Disney Princess Half Expo + A Day at the Parks

If you’re catching up on the weekend, I spent the weekend with Mickey, Minnie and some Fitfluential people to run the DIsney Princess Half Marathon (recap to come tomrorow!) and Tangled Family 5K.

I’ve written about the races first…because that’s what I went down for. But since I’m only part racing machine, I also hung out in the parks.

After breakfast Saturday, I headed over to the expo to pick up my race packet. This was, unfortunately, not my chariot. (A nice van driven by Ashley, one of the Disney people who worked with us all weekend was. We didn’t have the van the whole time, but it was pretty sweet to catch rides with them for some of the events.)

Held in the field house at the Wide World of Sports, this is a huge expo. (It actually wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as it looks.)

….

Compared with me two years ago here:

It was mostly your standard expo fare, save for some tutus and mini Luna bars.

And beer…obviously.

I don’t know why they had a glass slipper there. Who would run in that??

Holy bright headbands.

After the expo, I headed over to the Magic Kingdom to meet up with Meghann and Callie (one of my new fave people.)

For lunch, we used one of our vouchers from Disney at the Columbia Harbour House, one of the counter-service restaurants in Fantasyland that Meghann recommended.

I got the Lighthouse sandwich, a sandwich on multigrain with hummus and veggies.

Splash Mountain is my favorite ride in the Magic Kingdom, but nobody wanted to get wet, so we didn’t go on it.

You can tell which one is the New Yorker because she is:

1. Casper-white

2. Dying to wear a dress at any hint of warm weather.

We rode Space Mountain and then some cute kids’ rides in Fantasyland. I used to think Space Mountain was no big deal when I was younger, but now, as an old lady, I was a little scared on it. How did I used to go on upside-down roller coasters??

We got these super-awesome media passes that allowed us to get Fast Pass tickets to go through immediately, rather than having to come back. Like Meghann said, freakin’ Disney gold.

Just a little topiary tea party. And no, I did not buy the Birnbaum Disney book every single year growing up, regardless of whether we were going there that year or not. I do not know tons of random facts about Disney World.

There’s currently a ton of construction going on in Fantasyland 🙁

Oh look, more Cinderella’s Castle.

After a few Fantasyland rides, we saw the Philharmagic show, an adorable 3-D show with lots of Disney songs.

After the rides, we went over to Epcot. We’d hoped to get in a few rides before dinner, but all the Fast Passes had run out for the day, so we dragged our tired butts over to dinner early and just sat and waited for everyone.

We went to Via Napoli with all of the other RunDisney bloggers, the Disney folks, and our lovely Kelly Olexa, who started Fitfluential and made all of this happen.

A fuzzy photo, but it was so nice to finally meet Kelly after lots of emails, tweets and Facebook posts. I had fun chatting about the social media business with her and just life in general. She’s hilarious.

This picture doesn’t show it, but there were something like THIRTY of us!

Oh hello there.

We each were told to get an appetizer, entree and dessert. Heather and I were looking at the menu, and the fried risotto balls were pretty much irresistible. We had big plans to each try a different appetizer, but we decided to just both get the balls. Always just get the balls.

For dinner, I got spaghetti with veal meatballs.

After three hours of sleep, a 5K, walking around the parks all day and a big pasta dinner–oh, and a 3am wake-up call for this morning–I went back to the hotel with everyone to hop into bed.

Disney fans: what’s your favorite ride?? Mine’s Splash Mountain in the Magic Kingdom and Tower of Terror in MGM. (Which I guess is called Hollywood Studios now, but it will always be MGM to me.)