44. See Wishes, Fantasmic, and Illuminations all in One Night

Wishes, Fantasmic!, and Illuminations: Reflections of Earth are the three biggest nighttime shows in the parks. They are in Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot, respectively. Most nights, they are at overlapping times. But one night, without even planning it ahead of time, they happened to each start an hour apart from each other. So of course what else could we do but take advantage of that and see all three in the same night!

We started with Fantasmic at 7pm at Hollywood Studios. It's by far my favorite of the nighttime shows. The show follows Mickey's imagination, where he imagines many of the most famous Disney characters and movies. When villains take over, he must defeat them using awesome music, cool pyrotechnics, and other neat effects. We got front row seats and had a great view of this amazing show. Unfortunately, the show is 24 minutes long, so by the time it ended and we ran out of the park and to the bus stop, we only had about 25 minutes to get there, and the bus ride is 15 minutes, and the bus didn't come for 10 minutes. That meant that the fireworks were going to start as soon as we got there. Math.

We got to Magic Kingdom at almost 8pm exactly, and the fireworks started as I was sprinting to the front of the park. By the time I ran through bag check and the main entrance, I had only missed about a minute and a half, but since I could see the fireworks and hear the music from the outside I still count it. Wishes fireworks show is themed around how wishes are powerful and come true and all that jazz. Wishes is only 8 minutes long, so after sprinting to the monorail to beat the crowds headed toward the parking lot, we got the first car all to ourselves and then had plenty of time to find a good spot at Epcot for Illuminations.

Illuminations: Reflections of Earth was on at 9pm, and is unique because the show is in the lagoon, so there are viewing areas all around the World Showcase. The show is about how everyone on Earth is connected, or something. I hadn't really seen it before that night, and I really didn't like it. Thanks to the really nice woman in front of us who moved towards the side to make sure we could see, we had a really good view. The show to me seemed all over the place, featuring fireworks, lasers, fire, and a large spinning globe with screens on all the continents showing images too far away to see. It was like a bunch of people had sat in a board room spitting out ideas for a new show and they decided to incorporate all of them.

The shows definitely went best to worst, but it was still a really fun adventure. Paul deserves major props for agreeing to run around to three different parks in two hours with me. Even though on the run to the monorail, he said, "I hate everything about this. The things I do for love." But all in all I think this was one of the coolest bucket list items I've completed.