Day 6: A "Magical Moment" to End All
"Magical Moments" and Transfer Time - PART 1
...Okay, so when I last left you we were seriously sleepy, I was quickly becoming sick as a dog, and we were off to sleep with visions of sugarplums, a few last-minute Disney adventures, and some Universal fun on the way...
So I was dumb to try to cram so much into the previous day, but I'm not totally crazy. I booked our breakfast reservation at Boma for a bit later that morning to get a little extra sleep. But the only downside was that the service and the freshness of the food at 8:45ish could never quite stand up to the 7:30 experience. Good to know. We still had a great meal all things considering, and then headed back to the room to pack. Once everything was packed up we left our bags with Bell Services—I had never done this before. So easy and convenient!—and left for some last-minute magic.
I had left this day pretty open in our plans to see what we wanted to do. Our only contraints were a lunch at T-Rex and a dinner back at Boma when we picked up our bags. Initially I'd wanted to try to get our missed Typhoon Lagoon experience in here somewhere, but we both ended up deciding that our disappointments from our Animal Kingdom outweighed that, so I booked us a FP that morning for the safari, and one for Nemo (my favourite live show of all time at WDW, which we'd also missed) for the afternoon. It seemed pretty busy to cram it all in that way with Disney Springs in the middle, but it was the only way that would work.
When we got back to the Africa section, you'll never guess who we ran into again!!...
In the words of the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor crew: "THAT GUY!"
He was in the middle of a show, but he recognized us walking by and did one of those "look me in the eye" motions where you point back and forth from your eyes to theirs, and then he raised up 10 fingers. *Shudders at the thought of 10 kids when I can't even keep track of myself.*
Just after passing him by, the MOST MAGICAL THING happened. (Well, the second-most-magical thing of the whole trip if you're counting the whole proposal thing.) We were stopped by two strangers. Their names were Davis and Becky, and they rocked our worlds.
We were on our way to the safari when a man in full safari gear (Davis) stops us and the following conversation happens:
Davis: Are you going to the safari?
Me: Yes...
D: ...well...do you have fastpasses?
Me: ...Yes... (beginning to get nervous that he's about to tell me the ride has broken down, or something terrible has happened...)
D: ...Well, if you'd both be willing to give up your fastpasses...
Me: (thinking) No way! Absolutely no way! This is my LAST chance on this trip to get a possibly decent safari, and it's like my favourite experience at WDW, and we almost missed it, NO WAY am I giving it up. I don't care how selfish I'm going to sound! (opens mouth to speak...)
D: ...then you could come with us instead on a private hour-long safari in our truck where you can ask us anything you want: about the animals, about Disney, about our personal lives...
Me: ...! ...what's the catch...?
D: (laughs) There's no catch! We call it a "magical moment."
Me: (looks at N, who's looking at me like we'd be crazy to say no.) Yeah! Absolutely!
Turns out that when the guides from Wild Africa Trek have nobody booked on a tour they'll sometimes pick someone random and do a safari experience with them. We happened to be walking by at exactly the right moment and they saw our buttons. They thought it was awesome that they happened to pick some of the most animal-happy people possible, that N had even proposed at the Lodge, and that we had made a special morning trip back to AK on our very last day for nothing but the safari. And we thought it was awesome that they were so awesome.
I could write a trip report about the whole experience, but I'll try to keep it brief-ish. They took us kinda backstage-ish where the Wild Africa Trek people go to board a smaller safari truck, and we had an awesome private driver named Rene who took us around the savanna and stopped wherever Davis and Becky asked her to.
Davis was from Georgia, Becky from Delaware, and they both seemed to really love their jobs. They told us all about life working at Disney and living near Orlando, and they were a wealth of knowledge about the animals. When we were just getting settled and getting to know them I thought it would be an awkward hour with just the four of us because at first it was hard to think of questions for them, but once we got talking and taking photos the time absolutely flew!
No matter how many Disney trips I take, this will always be one of the best experiences I've ever had there, and it makes me excited to start saving up to try to do WAT on our honeymoon.