Space Mountain Down for the Count

Just back from a quick trip to Florida where my wife and I (for the first time sans little one since before she was born) spent the weekend camping at Fort Wilderness and enjoying the LATE hours many of the parks were open coming off the busy Easter break.

Friday night and last night both saw the Magic Kingdom open until 3 AM for Extra Magic Hours!!!! Ouch if you were on duty. We didn’t make it past 1 (light weights that we are these days). Strangely however, and as Len Testa pointed out recently on the WDW Today podcast, Disney must be having a hard time getting the crowd levels right and if the crowds we saw are indicative of what’s going on, this is going to be a VERY BAD quarter for the TP&R guys as well.

Len and Fred’s Crowd Calendar gave estimates this last weekend of attendance being a 9, which means very significant waits for rides. However, my wife and I found the crowd to frankly probably never have been much above a 6, 7 at most in the early afternoon across any of the four parks (we saw peak waiting times in the 60-70 minute category, but nothing more). Ample parking, plenty of long hours and more than enough time to see what ever we wanted.

I can’t BEGIN to count the number of times we started in the FastPass line only to switch to the non-FastPass line to conserve them for a future date because we didn’t need to use them. The Cast Members WILL however take them if you come down the FastPass line regardless of the lack of people in the other line. At 12:30 in the morning no ride except Peter Pan?!?!? had more than a 10 minute wait.

We also had a chance to poll many of the folks in Tomorrowland on any information about the Space Mountain re-hab… not a lot to go on, but we did get this out of one cast member (my paraphrase):

• NO audio an no new track system ala California
• updated loaded platforms with gates
• upgrades to the queue and overhead affects
• mostly updates to address control system updates to increase the reliability of the dispatch and control systems. Currently the ride is very difficult to recycle from cars that miss their dispatch window, and that causes lots of downtime
• focus on ‘keeping it authentic, since it’s the original’

Don’t know how well this person knew what was going on, but it was a pretty detailed list.

Oh, and got evacuated from Big Thunder this past weekend. Fun.