Day 4 - Hollywood Studios!
Today was the. perfect. day. in. Hollywood. After a nice restful night I was up before my alarm, showered, and ready to rock at 7 a.m. I got a Slinky Dog LL for 11-something, which on any other day might be a great return time but I was not happy with it. My favorite G+ strategy (when not stacking in the afternoon) is to try and get the first return time for before the 11 a.m. drop (or whenever 2 hours after park open is) when EVERYONE can grab the second lightning lane if their first return time is later in the afternoon. If you can get a couple LL's before 11 or whenever, you have the better chances of getting the most popular or hard to get rides out of the way early. So, instead of being Ok with 11-something to ride Slink, I modified and BINGO WINGO I booked 9:05! It turned out that it didn't matter, because before we even left the room we got a push notification Slinky would be down during our return time and we were issued redemption passes. But that meant I could book ANOTHER LL so I got Rockin' Rollercoaster. Why not Smugglers or Mickey and Minnie's? Because other than Rise, RRC is the other ride in HS that goes down allll the time so in the event the ride was down, we would get an other redemption pass and then could book another LL immediately. I know this is why G+ gets very little love, and that's valid. I watched a lot of YouTube to figure out the best ways to use the system to my advantage. But now that I've got it nailed down, it's quite easy to navigate.

Anyway, we got to the Skyliner line and it was WAAAAYYYY backed up. We had walked right on the morning before so we were really surprised. But again, these are two large resorts sharing the same station and we were coming up on the long weekend for Indigenous People's Day and many states (not NY, lol) have a fall break that week, too. So we felt the uptick in crowds yet again, but gondola systems are designed to move large groups of people efficiently so it really took about 8 minutes to get to the load station. We got through park security and the turnstyles with enough time to enjoy about 10 minutes of resort guest early entry before rope drop. Slinky hadn't come back up, and good news - Coaster was also down! It wasn't our return time yet so we weren't issued redemption passes but I kept my eye on it. I made the quick decision to turn right and go do Tower standby. The wait was short, and we had a great drop sequence. I love Tower, I could spend hours in the queue noticing all the details in the lobby especially.

While we were in line for Tower, Slinky still hadn't come back up, Coaster was still down, and we were in part of the garden where you can kind of see through the foliage to backstage. We heard fire truck sirens and saw some flashing lights through the trees. Not a good sign. I wondered if that was the reason Coaster or Slinky was down! Turns out, there was a crane parked on the stage of Indiana Jones that must have had some kind of fire because all the performances were canceled this day (which was a bummer because I thought Husband would really enjoy it) and I saw some reports from others on social media that the crane remained parked there completely immovable.

Sometime after Tower Coaster had come back up but we had an hour before our return time. Slinky was also back up, but I didn't want to race over there just to stand in a super backed up LL. Even though Studios has the smallest footprint of any park, I wanted to avoid criss crossing and needed to stay in the general area of Hollywood Boulevard/Chinese Theater. So we decided to do some character meets! Husband was so pumped. We met Olaf, Donald, Max, saw Chip & Dale having a picnic on the Brown Derby lawn, went to the Launch Bay and met Chewy & BB8. We had some great interactions and I am so happy I got the Photopass package with my AP. I don't always do pictures but I figured if I'm going at least 3 more times this calendar year it would be worth it. After meeting our friends, it was time to ride Coaster so we got in our Super Stretch and made it to the show just in time. Once we had scanned in to Coaster I made a LL for Toy Story Mania! for essentially that minute so we then went to Andy's backyard. It's so cute back there! We did TSM first and Husband beat my score so now we were even between TSM and Buzz from the other day where I wiped the floor with him. After we used our Slinky redemption passes. Then it was time for lunch!

Continued in next post...