On our last day in the parks, we decided to “bite the bullet” and join the queue for the Rise of the Resistance ride.
What an experience. Up at 5:30 to catch the first bus from the resort at 6:03 heading to the park. Of course, us and several THOUSAND of our friends were already standing in line at the entrance of the Studio’s, which does not open until 7:00 a.m.
So we get through the bag check and they let us into the park through the “Mickey band checks” at about 6:30 a.m… we now have about 30 minutes to stand around on main street waiting for the “JOIN A GROUP” button on the Disney app to become active at 7am.
Well… 7:00 hits and BAM!!!… the button is still greyed out… I’m trying everything, including rebooting my phone to get it active… NEVER HAPPENED!! Fortunately, my husband continued moving into the park closer to the Galaxy land. At about 7:10 he finally gets the button and hit the submit…. he is in Boarding Group 149 for the day. They only guarantee admission for groups 1 through 128!!! Bummer… we spent the last 2 hours trying to get a place in line and we may not get a turn!
We left the park and returned to our resort. We knew that our boarding time would be LATE… very LATE if we even got a chance to experience the ride. We returned to the park for dinner reservations at Sci-Fi at about 4:00 pm and just after dinner, we FINALLY got our boarding notice… it’s now about 7:45 when we finally get to the beginning of the queue.
It took about 40 minutes of walking through the line until we got to the point where the first person greeted us and asked “how many in your party?”… finally, we were at the beginning of the Rise of the Resistance experience.
I did try to take some video on my phone, but after getting home and checking YouTube, I realize that there are much better videos already available to see what the ride is like… so I won’t be posting the junk I captured on the phone. Here is a link to a good one.
Instead, a few more images of the Galaxy Edge area both during the day and a couple more shots at night.
We never did get on the Millennium Falcon ride… some thing for the next visit!
**UPDATE**
Just FYI for the photographers that might be interested… I’m not sure Disney allows full tripods in the park. I took my small Joby, (my model isn’t available anymore but the closest one is this), the JOBY 5K, and it performed fine. I set it on trash cans and wrapped it around fence poles to get the 15-20 second long exposure images. It is VERY dark down in the Galaxy land.
But the second night I was in the park at night I use my PLATYPOD Max and I got much clearer images. I linked my Sony to my phone with the remote bluetooth app and was able to set the camera inside some of the displays on top of counters and different boxes and things to get some cool angles. I really like the Platypod… very compact and easy to travel with. I have a small ball head I use from one of my MEFOTO travel tripods and it handles the Sony A7 cameras just fine!
If you plan to take clear night shots in the Disney parks, you better have a small tripod solution with you. If you want to get some video, consider your gimbal device. As I flew there, I just could not pack everything, so the gimbal had to stay home.
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