Day 10: Hollywood Studios & Epcot

It’s Star Wars Day! No, not May 4th, but the start of Disney’s Star War Weekends at Hollywood Studios. This is the day we had been waiting for as it was the day that we’d get our faces scanned and digitally printed onto a Star Wars collectible figurine. The elation cannot be described.

But before we could get to that, after readying ourselves this morning we opened our hotel room door to find the strangest of feelings. It was cold. Where was this wall of heat we’d been used to? It was now 18 degrees outside, were we back home? Debora had to go back for a cardigan!

It was another terrible journey to Disney. The shuttle bus was over capacity, we were lucky to get on when we did, then, once arriving at the Magic Kingdom (the default drop off location), the crowds were heaving. Literally, there were queues for the monorail stretching back to the parking lot. So we stumped up the cash and got a taxi over to Hollywood Studios. This was less busy but still full of people, all lined up along the streets in preparation for the parade.

We went straight to Muppet Vision 3D which was great, but there was hardly any merchandise, really disappointing. There could have been a Muppet Whatnot workstation at least! Then it was The Great Movie Ride and after that time for our face scanning. Because we booked a time slot many months ago we were able to get straight into ‘Darths Mall’, skipping the huge line outside. We got our faced scanned and then were able to do some shopping.

We had lunch at Pizza Planet, simple cheese pizza was a welcomed refreshment after we had missed breakfast on account of the diner not being open over the road. We then spent the rest of the afternoon queuing for photo’s with Darth Vader and then got on the Studio Backlot tour and Star Tours before headed over to Epcot.

It was now quite late in the day so we got ourselves some chips from the Chippy in the British part of the World Showcase and settled in for the fireworks. These were much better than the Magic Kingdom fireworks although the central section featured a globe circling the lagoon with images projected on it which reminded me a lot of the old BBC One Title Cards.

After, we began to head back but would you believe it, the monorail wasn’t working so everyone was crammed into buses. We made it back to the Ticket Center with minutes to spare and were able to get onto our ride back – although again, squashed in. Ridiculous.