The next day, we got up to hit the park again.  With the preview under our belt, we had a pretty good grasp of the park’s layout.  The kids mapped out what rides they wanted to conquer again and couldn’t have been more excited about visiting the park.

 

Since we were visiting the park on Christmas Eve, the park had limited hours.  The park opened at noon, but Hershey’s Chocolate World opened at 10 so we headed to the theme park to check that out.  Hershey’s Chocolate World has shops, eateries, and add-on features.  There is a free ride that takes you through the process of making chocolate, which we all enjoyed.  We ended up doing it twice just to kill time.  At the end of the ride, they give you a sample of Hershey’s chocolate, which my kids thought was pretty cool.

 

We spent some time in the shops before waiting at the park’s entrance for the park to open.  In our experience, many parks will open a few minutes early… although there was an announcement that the park was ready for visitors, they didn’t open the gates until noon on the dot. 

 The park closed at 4 on the day of our visit, so we had 4 hours in the park.  Despite this, we didn’t feel robbed of our time since we had the preview.  Plus, we had another day of 0 lines, so we walked directly onto every ride, which was pretty amazing!  If you visit any of the Florida theme parks around the holidays you’ll experience longer than normal wait times, so to have virtually no wait was remarkable. 

 

One bummer was that several rides were not open due to the temperatures.  Since it was so cold out, there were no roller coasters open (which is something we’ve experienced at other parks).  As far as thrill rides are concerned, there were only 2 available: an indoor roller coaster, and a “baby roller coaster” as my kids called it.  All the open rides were the type of rides you’d find at the fair, which was a bummer.