Tiggerfans Trip Report Part 2

[tiggerfan]

Day Three: Sunday October 8th

Check my earlier post for days 1 and 2.

I often find it funny that on vacations you often end up getting less sleep than you do when you are back home. This was certainly the case when it comes to doing the CHOC walk.

I got up around 4am, mumbling to myself ‘for the children, for the children’. After a nice but too brief shower I stumbled out to get dressed. I was lucky to be walking with my dear friend Judimouse and several of her Disney pals.

Our official plan was to meet around 4:45 to get to DL gates by 5am. But as often is the case with plans, things didn’t quite work out. On Saturday poor Judi had been having problems with her cell phone. Well I guess it picked Saturday night to completely shut down on her.

To her benefit, she did get to sleep a little later, which was good, but as with all of us she was a tad upset at things not working properly. But she made her way down to the park and we met up only a bit late.

We trudged over to the park to the light of the moon. We had considered driving but decided that given the crowds coming in for the walk it would probably be easier to walk. Much to our surprise, the early crowds were not too bad and we got into line with only a few people ahead of us.

They opened up the gates around 6:30 or so and we made our way down to the end of Main Street. I’d guess we were maybe 10 feet back from the front, so we had a great view of the main stage they had set up. While we waited Judi ran to grab herself some morning coffee, so I kept the place in line.

About 7am they started the opening ceremonies. I know people have already posted details on what happened, so I won’t go into great detail. But I did enjoy the amazing nine year old who sang the National anthem and the very cute little girl who (in the requisite lisp) thanked us for ‘hepping make me better’.

We also heard from the head of CHOC and the new President of DL resort, Ed Grier. It was his first CHOC walk and he seemed very enthusiastic. We then had a little opening ceremony bit by Mickey, Minnie and Goofy. I thought it was cute but the idea of having all of us do warm up exercises while there were thousands of us packed onto Main Street was a bit much.

We started out heading into Adventureland, following the crowd in front of us. Somehow the rest of our group never caught up with us so it was just me and Judi (or is that Judi and I). We decided to take our time and enjoy the scenery.

Heading into Adventureland we saw Aladdin and Jasmine out to wave us on, then as we made our way into NOS we got to listen to some music courtesy of the Pirates band. Moving past the HM we were greeted by Jack and Sally, the Jack was particularly good at interacting with the walkers.

Now the route took us back along the Rivers of America, where we saw more Pirates on the Columbia and Woody waving to us from the top of the Golden Horseshoe. The route now curved us past Big Thunder and into Fantasyland.

In Fantasyland we saw all of the Princesses riding on the Carousel, and I bet they were all dizzy and motion sick by the time they rode there for 3 hours. From Fantasyland we moved along the closed Matterhorn and into Tomorrowland.

In Tomorrowland we got to see the new Star Wars Jedi training characters out and Buzz waving from above. The route now took us along the side of Main Street and across the way into DCA.

In DCA we made our way through Hollywood and got to see Mike and Sully out to greet us. Then we made our back out to the main drag and headed through the other areas of the park, with a great band out to perform as well as the new High School Musical group.

Then we headed back by ToT and out the back way, so we got to see behind the scenes as they took us out into Downtown Disney and to the finish line.

(please do forgive any errors in the exact route of the walk but it was very early…)

After the walk we toured through the sponsor booths, looking in particular for the Cingular booth to see if they could help Judi with her phone, but no luck. So we moved back down to the DL gates. Amazingly there were still people coming out of DL on the CHOC walk.

I understand they had over 15,000 walkers and hope to raise upwards of $ 2,000,000 this year. So good for all who walked.

When we got into DL we quickly moved down to Carnation Café where we had reservations for breakfast. In a comedy of errors we saw our reservation move from 8 to 9 to 4 to 7 and so on before finally settling on 6.

It took us a little while to get seated because we wanted to be served by Troy, a very sweet and friendly CM. He took our orders and we sat there talking about the walk for a while.

Judi decided to make a run to Cingular since we are all addicted to our phones (sad isn’t it). The rest of us sort of split up for a while so I moved into Tomorrowland and did Buzz a couple times along with Star Tours and my once every couple years run through HISTA.

I then headed over to the hub to meet with Judi and the wonderful folks from MiceChat.

To be continued in Part 3.

Also I'd appreciate feedback on if I should continue breaking up my report into sections or post it all at once.

[tiggerfan]

Part 3 is pending, just delayed by that darn work thing.