It seems only fitting that we end our week's worth of Star Tours: The Adventures Continue and "Star Wars" articles with a piece on the very attraction that inspired us to do so in the first place. We've literally been talking for months now about how excited we were for the new attraction to debut, and it officially opened for the very first time yesterday. Even though we were lucky enough to have ridden it several times before it was officially opened to the public, we were nonetheless extremely excited to get to The Park and be a part of the insanity of seeing it open to everyone. We haven't been blogging long now, and we've never been to another attraction's official opening day before, so when you put the two together we just knew we had to be there for this one!
Our plan had originally been to be inside The Park when rope-drop occurred, but we ultimately decided to take it easy in the morning and go into The Park a little bit later than planned. If you read our "challenge" in our post earlier in the week, you'll remember it was also originally in the plans to basically just "run around the mulberry bush" all day long and ride Star Tours over and over again until we collapsed, either from exhaustion or heart attack. Well, you know what they say about best-laid plans, but we'll get back to that in a minute. We wound up getting to The Park around 9:30 in the morning to this...
Greeted with madness!
It might look like it's just a mass of people moving through The Hub near the Partners Statue, but we can assure you it was not. When we arrived the line began at the back of the statue, wound around in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle a bit, weaved towards Pixie Hollow, back into The Hub, into Tomorrowland and down towards the entrance to Star Tours, back out into The Hub again, along the front of Plaza Inn, past the entrance to Star Tours and back near the Star Trader, back towards and into the overflow room, and finally into the Star Tours building itself. Sound convoluted enough for you? Yeah, we though pretty much the same thing.
Several things were already kind of working against us at this point. First, the attraction wasn't set to open until 10:30 so a long line had already had time to form. Second, the Fast Pass system for the attraction wasn't in operation yet. We had kind of counted on that to get us a few extra rides during the day, so we pretty much knew immediately that the number of times we were going to be able to ride were going to be drastically reduced. But, ever the intrepid adventurers and gluttons for punishment that we are, we jumped into line and prepared to wait.
Making our first pass by Star Tours
Amy had made it out to join us by this point so along with her and Chad's son Michael, the waiting commenced. We wish we could candy coat it and make it sound like it was the most exciting thing we had ever done, but there's really not much to say. We wound around the area for the next three and half hours before we were finally able to board. We spent the time tweeting, blogging (some of which you may have read), talking with some people around us, engaging an awesome Cast Member named Sam who was running part of the line at the time, and just enjoying the atmosphere. Even though we can't really say moving through the line was exciting, the atmosphere was very much so, if that makes sense. We loved listening to people, chatting it up, and the excitement in the air was palpable. Even though the line was huge and the wait was long, people were genuinely excited about riding Star Tours for the first time, and it was an awesome experience to be waiting alongside them, excited just like they were.
Some of our favorite art in the overflow room - The StarSpeeder 1000
Even now we long for a trip to Alderaan!
They promised Rex and delivered. Too bad the poor guy has been labeled "defective".
Mark, Amy and Michael get ready to board!
We didn't get to spend a whole lot of time in the queue taking pictures yesterday (once inside the line moved
very quickly), but we did notice a few things we hadn't before. Rex talked! Well, sort of. Since he had been labeled "defective" he kind of stuttered a lot and repeated himself over and over (just like a broken droid would), but it was definitely a nice touch! We also got a big kick out of the droid in charge of checking the luggage on the left as you move through. As the luggage moves along the conveyer, he inspects the inside of each piece with an x-ray machine and there's some pretty funny stuff going on in some of those bags. We won't spoil it for you, but be sure to keep an eye out for it! And there's a Hidden Mickey in this room as well! We'll say more about it when our friends from
FindingMickey.com have had a chance to see it for themselves, but it's really cool so keep an eye out.
We made it through, got our glasses, watched the pre-flight video and hopped aboard. Amazing atmosphere in the cabin during that first ride. People were obviously truly excited to be on board, and there was a ton of clapping, yelling, screaming, and laughing going on. It was awesome to be a part of it all. Unfortunately, other than seeing a different "Rebel" on this ride (we saw Admiral Ackbar finally), we didn't get to see any new planets or sequences. Well, Amy did, but Chad and Mark have been stuck waiting to see Coruscant or Tattooine for a few rides now. Ah well, another excuse to ride it lots in the future!
Once we were done with that first ride, we had a decision to make, though. Were we going to see our own "challenge" through and hop right back in line again, or move on to greener pastures? It was already around 2:30 at the time, and after weighing our options, and given the length of time the line still was (still 2 hours plus), and thinking about how many times we'd really be able to ride the rest of the day, we decided to move on and try to catch it again later in the night. We talked about it some later and came to the conclusion that with food being a necessity, we really would only have been to ride it one, maybe two more times than we did, so we're pretty happy with the decision that we made. We moved on to the Tomorrowland station, and railed it on over to New Orleans Square for lunch at Cafe Orleans. We weren't in line for Star Tours, but we had an awesome time hanging out, enjoying some fantastic grub, and watching 8-year old Michael really put the moves on Amy in some "Kids Meal" competition.
Days In The Park gets all competitive, Kid's Meal style!
Gumbo, Pomme Frites and Mac at Cheese at the Cafe
Amy's Monte Cristo and Mint Julep
Splash Mountain awaits
After an awesome lunch, we met up with another friend of ours and hopped into line (it was day all about lines) for a ride on another of our favorite attractions, Splash Mountain. We hadn't had a chance to ride it yet since it reopened on the 27th, so we waited the hour or so it took (seemed like a drop in the bucket compared to Star Tours) to ride and get soaked. And we meant, we got soaked. We've never been so drenched coming off of this ride, ever. Even when we rode it around 5 times without leaving our boat, we weren't as wet as we got yesterday. Amy swears (and she used to work at Splash Mountain) that she's never seen a wall of water as big as the one that nailed us yesterday, so we figure that's really saying something. We remember seeing the water rise up and over Michael's head and just making it way back along the boat. It was seriously frightening and fun at the same time. If you get a chance to ride Splash soon, we recommend it big time. They seem to have ramped the water up to an 11, and it's always a good time!
Before the soaking
Hoisting the R2 popcorn bucket - Michael was so happy!
We're happy to say that we did in fact ride Star Tours just one more time before we went home. By this point, Amy had had to mosey on but we still had a nice little group going and we decided to ride it one more time. We hopped back in line and waited another two and half hours to ride it once more. Saw nothing new this time, either, but had a fantastic time yet again. There was a huge group of "Star Wars" fans on our final flight of the night that were just loving being on board, and that made it all the more fun. Plus, riding with friends who had never ridden it before (and their little 4-year old son) made it just that much more special for us. We left The Park around 10:30 or so, only having ridden twice, but loving every minute of our day out.
Yeah, it was longer than that...
So there you have it, the official opening of Star Tours: The Adventures Continue from the Days In The Park view. The Day didn't really pan out the way that we had originally envisioned, but that's okay! We had a fantastic time (we really hope that came through), and that makes it all worthwhile. We're definitely ones that understand the importance of going with the flow while you're in The Park, and not getting stressed out or locking yourself into one thing, so for us the Day went exactly the way it was supposed to. No regrets, no sense of failure, just an overwhelming sense of "Yeah, that's what it's all about!".
How about you guys? Were any of our other readers in The Park yesterday? How many times did you brave the lines to ride? Let us know because as always we'd love to hear from you. Thanks for coming along with us!
We went to Star Tours Opening Day and all we got was this AWESOME shirt!
