Magic Kingdom

I suspect that the wonder of Magic Kingdom can only truly be appreciated if you are travelling with kids.  But it still holds a special place in my heart. There's something really magical about walking under the train station and seeing Cinderella Castle towering over you. My only complaint about Cinderella Castle is that the painting seems kind of inconsistent. The bottom half has an awesome stone effect going on, but the top half is kind of meh. And then the top tower is gold instead of blue? They were painting the castle during our 2006 visit and I assumed they were halfway through changing the colour scheme. But it still has the same half-done look to it. I'm not really sure what look they were going for.

For me, the most magical part of the Magic Kingdom is Dream Along with Mickey, the show in front of the castle. This trip I found (and bought) the CD with the soundtrack for this show and just listening to it makes me cry. This, to me, is what Disney magic is about. Plus the new movable heads are awesome (new since our last visit).

Pirates of the Caribbean had been updated slightly since our last visit with the addition of Davy Jones. Last time we were there Jack Sparrow had just been added and the queue was horrendous. Much quieter now. And the drop was more impressive than I remembered.

Last time we did Jungle Cruise on the Keys to the Kingdom tour and so we didn't do the traditional version. Was good to do it with the proper commentary (although Mum tuned out and didn't realise that the skipper was asking her a question...).

We went to Hall of Presidents mainly because it had been updated quite a lot when Obama was added. It was still boring. At least it's air-conditioned and has comfortable seats, so it was a nice place to take a nap...

We also went on the Liberty Belle for the first time. This offers a view of the park that you don't get anywhere else. Unfortunately you need to stand to really see everything and I was too tired to stand up for the length of the trip. The inside seating had awesome seating, though, and Mum took lots of photos.

This photo makes me want to read Tom Sawyer again.

And I don't think you can see Haunted Mansion like this from land.

Haunted Mansion has new effects since we last went, which were pretty cool. The interactive queue trial must have ended by the time we got there though, which was a bit of a shame because from what I'd heard it sounded cool.

The biggest change in Fantasyland is obviously the long stretch of construction walls put up ready for the upcoming expansion. I'm pretty excited to see what's coming. We walked through Toontown for the last time. To be honest I don't think I'm going to miss anything there.

Snow White broke down just as we got into the ride vehicle. People talk about how they wouldn't want to be stuck on it's a Small World, but I think this could be worse. We were only stuck for about 5 minutes and since we were still in the loading area we could have just got out again, but 5 minutes was more than enough to hear the ride vehicle behind us announcing repeatedly 'Please exit to your left.' If we'd actually been *stuck* there for an extended length of time, I would have gone crazy.

Space Mountain was another attraction which had received a refurb since our last visit. I think the new version is awesome. It's much darker, so you really have no idea what the ride vehicle is going to do. From what I've read, a bigger refurb was planned but they cut back to save money. I'm not fussed though, that one change gets a big thumbs up from me. They've also added queue games but because of the timing we didn't get to experience them. The only downside of the changes is that you can't see anything when the TTA goes through Space Mountain. It felt like they'd also made the TTA vehicles go heaps faster which ruined the feel for me.

The Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor was in softs when we went last time so it was much more polished this time around. I got picked for one of the segments. The monsters asked me where I was from. I said Australia. They said that Australia was a volcanic island famous for the Eiffel Tower. They asked me if that was correct. I said yes. The look on their faces was priceless :D I'm just glad I wasn't 'that guy'.

We went to Magic Kingdom on the first official night of Summer Nightastic. Spectromagic was replaced by a slightly updated version of Main Street Electrical Parade. I was a little bit disappointed really -- I love the soundtrack on CD but it didn't quite work live. I wonder if they were still tweaking the audio levels as I think the problem was that I couldn't hear the music from the floats properly.

The new fireworks, on the other hand, were awesome. I believe they are mostly copied from the Princesses & Pirates Party (the music for that was on the same CD as Dream Along with Mickey and it sounds the same as what I remembered from the Nightastic fireworks). The fireworks effects were amazing, especially the pirate fight. I was seriously worried that the castle had been damaged :). Hope that somehow they manage to keep those fireworks permanently but I get the impression that they are more expensive to run than the regular fireworks and that's why they only do them for special events.