After Epcot I park-hopped to the Magic Kingdom (via the monorail) where I was immediately hit with a wave of Disney holiday wonder and delight.
It was the opposite of my Epcot experience where I’d arrived planning to take it easy and ended up doing All The Things! At Magic Kingdom I arrived with a list of rides to check off but realized that nothing was going to be as good as marinating in decked-out Main Street. (Plus I hadn’t realized that Star Tours is at Hollywood Studios.)
I got there just as the characters from Frozen, Tangled, and Princess and the Frog took to the castle stage with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, and Goofy for a pre-parade concert. (The castle has a 50 on it because Disney World has been celebrating its 50th anniversary since October of 2021 and will continue to do so until March of 2023.)
You can’t wait for the parade without a snack, so I put in my mobile app order at Casey’s Corner, and they had it ready by the time I got there.
This is the Plant-Based Loaded Slaw Dog from Casey’s Corner. It’s vegan sausage topped with pickled slaw, barbecue vegan aioli, and roasted corn relish. It came with two mandarin oranges! It was definitely the best thing I had on this year’s Disney World adventure. I would have gone back for another one the next day (but I ran out of time). Since there were no tables at Casey’s Corner I got to camp out on the (fake) grass and have a picnic.
I did ride some rides! I snagged a Lightning Lane time for Pirates of the Caribbean, and I waited in the standby line for Big Thunder Mountain (which wasn’t too bad–I managed to beat the post-parade crowd for a relatively short wait).
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