Exhausted...Exhilarated...

And...just like that, our vacation is over, and it's time to get back to the "real" world. Between 5 days at Disney world, and 4 full days at the beach, it was a long vacation, but it seemed to go by so quickly! And, of course, I took lots and lots of photos, so I plan to share some of the photos and stories to keep a record of them until I get a chance to scrap them. Between my camera, and all of our phones and ipods, we have somewhere around 4000 photos, so there are plenty of pictures and stories to share! Oh yeah, and I purchased the Disney Memory Maker (used to be known as Photopass Plus), so I actually got to be in a few of the photos myself! I truly think it was worth the advance purchase price of $149-we got over 200 photos from it-including characters, rides, and those classic park icon shots of the whole family, so that works out to less than a $1 per photo. Here are some of my family's Memory Maker "icon" shots:

Magic Kingdom:

 We arrived at the Magic Kingdom around 5pm at the 24 hour "Show Your Disney Side" party on May 23rd-which gave our "castle shot" a lovely color/glow.

Hollywood Studios:

After staying at Magic Kingdom until 5 am, we got up a little late for our day at Hollywood Studios-we didn't get started until after noon. Luckily, I was able to change most of our fast passes- the only one I couldn't reschedule a fast pass for was Toy Story Midway Mania, but I was able to get one for Rockin' Roller Coaster instead. We skipped Toy Story-90 minute waits in 95-100 degree heat wasn't even an option in our minds, and there was plenty of stuff to do and see, especially with Star Wars Weekend festivities!

We went back to Magic Kingdom on the 3rd day, and didn't do a castle shot right away, but we did get one after dark:

Love how beautiful the castle is at night!

We definitely discovered the benefit of Evening Extra Magic Hours on this day, but I will share more about that in a later post!

Epcot:

 

Spaceship Earth is pretty beautiful at night, too! Another late start for us-everyone was tired and really hard to wake up-this is the park that I would really love another day (or 3) at to explore. At least we had Evening Extra Magic hours here, too!

Animal Kingdom:

We loved Animal Kingdom, too! This was our check-out day, so we got up early, packed the van and cleared out our room, then we took the resort bus over to DAK for the day. We were running when we entered, to make our Kali River Rapids fast passes, so we got this shot at the end of the day.