Thanks for the compliments, everyone.
Arvorenn, I'll try to remember to take a picture of the lanyard of power and post it sometime soon. Meanwhile, lets' continue with the trip report.
Day 11, Friday 12-10-10
Mouseoholic still wasn’t feeling well, so we blew off our original plan and stayed in for the morning. We had breakfast croissants and coffee from the Boardwalk Bakery, and just relaxed with a hot bubble bath in the jacuzzi tub. That helped get us going. We had a lunch ADR for Le Cellier scheduled for 11:30, so we got ready and meandered over to Epcot. We got to Le Cellier a little early… they don’t start seating people until right at 11:30… so we just kind of hung out and took some pictures in the gorgeous grounds of the Canada area:
Lunch was awesome, as expected. I still say they have some of the best steak on property, and the cheese soup is to die for. And you just gotta love the pretzel bread! Yum! Anyway, after lunch Mouseoholic wanted to go to AK and go on her new favorite ride, Expedition Everest. So we got over there only to find that it was “temporarily” shut down. Major bummer. But we went ahead and fast-passed it just in case, and then wandered around for a while. When we came back to check on it, they were just running some tests and getting ready to reopen it, so we waited. Sure enough, after about 5 minutes they opened it and we got right in! Didn’t even have to use our fast passes! I was a little nervous about getting on right after a shut-down, but Mouseoholic was chomping at the bit to go, so we went. Sure enough, as we left the station and started up the first hill, it broke down again… leaving us stuck on the hill! The C.M’s had to come and get us off, and walk us back around the track to the station.
Here’s some shots you don’t see every day:
Poor Mouseoholic was so disappointed that I finally drank the Kool-aid and let her buy one of those nefarious vinylmations. Look at that face… I was sure I was going to regret this (we now have a collection of four, and I’m sure it will be more
):
Mouseoholic was bound and determined to ride EE, so we hung out to see what would happen. While we were loitering near the entrance trying to eavesdrop on the C.M’s, this other couple who were tired of waiting gave us their fast-passes and left. Score! Now we had two sets of fast-passes!
Sure enough, they eventually reopened the ride and we took a chance and got on. This time it went great… no problems. Here’s a couple of “artsy” shots from the ride:
As soon as we were done, Mouseoholic wanted to use the other set of fast-passes and get right back on (have I mentioned that she loves this ride…?
), but I didn’t want to. So she went by herself and I waited down below to get a picture of her. If you look carefully, you can see her right in the very middle of the train, in a white jacket, sitting by herself:
By now it was getting close to dinner time, so we went to Flame Tree BBQ and had pulled pork sandwiches – the best on Earth, in my humble opinion – and then just relaxed and soaked in the atmosphere for a while. Then we headed back to the resort for a quick break, with the plan of going back to Epcot for the night.
When we got to Epcot, we wandered around and just did whatever came to mind. After 11 days at WDW we had done pretty much everything we wanted to do, so there was no pressure to keep to our schedule. We were happy at this point to just enjoy ourselves at Epcot for the evening. Naturally I had to go back to La Cava Del Tequila (my favorite hangout) for some guacamole and chips, washed down with a… you guessed it… jalapeno margarita:
Cousininmiami was supposed to meet us there, but we never did hear from her. Mouseoholic had texted her, but she didn't respond, so it was just us by ourselves at La Cava... but that's okay. We still enjoyed it.
By the way, let me fill in a little background information at this point: for some reason, during the entire trip we all seemed to have problems with our cell phone service. Sometimes it was hard to get a signal, or calls wouldn’t go through, or text messages would take hours to get delivered. Consequently, we had missed numerous opportunities to meet up with Amy and F1gment because of having trouble getting in touch with each other. Well, we finally did today, and agreed to meet up tonight for Illuminations. When the time came, we found them where they had staked out a great spot in front of Norway:
And now, it was time for Illuminations! We had finally figured out how to best use our camera for fireworks, and of course Illuminations is awesome, so we got some fantastic pictures. There were so many good ones that I had a really hard time deciding which ones to post. So here are seven of my favorites:
By the time Illuminations was over, the Boilers were on their way to meet up with us and help create mayhem until park closing. But Amy and F1gment had other plans, so we parted ways.
When the Boilers arrived we set out to see what kind of trouble we could get into. I don’t remember all the gory details, but I do know that we had a blast, as usual. One thing I did was sneak my camera out during Soarin’ and get some pretty cool ride shots. I had a whole bunch of good ones, but I settled on these five because this is already a pretty long post. Notice the hidden Mickey in the fireworks at the end (I was a split-second too late for the perfect shot… the head is a little stretched out already):
By the time we had created all the mayhem we could think of, the park was already closed. So we started making our way back toward the rear exit to head home. There was a very interesting thick, low cloud cover that was absorbing the light from the park and giving the sky a beautiful glow. So even though we had already taken a bunch of good night shots on previous days, we couldn’t resist getting a few more with that gorgeous sky in them:
Well, that’s it for Day 11. Tomorrow will be the last day of the trip. Hopefully I can put it together and get it posted soon.
I don't know about you but in all the times I was giving one on this last trip, no CM ever tried to explain it to me. Because of this my friend, the newbie, was very confused. The first time I got one I explained to her what it was but after about the fourth time she asked me how they knew to keep giving it to me. 
)