Way back in Nov 2013, when I finished the Jingle Jungle 5K at Disney (that race was the race that actually got me started running), Ryan offered up a "challenge", if you will.
He said that if I upped my game and trained for a half marathon (which I swore I would never do, haha), then he would run the Disney Princess Half with me.
Challenge accepted.
I even ended up running 2 other Half Marathons before we got to the Princess Half!
For the Princess Half we convinced my brother and his wife to do it with us. Sandra was skeptical, but I promised her she could do , and do it she did!!!
My time was only 5 minutes slower (2:32) for this race than it was for the Wine and Dine (2:27) in November, but that was also the official "chip" time through RunDisney. It doesn't take into account the bathroom breaks and photo stops I did. My Nike App said I did it in 2:25 (it pauses the timer when you stop moving), so I was happy with my pace!
I had a great time at the race, but I will say it was a lot more "highway" running than park running compared to Wine & Dine. For this race we started at Epcot, ran 5 miles to MK, one mile through it, then the rest of the way back to Epcot, where I think maybe we ran another mile through there. I found that with Wine and Dine, you were almost always in a park, and the race went by so fast because you were always looking around at something in the parks. I found myself fighting to keep running about halfway through this race. I think for now we'll say our favorite RunDisney race is still the Wine & Dine, but we still have to get through the Tinkerbell half in CA in May so we'll have another race to compare it to!
Once the race was over, we finally got around to having some fun with my brother and his family! We spent the rest of our night at MK, and the boys of course wanted to visit Tinkerbell again (who can blame them, she's pretty cute).
Plus, we had to get our traditional photo with Buzz! I have one from every single visit the boys have ever made to Disney!
The next day we all went to Epcot, and Zoey met her first character....and wasn't really a fan!
Not only did we get to spend a ton of time with Larry, but we met up with our oldest brother Jim too. he lives in Tampa and made the drive to spend the day at Epcot with us!
When Larry & Sandra left, we had plans to stay for 2 more days so we sent our stuff over to Animal Kingdom Lodge while we spent a fun day out!
Mason saw Sofia at HS and said "Mom, I just want to hug Sofia!". SO of course we had to get in line to see her, and when she heard that was what he wanted, she hugged him forever! It was the cutest character experience ever!
Aidan was pretending he was too cool to visit and take a pic with Sofia, but she won him over in the end! (she was quite proud of herself, too)
I even got to meet up with Katie & Scott for after dinner drinks that night! We tried to meet up before heading to our corrals at the race, but we just never managed to make it happen, so I was glad we got to meet up at House of Blues!
Our stay at Animal Kingdom Lodge was our very first, and it was so neat. The boys loved having the Animals right outside their windows for their "anytime" viewing pleasure.
We actually spent so much time the following day checking out the resort, we never ended up going to a park at all that day. There was certainly plenty of cultural activities for the boys to do around the resort! They got their faces painted, they did some stamp art, participated in an animal knowledge session, traded some pins with the King Pin, then we had a really nice dinner at Jiko, followed by some night vision goggle animal viewing!
As usual it was sad o leave, but nice to be come home!
Until next time, WDW!
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