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Hello everyone,
Last month Jon and I, along with a very dear friend, took part in our first ever runDisney race weekend. We participated in all three races (5k, 10k and half marathon) at the Disney Princess Half Marathon Weekend at Walt Disney World in Florida.
It's hard to even know where to begin describing this entire journey to you, since it wasn't at all like a normal trip. We didn't just go to the parks and happen to run through them like our lives depended on it - this was an altogether different experience. A journey that involved months of hard training, registrations, and bookings at precise moments to get what we wanted, and planning out strategies and coping mechanisms for running these events as a team, while making individual achievements.
We had known for a few months prior to booking that our goal was to be fit enough to want to complete a runDisney event, and when we booked the races last year, we had reached a point where we felt we could be ready in February to compete. The booking process itself was a challenge - as with everything with Disney these days - and we had to make several calls and enquiries to get what we wanted. They don't really make it very clear with regards to some aspects of it, if you have never done this before. So to that degree it was frustrating.
Months later still, and February finally arrived, and we were as ready as we were ever going to be! [ Read More... ] |
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 | Disneyland, February 2017 - A Trip Report | |
| DisneyDan
Wednesday, March 15, 2017 10:41:27 AM |
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Hello everyone,
Last month I shared with you my report on our trip to Disneyland for AP Days and the return of the Main Street Electrical Parade. That report specifically focussed on those two things, can be found by clicking here.
In this second and final part of my trip report for our visit to Disneyland, I am going to share with you everything else that we managed to do in the whirlwind less-than-two-day adventure we had there!
[ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
In this fourth and final part of my trip report for our visit to Walt Disney World during Christmas 2016 I am going to share with you some more of our adventures at the Magic Kingdom.
Let's start on Main Street USA where we met Santa Claus before he set off on his magical deliveries on Christmas Eve. [ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
In this third part of my Walt Disney World Christmas trip report, I am going to share with you some of my photos from our various viewings of Mickey's Once Upon a Christmastime Parade and Mickey's Most Merriest Celebration at the Magic Kingdom.
The Christmas parade has changed little over the past few years, but there have been some tweaks along the way nonetheless. This past year saw the princes wear their new outfits in the parade for the first time. Being there Christmas week, we got to see the parade during the day (as opposed to at night, at the much more crowded Christmas parties), which was nice so that we could get decent photos of their new outfits.
Before the parade the Kringle Crew danced down Main Street USA, giant inflatable balls in tow. [ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
In this second part of my Walt Disney World December trip report I am going to share you with your our adventures at Disney's Hollywood Studios and Epcot. In case you missed it, the first part of my report, which covers Disney's Animal Kingdom and the Disney resort hotels, can be found here.
Let's start with Hollywood Studios. [ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
During the last week of December we visited Walt Disney World for Christmas and New Year. In this first part of my trip report I am going to share with you our adventures at Disney's Animal Kingdom and some of the resort hotels, including character dining and more.
Let's start with Animal Kingdom.
At the front of the park, the giant Christmas Tree was on display, looking exactly the same as it has for the past ten years! Despite its age, it is a nice tree.
[ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
On January 19th this year the Main Street Electrical Parade came back to Disneyland at a special event, which was followed the next day by the start of its final daily run at the park, which will end on June 18th this year.
Last weekend (Friday 10th February), Disneyland began hosting the first of this year's AP Days events, which for this month is themed to the Main Street Electrical Parade. Running until March 9th, annual passholders can visit the park every week to receive special buttons, menu cards, and other giveaway items, and meet characters. We were there this past weekend for the 2017 debut of AP Days, and to see the Main Street Electrical Parade (MSEP), and so I have my report here for you now! [ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
Yesterday the Disney Parks Blog (DPB) made a surprise announcement about an upcoming event at the Disneyland Resort. From May 27th - the day that the new Guardians of the Galaxy attraction opens at Disney California Adventure - until September 10th, the park will present the Summer of Heroes.
The DPB describes this new event as follows: [ Read More... ] |
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Hello everyone,
As always, I have been pressed for time to write updates recently, but I am here today to share with you some things that I thought worth mentioning regarding the imminent arrival of the 25th anniversary celebrations at Disneyland Paris. Over the past week or two a lot more information about the celebrations has been coming to light, with various sites and pages leaking information, and of course Disneyland Paris revealing a little more themselves, too.
During the 25th anniversary celebrations, you will be able to experience two brand new stage shows, a brand new parade, meet and greets, and other offerings such as the new versions of Space Mountain (Hyperspace Mountain), and Star Tours (Star Tours - The Adventures Continue), and the new nighttime spectacular, Disney Illuminations. Of course, being Character Central, I am going to share with you the character based offerings in this article.
To begin, let's take a look at the parade. [ Read More... ] |
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 | Character Central Anniversary and Updates | |
| DisneyDan
Sunday, January 8, 2017 1:11:24 PM |
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Hello everyone,
First of all, Happy New Year to you all! Jon and I both hope that the new year started well for you all and that 2016 ended with a bang!
If you are a regular here to the blog, you will know that it is fairly unusual for me to post updates about the internal workings of Character Central, but I felt that today we reached an important point in our history. With us turning seven years old last week, I needed to share with you all some of the things that are coming to Character Central in 2017. Part of the reason for this is due to the fact that I am more than well aware that the site has become slower with time, and that some of you regularly experience time out problems, and get either the Flik or Figment errors. Trust me when I say, these things annoy us, too, and we want nothing more than to be able to prevent those pages from displaying!
A massive overhaul of Character Central is well passed due, and while we have had some upgrades over the past seven years, we both feel that it is now time to completely change the site. Let me lay out some of our plans, which I hope you will agree, are quite exciting!
We want to move away from external image hosting, with all content being directly embedded into Character Central. This will allow the site to run faster and for pages to load all images without having to rely on an external source. One of the main issues we get now is that when the external sources are down, it brings pages on Character Central to a grinding halt while our servers try to locate the files.
We are are going to redesign all location pages to be less cluttered, with less photos, deleting those that are older/no longer relevant. We may be removing many non-Disney locations (such as Universal, Busch Gardens, etc), the Disney Store locations and other redundant content, too.
Removal of dead links and pages that no longer receive traffic, such as the calendar and trip reports pages.
We are going to redesign all character profile pages to provide clearer, more accurate information, removing many duplicate/redundant images, and making it easier to view a character's wardrobe.
The blog will be completely redesigned, and will allow commenting directly on blog posts instead of having to go to the forum to comment (which is how it is now).
We are considering either reducing the scale and scope of the forum, or removing it altogether. This is probably our biggest change, and while we have made many new friends, and undoubtedly brought many fans together over the years, it is simply unsustainable in its current format. We are just two guys, and we don't have a huge amount of free time, and the forum gets a lot of abuse, spam and irrelevant content posted to it that is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor.
Make the entire site mobile friendly, with a design that works on most smart devices.
While the site undergoes this work, there may be days when the site is down completely, links may not work or pages will disappear and reappear. We will try to reduce the impact of this as much as possible, but sadly it will be unavoidable.
You have to understand that all of this will take time, and a lot of patience from both us and you. We really appreciate all of your support, and we couldn't have lasted for more than seven years without you all. We are positive that once we are done with the site, it will be better than ever, and that you will only see that tolerating the "construction" period was only worth it for a cleaner, smoother, over all more pleasant experience.
Finally, since we have so much work ahead of us, and our schedule seems to get increasingly more busy and erratic, I am going to have to abandon some incomplete reports and projects on the site. I know that a lot of you like my trip reports, and I know I am behind on the last few trips, but sadly they are not going to get written at this point. I want to start 2017 fresh, and need to go into the new year and new site without being bogged down with things from months ago. Going forward I will of course continue to post my reports from new trips, but anything that was as of now unfinished, will sadly remain that way.
Have a great day everyone, and thank you again for your support, patience and understanding.
Dan. |
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