Day Two of the D23 Magic & Merriment events at Walt Disney World began at Magic Kingdom… at 7:45 in the morning. Did you know that there aren’t even Parking Cast Members in the parking lots that early? And, did you know that if it’s foggy, it can be really hard to find your way around the mazes of the Magic Kingdom parking set up? Well, both are true.
We were escorted into Magic Kingdom as a group and taken to Columbia Harbor House where we were served a buffet breakfast. (Sorry, no photos.) We believe that the following were on the buffet, and it was all just standard WDW breakfast offerings (nothing special). We learned the day before at the hospitality suite, all of the food for in-park WDW Events is made at Epcot and “trucked” over to where the event is taking place… our table mates at breakfast (another non-crazy-fan couple from Florida, we met on the monorail earlier) were as surprised as we were that they didn’t just use the kitchen at Columbia Harbor House. The wife proposed that maybe there wouldn’t be time to get it all cleaned properly before they had to start preparing their regular food for Magic Kingdom guests?
Breakfast offerings… scrambled eggs, limp WDW bacon (it can be pretty pitiful), pale sausages, potatoes, fruit, muffins, juice, water, and coffee — one muffin was interesting, it was a spice muffin with cream cheese and apple pie filling inside
The BIG EVENT at Magic Kingdom wasn’t to be the breakfast though, it was to be a Holiday Scavenger Hunt (we had already decided that this wasn’t really up our alley, doing a scavenger hunt in a full Magic Kingdom theme park? no thank you).
We were given a “Holiday Hunt Guide Book” – we don’t do scavenger hunts as a general rule, this one had “coded answers” instead of multiple choice. Later, that evening, our new friends were happy to tell us the following about the hunt…
- A LOT of the questions had to do with the new Fantasyland (this was on Monday after Fantasyland officially opened on Thursday/Friday)
- If you hadn’t been to the press events, special previews, etc… and/or if you weren’t a huge Magic Kingdom fan, this really compounded the difficulty
- The questions weren’t arranged by “area”… in other words, all of the Fantasyland questions weren’t grouped together
- So, there was a lot of going back and forth from here to there to try and answer the questions
- Many of the questions were “attraction centric” and very detailed at that
- With the large crowds, it was very time consuming to ride the rides and see the other attractions, again, compounding the difficulty
In retrospect, we were very glad that we opted out (we headed to Fort Wilderness to take photos instead :)); it would have frustrated us and made us pretty unhappy to have tried something like this. One thing that could have helped, allowing D23 guests some access before the park opened to the general public. So out of 100 questions, how many did the winning team get correct? 90 out of 100. The teams with the next highest scores were able to get 65 or 67 out of 100 correct.
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