16 May 2011: Orlando, Florida

Day after the race. After almost falling asleep at dinner the night before, we got a good, long, night of rest in and woke up around 9am. We headed out from the Beach Club to the bus stop to pick up a bus to Hollywood Studios and then realized that such a bus does not exist...transit from the Beach Club to both Epcot and Hollywood Studios is by boat. Sweet. We did not have to wait long and our Friendship boat took us up to Hollywood Studios, our favorite of all the parks at Walt Disney World. We headed right over to Toy Story Midway Mania and picked up some Fastpasses...and then waited in line to play right away. This ride has changed a bit since we were last around, and it is just as much fun as before...maybe even more so.

After riding the Tower of Terror (our most favorite ride ever!), we headed over to The Hollywood Brown Derby (a replica of a famous Hollywood restaurant) for our special lunch...Dining with an Imagineer. This is a special event where you are part of small group (12 people in our case) that sit in a small room and have lunch with one of Disney's Imagineers. Disney Imagineering is their organization that does design and implementation of pretty much anything on Disney property, from a new addition to a restaurant to a new ride. It's pretty much design/engineering/construction services for Disney. In short...my dream job. :) The Imagineer that hosted our lunch was a Project Estimator, which is basically a construction and finance job, and he had worked on many fun projects in the past couple years that he told us all about. I learned a great deal from his presentation and answers to other people's questions about how Disney engineering works. This was a really interesting experience and allowed Cin and I to get some backstage information about a very specific aspect of Disney that I was really interested in. The lunch itself was delicious and the entire event took about three hours...which was totally worth it. This is a great function and should you be interested about how the Imagineering function works and want to learn more about it, I highly recommend this event.

After lunch, we walked over to Star Tours. Now, this ride has been out of commission for quite some time as they (as in, Disney Imagineering) have been completely redoing it. The launch weekend for this was announced as being 21-22 May, right after we left. However...we learned at our lunch that it was undergoing "flight testing" ... meaning it was open. So, we hustled over and rode it...four times in a row. The cool thing about the new Star Tours is that it changes every time you ride it. There is something on the order of 50 combinations of the ride and we have multiple very different experience. The refresh is totally awesome and worth a trip to Disney just to experience. Totally awesome. The waiting queue area is also totally redone and the "security droids" are hilarious...pay attention to what is in the luggage scanners as you go by! After multiple Star Tours rides, we rode the Tower of Terror a few more times, rode the Rockin' Rollercoaster, and had a quick dinner at Pizza Planet (using one of the quick service meals on our dining plan).

We left the park a little earlier than we would have liked to in order to meet up with an old friend, Jack, and his girlfriend, who live in Orlando. We rode the boat back to The Boardwalk area and waited for him to arrive. Once they showed up, we got a table at the Big River Grille and Brewing Works (their TripAdvisor page is here), where they had dinner and we had some drinks. We did not eat much so I cannot comment on the food, but their microbrew selections were excellent...especially their IPA. It was great seeing Jack and Lauren...we haven't seen him in a long time and it was great catching up. After we were done, we walked back to the Beach Club and hit the bed...exhausted. What a great day at Hollywood Studios, a great lunch experience, and catching up with old friends.