As my husband Dave and I were planning our trip last November, we kind of accidentally made it into the Great Disney Food Tour. We really love to eat (doesn’t everybody?) and Walt Disney World has become a food lovers paradise over the last several years. Our trip would consist of four parts: a Magic Kingdom resort crawl, our first Disney Cruise, a Disney Springs food crawl and a spin through the Epcot Food and Wine Festival.
After dropping our bags at our resort for the night, we actually started our resort food crawl with bread service at Sanaa. This restaurant features the art of African cooking with Indian flavors and it can be found at the Animal Kingdom Lodge – Kidani Village. The Indian-style bread service
comes with three types of naan and nine accompaniments, from sweet mango chutney to spicy red chile sambal. This was a little more adventurous for me but I had heard a lot of good things about it and I knew my husband would love it. I tried six of the dips/sauces and found a couple I really liked. I’m not a big fan of spicy foods so that was as much as I could handle. Dave, on the other hand, tried all of them and especially liked some of the spicier ones.
Our next stop was the Wilderness Lodge to have some Smoked Mushroom Soup at Territory Lounge. Unfortunately, we would only have drinks at this stop as my timing was just a bit off. They opened at 4pm but don’t start serving food until 5. Since we still had many stops to go, we just had drinks and moved on.
You may have noticed that I didn’t label this as a Monorail Crawl and that is for two reasons. One, we were including the Wilderness Lodge on our route, which is not on the Monorail line but is a Magic Kingdom area resort. And two, we would need to visit the Monorail resorts in the opposite direction as they are on the Monorail Resort Line because we wanted to catch the Electrical Water Pageant from the Polynesian Resort.
After catching the Fire Rock Geyser on the lakeside of the Lodge, we caught a boat to the Magic Kingdom from the nearby dock. Once there, we made only a brief stop for some photos and then changed boats to head to the Grand Floridian. Here we shared an entrée at the Grand Floridian Café and took the opportunity to take in the holiday decorations and almost life-sized gingerbread house. We also checked out the newly-opened Enchanted Rose lounge. Themed after Beauty and the Beast, this new space is stunning! Now back to the boat launch to catch another vessel to the Polynesian Resort.
As we headed up to the main lobby, it started to mist. Keeping our fingers crossed that’s all it would be, we made our way to Trader Sam’s Grog Grotto. This fun tiki bar can be difficult to find as it’s just a single door without too much fanfare. Once inside however, it’s like being transported to a bar on the shores of some remote Pacific Island. If you order the right drink, you might get a little show! Feeling a little lighter, we headed back to the dock to watch the Electrical Water Pageant. This cute show has been performed nightly on Bay Lake since the 70s! It was also the inspiration for the Main Street Electrical Parade. We did get a little damp as the weather continued to deteriorate, but we did as one does at Disney, we carried on. Now it was finally time to board the Monorail and head to our last stop: the Contemporary Resort.
The goal at our last stop was to watch the fireworks from the California Grill, located at the top of the resort. We went to the check-in desk to see if we could go up to the lounge to have a snack and wait for the fireworks. We were told the lounge was full but that if we waited nearby for just a few minutes, they would let us up just to watch the nighttime spectacular. Once we arrived on the 15th floor, we headed to the outdoor balcony. Now, unfortunately, it was still a bit rainy, but since we had already gotten wet, we stuck it out and enjoyed the show.
I hope you have enjoyed our adventures so far. Stayed tuned for part 2, coming soon!
Heather Brookshire
The opinions within this post are my own and no financial compensation was provided in exchange for this review.
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