Birthday at Hollywood Studios

Well, yesterday I turned 45. It’s not a monumental thing but it felt right for us to unveil an idea for a blog we have had for a while, even before we decided to pack up and move across the country! A place for us to share pictures, reviews, and even stories about our Disney kind of life. I know you are looking at the link for the site and you see disneykindalife.com but let’s be honest, it sounds better than disneykindoflife.com

This being the first post of the blog, we aren’t sure where this website will go but it does give us more breathing room than other social media platform, to construct our thoughts and share our experiences. So, let’s get onto why you are here, that is to hear about my special day — my 45th birthday.

For my birthday, I wanted to spend it at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (DHS) which is home to Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. I built up a day that includes a lot of activities. DHS plays host to some of the more thrilling attractions in Walt Disney World (WDW) including some major headliners like The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Rail, Star Wars Rise of the Resistance, etc.

To start the day off, we booked a table at Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater. This place is great, and the ambience also is top notch. This starts when you enter that dark drive-in movie theater like building right out of the 50’s in Los Angeles. You are escorted to your car where you sit and watch very cheesy but enjoyable movies while waiting for your food to arrive. I ordered the Drive-in BBQ Burger pictured here and Emma got the Pan-Seared Chicken Pasta, pictured below. The burgers at Sci-Fi are always delicious but this one is even on a higher level with their juicy and very tasty 9-hour smoked pork and bourbon-bacon jam. You may think that this would out flavor the beef of the burger, but they really complement each other nicely. The pan-seared pasta is also a delicious choice if you opt out of their wonderful burgers. The sauce they make for this pasta is very creamy and the ingredients really balance each other out. The addition of the garlic bread helps cleanup and leftover sauce as well. Both dishes are highly recommended. If you can score the coveted Advanced Dining Reservation (ADR), we recommend this place to everyone we talk to.

After the very filling meal at Sci-Fi, we decided to walk around a bit while waiting on our reservation for The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Since it was my birthday, we opted for the new service called Lightning Lane. This is a newer service Disney offers to save you time. More on that service another time. Unfortunately, when our time was called for the attraction, it went down. Since we had some time to kill, we wandered over to Lightning McQueen’s Racing Academy. Neither of us had seen this show before. Think of it as stage show hosted by Mater and a real-life cool Lightning McQueen animatronic. The show starts with Mater introducing Lightning and he is going to teach you how to race. Avoiding spoilers, I’ll just say that some trouble happens, and things get a little crazy.

With the Tower of Terror (ToT) still down, we headed over to Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular. This is a 3-scene show dedicated to everyone’s favorite archaeologist, Indiana Jones. The show essentially gives you a behind-the-scenes look into how stunts are performed on set during the filming of movies. After the 20-minute show was done, we decided to caffeine up at Starbuck’s before finally going on ToT.

We headed off to the Tower of Terror and tapped in with our magic bands to utilize our Lightning Lane reservation. For those of you who haven’t been on the ToT here in WDW, it is a bit creepy but in a good way. The overgrown abandoned building look really gets you into the mood for the attraction. The backstory is several people disappeared from the hotel during the golden age of Hollywood. You now have secured a reservation at the same hotel and decide to drop in for a visit. In later blog entries we will dissect these attractions a bit more than here.

Next up for us is Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Rail. This attraction is truly a delight and one we frequent at the parks. It’s no secret that Emma and I are our own version of Mickey & Minnie, and they made a whole attraction out of a date day in the park that goes awry, thanks to the wonderful lovely Goofy. This trackless dark ride attraction is a not to miss experience. Dark ride attractions are story telling type of rides where you get a point of view (POV) of a story unfolding in front of you.

Next up on our Lightning Lane reservations was Star Tours the Adventures Continue. As an avid fan of Star Wars, this simulation attraction is always a fun experience. The 3D they have on it is very crisp and very nice looking. This is one of those times when they updated a few years back it was for the better. Also, they gave the attraction a lot of re-riding possibilities with the multiple storylines you can get while on the attraction.

To finish off the night, we headed to Batuu which of course is Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. This is going to be the main highlight of our night. While visiting the planet of Batuu, we did some shopping in the marketplace, adopted a creature, ate at Docking Bay 7 Food and Cargo, piloted the Millennium Falcon, grabbed a couple drinks at Oga’s and even built a lightsaber at Savi’s workshop. All these experiences will get their own blog entries at some point, but you can rest assure that is a lot to accomplish in a couple hours while visiting Batuu. Below is a couple of pictures from our Batuu excursion. The main event being the Savi’s workshop lightsaber build. I will dig into that experience in detail in a future blog post.

Overall, a very good birthday and first blog entry. I hope you all enjoy our blog as it develops. We will do our best to bring you into our Disney Kinda Life! And oh, may the force be with you…..