bazillions things on the schedule that weren't there before (well maybe just two). In two short car rides our vacation has now turned into:

Saturday: The Great Character Quest (Wouldn't dare touch this, shirts arrive tomorrow)

Sunday: 4pm Hoop-de-doo Review (pretty excited about this, never been, love all things cheesy)

Monday: Breakfast at Be Our Guest 9:25 am
Dinner Cinderellas Royal Table 7:00pm

Tuesday: 3:00pm Escapology Antidote
4:10pm Escapology Shangheid
8:00pm Departing Flight

 

[DisneyRegulars]

The Great Character Escapade Rules (Version 1)

1. The objective of the day is to earn as many points as possible by visiting characters in the Walt Disney World Parks and restaurants. For each character you meet you must get your picture taken with them, and if they sign autographs, you must also get their autograph.

2. You have from when the first park opens to when the last park closes on a single day of operating hours to complete the challenge. Character meals at restaurants before park opening are allowed, attending park closings past midnight are also allowed.

Points are awarded as follows:

3. 1 Point for each unique character.

4. For every park/setting that you meet the same character in, bonus points are earned based on the number of parks/settings the character was met in. For example, if you meet Mickey in two parks, you are awarded 1 point for the first Mickey, and 2 points for the second Mickey for a total of 3 points. If you meet Mickey in all four parks and 1 restaurant you would receive 1+2+3+4+5 = 15 points for all five Mickeys.

5. You earn a 5 point bonus for meeting the criteria of any of the following sets. For example if you meet all of the Fab 5, you would earn a bonus of 5 points:

• Fab 5: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Pluto, Goofy
• Any 5 Princesses: Aurora, Elsa, Anna, Ariel, Belle, Cinderella, Merida, Rapunzel, Jasmine, Snow White, Pocohontas, Tiana etc..
• Hundred Acre Wood: Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Pooh
• Any 3 Villians: Captain Hook, Lady Tremaine, Gaston, Jafar, Witch From Snow White, etc...
• Any 3 Disney Jr: Doc McStuffins, Handy Manny, Jake etc..
• Any 5 Pixar: Buzz, Woody, Jessie, Mike and Sully, Mater and Lightning, Green Army Men, Incredibles
• Any 5 Non-Princess Face Characters: Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland, Fairy Godmother,Prince Naveen, Aladin, Peter Pan, etc...
• Any 5 Main Street Citizens / Performers:Mayor Weaver, Penelope Prose, Scoop Sanderson, Sheila Shufflehop, Victoria Trumpetto, Mabel Mae Benaught, Igna Depoint, Hildegard Harding, Andrew Bition, Beatrice Starr, Smokey Miller, Constance Purchase, Dewey Cheatem, Eunice McGilliacutty, Frances Fermata

6. You earn 3 points for every rare character you find. Rare characters are those marked by Kenny the Pirate as "Highly Unlikely to Meet" or "Very Rare or Impossible" (listed here: http://www.characterlocator.com/?p=character_list&id=8&park=rare&parkShow=1&sortBy=1) These include: Abby Mallard, Agent Oso, Angelica, Big Bad Wolf, Bowler Hat Guy, Bullseye, Carl Fredrickson, Chicken Little, Clarice, Darby, Darkwing Duck, Emile,Fawn,Fiddler Pig, Fifer Pig, Friar Tuck, Giselle, Goliath, Hades, Herbie the Lovebug, Hercules, Irridessa, Jiminy Cricket, John Smith, JoJo, Jose Cariaoca, June, Kenai, Kim Possible, Koda, Launchpad McQuack, Leo, Lewis Robinson, Li Shang, Louis the Alligator, Lucky the Dinosaur, Ludwig von Drake, Lumiere, Megara, Mittens, Mr. Potato Head, Mr. Walrus, Oogie Boogie, Panchito Pistoles, Periwinkle, Practical Pig, Prince Caspian, Prince Eric, Prince John, Quincy, Rabbit, Remy, Rhino, Roger Rabbit, Ron Stoppable, Roxie, Sebastian, Shan Yu, Sheriff of Nottingham, Silvermist, Smitty,Terance, TRex, Vidia, WallE, Wilbur Robinson

If a character can contribute to more than one category they can count towards both. For example,meeting Prince Eric can count for both a rare character, and towards meeting 5 Non-Princess Face Characters. The exception to this is that Main Street Citizens do not count as face characters.

We have never done this before, so we might need to tweak point values to make it fun and keep the game balanced. By including bonuses for meeting the same character in multiple parks we are hoping to encourage park hopping thereby making the competition more difficult to plan for. Feel free to try this challenge too. I'm also open to suggestions for other character group bonus categories that we could include or any other rules you think might be fun.

 

[franandaj]

This sounds like a fun trip. Are these your rules for the Character meet up or did you find these online somewhere?

 

[DisneyRegulars]

This sounds like a fun trip. Are these your rules for the Character meet up or did you find these online somewhere?

We made them up. We are thinking of making a whole series of challenges actually. We had so much fun trying to do the Ultimate Magic Kingdom tour a few years back, but we wanted to try something new.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Our shirts arrived for our Great Character Escapade. I'm a little obsessed with llamas, so we had a row of llamas with one of them wearing Mickey ears. Well the Mickey ears got flagged as copyright material and were denied by the t-shirt printer, so we had to add them ourselves afterwards. I think they cam out nicely though, kind of like a hidden Mickey on a shirt. On the back is a list of 92 characters we might see with room for check marks as we see them. We really wanted a super bright color, like fluorescent green or yellow, but it turns out if you only want 2 shirts made you typically only have your choice of white or white. We felt lucky to find a company that offered gray. Only 4 more days!!!!!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Been spending these last few days frantically cleaning the house. My parents are staying in our house to watch our son. Last night was the first time I have seen the play room floor in weeks. It looks amazing. I wish my house was this clean all the time. I went to Target last night to buy some gift cards, and was pleasantly surprised to see $100 Disney gift cards for the first time. I was so thankful not to have to buy twice as many $50 ones, and am very much looking forward to less painful trips to the front desk to apply them to my account. Getting super excited now. Yesterday I spent a good portion of the day mapping out character meet and greets for our Escapade. Here's what part of it looks like:



Good grief I'm such a nerd!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Let the adventure begin...

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Alright, we have arrived in Orlando. I normally do live trip reports, but this time Grizzly and I have agreed to stay off social media and our phones in general unless we are looking up something together. It's time to reconnect. Catch you on the flip side for a full report. It's starting off well though! We had four free drink coupons for SW, and after a flight where we had four drinks, I still have four drink coupons!! Not sure why they didn't charge us, but with two more trips this year, yippee! See you on Wednesday!

 

[franandaj]

Have a great time!

 

[DVC Tori]

I love the idea of having the challenge of "how many characters can we get a picture with?"!

I'll have to keep this in mind on my next trip down to Disney !

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Ok, I know I owe you a full trip report, and it's coming, but to tide you over I wanted to share these amazing posters we picked up on our trip. I'm totally in love with them, and they were so cheap. They came in a pack of twelve, here are the first two we have managed to frame. I'm totally psyched about them! Oh, and our trip was fantastic!

 

[DisneyRegulars]

I'm going to try out writing this on my phone and see how far I get before I want to throw my phone out the window because autocorrect has taken it upon itself to make my post incomprehensible. So departure day... I got a text of our room number at 2:25 which was a total tease because our flight wasn't scheduled to depart until 7:30pm. Rafiki 7617 I think, a standard studio awaited us. Our flight was of course delayed, but we weren't worried about our rental car company closing, so it was a lot less stressful trip than other years. The four free drinks on the plane also helped to set the mood. A happy mood, happy! Unfortunately, Grizzly did not get this happy memo, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. While waiting at the Buffalo airport I got the brilliant idea to ban our phones for the trip, and that turned out to be a pretty cool idea. I tend to hide in Facebook a little too much and become completely oblivious to the world around me, so it was nice to just get lost in Grizzly again. To save time at the Orlando airport, Grizzly went ahead and hopped a van to Fox rental cars while I waited for our bags. Once I got the bags I took the next shuttle over to Fox only to find Grizzly still ten people back in line. But for $66 I wasn't entirely surprised. Then of course they didn't have any of our reserved car size, economy toaster size, so they offered us $25 off to take a Yaris. Sweet! We drive a Honda Fit and a Prius C at home, so we would have been fine with anything with four wheels. We happily drove off in our $41 Yaris, and spent lots of time making fun of its roll down windows. At least it had AC! Turns out when you arrive at the hotel past midnight there's really not much parking, but eventually after much growling we found a spot near the lobby which was good enough. Then Grizzly discovered the shower and well, sigh, his evil shower fanaticism came out. Apparently the shower didn't drain well. This normally wouldn't have been too much of an issue except we once again found ourselves in a handicap accessible room, so the shower only had about a half centimeter lip on the edge that separated the slow draining shower from turning the entire rest of the room into swamp land. Probably complete with alligators. Grizzly was not pleased. So he calls maintenance who of course says they'll send someone right away, but at 1am we preferred to sleep than wait who knows how long for a shower fixer guy to show up. Grizzly asks for them to come tomorrow morning, and this turned out to be a very poor decision that caused us much grief the next day, but you have to wait for that. Up next, after only 5 hours of sleep we tackle our Great Character Escapade, an adventure that took us to all four parks, two of which we visited twice. My plan had us seeing 50 characters in a single day. Did we make it? Did we want to kill each other? Did we manage to see the fab five in all four parks as planned? Follow along to find out.

 

[quandrea]

View attachment 111706 Ok, I know I owe you a full trip report, and it's coming, but to tide you over I wanted to share these amazing posters we picked up on our trip. I'm totally in love with them, and they were so cheap. They came in a pack of twelve, here are the first two we have managed to frame. I'm totally psyched about them! Oh, and our trip was fantastic!

I saw those on our last trip in the wilderness lodge shop. I'm getting them in October. Glad your trip was great. Can hardly wait for the report.

 

[franandaj]

Wow! 50 characters in 4 parks, we're you planning on any rides?

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Wow! 50 characters in 4 parks, we're you planning on any rides?

Rides? There's no time for rides on a Great Character Escapade! We took our character hunt very seriously, though Enchanted Tales With Belle and a ride on the train to Rafiki's Planet Watch are in the plan. Plus lots of rides on buses and monorails. If you count only buses and monorails then we rode 9 rides!

 

[quandrea]

Rides? There's no time for rides on a Great Character Escapade! We took our character hunt very seriously, though Enchanted Tales With Belle and a ride on the train to Rafiki's Planet Watch are in the plan. Plus lots of rides on buses and monorails. If you count only buses and monorails then we rode 9 rides!

That'd be tough. No people mover? No Soarin'? No Rockin Roller Coaster? How did you do it?

 

[DisneyRegulars]

That'd be tough. No people mover? No Soarin'? No Rockin Roller Coaster? How did you do it?

We had three other days to enjoy those things. We could have done the people mover, but by the end of the night we both were too exhausted to even enjoy our favorite ride together.

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Ready....Get Set....Go! Our alarm went off at the ungodly hour of waaay-to-early o'clock. We got in our uniforms, slathered our sleepy bodies in sunblock, and headed out the door to find some breakfast. McDonald's was nearby, and I can't resist the yumminess of a McGriddle, so we stopped for take-out and gobbled them up on our way to Hollywood Studios. Here's a tip. If you want free parking, all you have to do is arrive 2 hours before park opening, or 1 hour before extra magic hours. We drove right through the empty parking kiosks and parked right in the front row, third car to arrive. We found ourselves in line right behind another couple also travelling kidless for their anniversary. It was their 20th, and they were on their first trip without their kids. You could easily see in their faces how relaxed they had become by their last day of vacation. I also loved that they were at rope drop! A couple after my own heart.

Right before park opening the CM's announced that Toy Story was down. This was fantastic news becuase it would force the crowds down towards Tower of Terror and Rock N Roller Coaster, leaving the Toy Story area and it's associated characters free for us to enjoy. My painstakingly prepared schedule worked amazingly well, and by 9:00am we had met: Donald, Daisy, Chip N Dale, Goofy, Pluto, Minnie, Buzz and Woody and a particularly mischevious Green Army Man. Note to others, if you are taking a selfie with a Green Army Man, do not, sorry let me say that louder, DO NOT, give the Green Army Man your phone to help out. Before I realised what was happening Green Army Man had taken about 53 selfies in quick succession. Deleting them all was a bit of a chore, but I also learned you can take pictures with the volumn button on the iPhone, who new the Green Army Man was more tech savy then me!

First Hour's Photos:
Donald and Daisy:

Buzz and Woody:

Pluto and Goofy:

Minnie and Chip & Dale:
They said Minnie had a new dress, but I wasn't all that impressed with it.

We noticed that Chip and Dale like to get into the spirit of their parks, but Pluto on the otherhand never dressed up.

One the left, the Green Army Man "helping" with our selfie. On the right, my face when I realised what he was doing!

We quickly headed over to meet Lightning and Mater, ready to rub our autograph books on their tire for our autographs. Unfortunately, we were delayed here as the automagical tarp roller-upper failed to do any rolling-up. Woe! All I needed was a picture! We waited patiently, watching several groups on front of us give up, and about 5 minutes later, which is an excrutiatingly long wait if you have 50 characters to meet in a day, a young gentleman arrived to the rescue with a manual roller-upper device. (Long pole with crank handle).

Finally, Lightning and Mater:

We lined up early at Sophia the First, forming our own line. We were able to meet Sophia, Doc McStuffins, and Jake in quick succession. The characters enjoyed that I knew all their songs!

Sophia, Doc and Jake:

It was 9:43 by the time we got done meeting the Disney Jr. guys. Instead of trying to sneek in Phineas and Ferb, we chose to wait in line for Mickey at 10:00am. We were the first people in the line, and nobody joined us, until they officially opened the line at 9:58. We should have gone to see Phineas! Anyways, we quickly met the big cheese, wandered around the corner to check the line on Sully (oh Heck no!) and then called it quits with Hollywood Studios. We had places to be! We headed out of the park, and judging by the looks of some of the pictures we took that morning we were having a good time:
Sorcerer Mickey:

Random HS Picks:

We were only just finishing up our first 2 hours of our challenge, and already we had used up an entire autograph book. Yikes! This day was going to be expensive! After much agonized discussion we decided to drive over to Epcot from HS. This proved to be a great idea, as it only took us 12 minutes from Tapstile to Tapstile to get from park to park. Here we would abandon our car for the rest of the day, from here on out relying solely on Disney transport.

One thing I observed from this first park was that Disney was EXTREMELY timely. If they said a character was coming out at 9:30, he came out at 9:30! We watched this precise timeliness over and over again all morning. It was amazing! Unfortunately, this precise timeliness also worked against us later on.

Will we get to 50 characters? Keep following along to find out...
The current time: 10:02 am
Number of Characters Visited: 15
Number of Parks Visited: 1
Up Next: Epcot First Visit

 

[DisneyRegulars]

Our first visit to Epcot was only to meet 2 characters, Chip & Dale and Pluto. Both of these creatures were out and about and easily spottable.

Chip and Dale meet in Epcot completely naked:

Pluto also appears once again dressed as a dog:

We rushed through Epcot as fast as possible, we had no time to dilly dally because we needed to get to the Magic Kingdom before Pluto and Chip and Dale went away for the day. Pluto was only schedule to be out until 12:00pm, so we had little time to spare.

We flew through the monorail line and effortlessly transferred to the Magic Kingdom. It seemed that the Disney transportation system was doing everything it could to get us to our destinations today. Our longest transfer all day was a little under 30 minutes tapstile to tapstile.

The current time: 10:43 am
Number of Characters Visited: 18
Number of Parks Visited: 2
Up Next: Magic Kingdom First Visit