Well –the title of the post gives it away, but when the day dawned, I thought it would be our second-to-last Disney day.  This is not going to be an easy entry to type… but here goes.

I made a list of what we had not yet done at the two parks and it certainly seemed like we had enough room to spend two more days there.

Our morning routine was down to a science by now, and I no longer fretted about not being first in line for rope drop.

As a matter of fact, this morning they let us all in early, and had us queue up near the castle and did official rope drop from inside.

We were so well positioned we easily could have ridden Peter Pan again without a wait, except that the lead walker in our party Got Confused and –just like that- our window of opportunity shut and it remained a one-Pan-trip.

We broke into two groups, and my group hit up a number of Fantasyland rides without waits.

The girls and John ended up getting off Dumbo one ride cycle before Nan and I .  And from the air I could see my family getting this cool interaction with Captain Hook.  Katriel especially has a fascination with Captain Hook.  Thankfully, John whipped out  his phone and recorded this encounter.

We turned around to go over to Storybook Canal for another ride, when we saw this group out together.  I have never experienced anything like this before.  They stayed out and played for such a long time that WE ended up walking away before they did.

We rode the Casey Jr. Train (which was adorable – and LONG).

The view from the train was pretty.  The park was still empty and had the fresh morning feel.

We did a few more rides in that area, and we met up again with Marie and headed over to queue for Moana.   She is the only Disney princess we had never met before.  There was some confusion after talking with a cast member and we were actually lined up in the wrong spot.  We figured it out and headed to the proper spot, just around the corner.  Three young women were already in line.  They said that they had seen us where we’d been queuing and knew we’d been there before they arrived and offered us the head spots in line.  Now – there were NO other people there, so it most definitely wasn’t necessary to insure that we’d meet Moana, but it was very kind.  We ended up chatting with these three sisters from Northern California and before the princess ever arrived Katriel was hugging them like they were her new friends. 

Moana was late.  Like, by 10 minutes.  She arrived in a bit of a rush, but fully in character.  The girls liked her a lot. 

We found the boys and headed over to DCA.

I honestly can’t say exactly what we did each bit of the day, but we chipped away at our list bit by bit.  And the boys were definitely teeming with signs of having entered the “age of unbelief.”

By lunch time they were lobbying to NOT return the next day.

We rode Guardians a few more times, and John and the younger girls did Radiator Springs Racers again.  We had some cool meet and greets with Marvel characters, and missed others in what would amount to my biggest regrets of the trip.

We watched the full Frozen show, which was outstanding, and the little girls enjoyed some of Bugs Land with Nan.

We did Turtle Talk with Crush, and visited Sorcerer’s Workshop.

Everyone but mom and Nan watched the first 15 minutes of The Incredibles 2 in the theater.

We had a neat (but time consuming) lunch where we ate from different restaurants on the Pacific Wharf section of the park.  John spent almost an hour going back to the van to collect a wire for me to recharge my phone with.

We finally got to ride the Monsters, Inc. ride as a family.

Having gotten to see all three of the nighttime entertainment offerings, we’d decided as a family that the one we most wanted to enjoy again was Fantasmic.  John had gotten us FastPasses in the morning, so we left DCA around dinner time having done a lot, but not having “done it all” and I will say there was an undercurrent of stress.  Some people were in better moods than others and some people were showing more grace than others, and that’s all I’m going to say.

We went back to Disneyland for dinner and had another knock-it-out-of-the-park meal.  This one was at Red Rose Taverne, and it was so good that Nigel quipped, “I’d come back here tomorrow just to eat this again.”

But – actually – this was the time of the night we had to decide if we were going to turn our four day tickets into five day tickets.  The boys really didn’t want to come back, and Nan was tired.  We opted not to turn them into five day tickets, and as I type this a full month later I can tell you I regret it as much now as I did a month ago.  Three thousand miles away from home and we didn’t add a day.  It was stupid.

We enjoyed Fantasmic one more time, as well as another ride or two.

And we headed to our van, saying Goodbye to Disneyland resort.