Every
year, we visit one of the Walt Disney World parks for New Year’s Eve, and this
year was no different.
Miraculously, I was not working this year on New Year’s Eve, so we had
the opportunity to brave the crowds and visit several of the parks. Our
adventures began on December 30th with a trip to Disney’s Hollywood
Studios. We saw the Frozen show,
Fantasmic, and we ate dinner at Momma Melrose’s. Unfortunately, it rained the
entire evening. Honestly, the
weather was miserable, but this terrible weather worked to our advantage.
Being insane, we left DHS, and then
we journeyed to the Magic Kingdom in order to see the fireworks. Many people do not realize this, but
Magic Kingdom offers the New Year’s fireworks on December 30th and
the 31st. The earlier
show is much less crowded, and it is the exact same fireworks. Due to the horrible weather, Magic
Kingdom was not terribly crowded.
This was wonderful for us because we strolled in and found a prime
viewing spot right in the middle of Main Street! The fireworks were amazing
because the show happens both behind the train station and behind Cinderella
Castle. There are also perimeter
fireworks during the New Year’s countdown. This is a serious pyrotechnics show, and the rain did not
put a damper on any part of the show.
As soon as the fireworks ended, we booked it to the monorail in order to
return to the TTC. We left the
Magic Kingdom at 12:05 am, and we arrived home by 12:25 am. This was pretty impressive given that
the Magic Kingdom had been enduring phase closures throughout the day.
On New Year’s Eve, we started off
with breakfast at Kona Café, which was delicious. Parking restrictions were in effect, so we could not leave
our car at the Polynesian. World
Drive was a parking lot, so we couldn’t even get into Magic Kingdom
parking. We knew that we wanted to
end up at Animal Kingdom later that evening, so we parked at Animal Kingdom and
took a bus to Magic Kingdom. There
were actually guest relations cast members waiting to check ticket types at the
bus stop because Magic Kingdom was in Phase closures again that morning. This means that guests with certain
types of tickets were not admitted into the Magic Kingdom due to capacity
issues. We have annual passes, so
we didn’t have any trouble. After
a lengthy bus ride, we finally made it to the Magic Kingdom. We used our three fastpasses, and then
we left. It was just too crowded,
and that large of a crowd does not leave a lot of room for enjoyable park
touring.
After catching a bus back to Animal Kingdom, we enjoyed the
Festival of the Lion King and It’s Tough to be a Bug. We then visited the Animal Kingdom Lodge for our dinner
reservations at Sanaa. Dinner was
delicious, and then we drove back home.
I had work the next day, and we knew that the parks would be
uncomfortably crowded by the time we arrived at any of them. All in all, we had a really successful
New Year’s Eve at WDW. However, we
planned pretty much every second of these two days so that we would not have to
endure the enormous crowds that were in each of the parks. You can definitely have fun on New
Year’s at Disney World, but you need a really good plan, realistic
expectations, and bottomless amounts of patience! Until next time, have a magical day, and keep moving
forward!
