🥧 Six Ravens finally (sort of) opened at Disney Springs today — then quietly un-opened a few hours later, with Cast Members confirming the posted hours were a mistake. The menu's out regardless: seven "Coffyns" ($10.99, savory hand pies) including a cheeseburger version, a BBQ pulled pork mac & cheese, a coconut curry chicken, and a breakfast bacon-egg-cheese served 9am til sold out — plus smashed potato sides, a house root beer, and beers from Sideward Brewing and The Ravenous Pig.

🧸 A six-year-closed EPCOT shop is finally back. Der Teddybär in the Germany Pavilion reopened after sitting dark since 2020, restocked with German-themed plushes (and a $450 Duffy Bear for the brave).

📈 Animal Kingdom's easy-wait window is closing. Bluey's Wild World has quietly pulled real crowds into Conservation Station, pushing park averages up after a slow summer.

🎟️ Three more July "Good-to-Go" days landed for Passholders (July 12, 14, 16), bringing this month's reservation-free total to five.

🏔️ Piston Peak's construction footprint has officially reached the Haunted Mansion. New aerial shots from @bioreconstruct (shared July 19) show the site clearing for Magic Kingdom's Frontierland overhaul has crept right up to the borders of Liberty Square, close enough that guests in the Mansion's extended outdoor queue now get a front-row view of the construction.

The scale is hard to overstate: where the Liberty Belle riverboat once quietly circled, there's now a graded sand crossed by deep trenches and fleets of bulldozers The site is shaping up to house two new attractions — a high-energy off-road rally race and a family-friendly activity area.

⏳ Timeline: Disney's own permits put infrastructure completion around 2028, with Piston Peak itself not expected to open until 2029. There's a lot of dirt still to move before any ride vehicles show up.

🚢 Every day, thousands of guests cross Seven Seas Lagoon without a second thought about the names painted on the sides of their boat. But the Magic Kingdom ferry fleet is basically a floating memorial to the people who built Walt Disney World in the first place — and a fourth name is about to join them for the first time in 50 years.

Admiral Joe Fowler was a retired Navy rear admiral who'd overseen aircraft carrier construction in WWII when Walt found him — running home construction in San Francisco — and hired him to be construction boss on Disneyland. He stuck around as Disneyland's General Manager for its first decade, then helped get Walt Disney World built too. His name originally belonged to Magic Kingdom's first riverboat, until a 1980 dry-dock crane accident destroyed the hull beyond repair; the name moved to a ferry in 1997.

Richard F. "Dick" Irvine was a Hollywood art director (with an Oscar nomination for Sundown) that Walt poached from 20th Century Fox in 1952 to help design Disneyland. He ended up leading design on the Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and It's a Small World, then became WED Enterprises' executive VP until retiring in 1973. His riverboat namesake was later renamed the Liberty Belle — retired for good in 2025.

General Joe Potter spent 38 years in the Army, including a stint as governor of the Panama Canal Zone, before Walt hired him in 1965 for his engineering know-how. He's the reason Walt Disney World has functioning underground utilities at all — he designed the drainage canals and utility corridors that turned Central Florida swampland into buildable land.

⛴️ Now, for the first time since 1976, a fourth boat is joining the fleet — and it's under active construction right now, with the top deck recently added to the hull. It'll be named the Meg Gilbert Crofton, after Walt Disney World's fourth president (2006–2013) and the first ferry named for a woman. Crofton opened New Fantasyland and Art of Animation during her tenure, and there's a nice bit of symmetry to the timing: she's getting her boat just as Magic Kingdom heads into its next huge expansion, the same way Fowler, Irvine, and Potter's names became permanent fixtures during the resort's original construction era.

Tucked between the Contemporary and Fort Wilderness on Bay Lake, Wilderness Lodge might be the most quietly ambitious hotel Disney's ever built — a resort that exists entirely to make you forget you're in Florida.

It was born out of Michael Eisner's "Disney Decade." In the late '80s, as part of Eisner's broader push to expand and elevate every corner of the company, he personally sent an architectural team out to study the great lodges of the National Park system: Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite. Architect Peter Dominick led the design from 1989 through 1991, drawing most heavily from two icons: Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn (still the largest log structure in the world) and Yosemite's Ahwahnee, now called the Majestic Yosemite Hotel. Groundbreaking came in August 1992, and thanks to what's described as an unusually smooth relationship between Disney, its Imagineers, and the contractor, the resort opened without a single construction delay on May 28, 1994.

🏕️ Eisner insisted on a lakeside setting — even though the actual site was wetlands. That single decision drove a huge amount of the engineering and landscaping work, all to design a hotel that had no business existing in Central Florida, feel like it had always belonged on the shore of Bay Lake.

🪨 The lobby is built from real rock. An 82-foot fireplace, stacked in bands to resemble the Grand Canyon's South Rim, anchors an eight-story atrium framed by log beams and hand-carved totem poles. As you climb the lodge's levels, the design deliberately walks guests forward through time — frontier-era craftsmanship near the ground floor, more refined touches higher up — and the lobby's carpet itself is patterned after an Indigenous-inspired creation story. Up until 2009, Disney even brought in Native American performers for an annual "Blessing of the Four Directions" ceremony to open each season.

🌊 Then there's Fire Rock Geyser — a real, working 120-foot geyser that erupts on the hour, every hour, from roughly 7am to 10pm. The legend, in full: according to Wilderness Lodge lore, a hunting party got trapped in the valley by a brutal winter. Forced to keep their campfire burning nonstop just to survive, they burned through their firewood and kept scavenging for more — until, after about a week, the "fire rock" itself cracked and quaked, and a geyser of water burst out, dousing their fire and sending their teepee flying into the air. Believing it to be the Earth's punishment for their wastefulness, the hunters fled the valley and never returned — and the geyser's been erupting on schedule ever since, a permanent reminder written into the resort's fictional backstory. Shortly after the resort opened in 1994, guests staying in courtyard-view rooms started complaining that wind was blowing the geyser's spray onto their balconies. Disney's fix was to install a wind gauge tied into the geyser's control system — a computer now senses wind speed just before each hourly eruption and automatically adjusts the height of the water spray to compensate, so the "magic" stays contained to where it's supposed to be.

📜 The whole resort has a fictional founding myth to match. Guests used to receive a mock newspaper, the Silver Creek Star, at check-in, laying out the "history" of a Colonel Ezekiel Moreland, who supposedly discovered Silver Creek Springs in 1822 after being inspired by tales of Lewis and Clark. He sent for his artist daughter, Jenny, to join him. Jenny's fictional legacy lives on today at Artist Point, the resort's signature restaurant, themed as her personal gallery. (Silver Creek Springs was later renamed Copper Creek Springs in 2017, folding it into the resort's newest expansion.)

🛖 The larger resort. Boulder Ridge Villas, added in 2000, is themed as though it housed workers building the transcontinental railroad; Copper Creek Villas & Cabins, added in 2017, is themed as a later addition built from the original railroad's leftover materials. Tucked inside Boulder Ridge is the Iron Spike Room, a small tribute space filled with real artifacts from Walt Disney's own backyard railroad, the Carolwood Pacific.

🍽️ What’s to eat?

Whispering Canyon Cafe is the place — a rowdy, all-you-can-eat skillet restaurant famous for servers who'll deputize your entire table into an inside joke the second you ask for ketchup or ask where the bathroom is.

Storybook Dining at Artist Point — the resort's signature meal, and one of the harder reservations to land on property. What was once quiet fine dining is now a character dinner built around Snow White, with Grumpy and Dopey stopping tableside and a genuinely rare appearance from the Evil Queen herself. It's prix fixe, dinner-only, and worth booking the moment your 60-day window opens.

Roaring Fork — the quick-service option, open all day with everything from morning pastries to house-smoked barbecue come dinnertime. Good grab-and-go pick if you're headed out to the parks.

Geyser Point Bar & Grill — an open-air, lakeside spot right on Bay Lake, no reservations needed. Sandwiches, small plates, and easily one of the best sunset views of any quick bite on property. In our opinion, one of the best burgers on WDW property.

Territory Lounge — the cozy, rustic bar attached to Artist Point, good for a pre-dinner cocktail or a quiet nightcap away from the lobby crowd.

🐭 Hidden Mickeys The lobby's wood carvings, ironwork, and even the guest room balconies all hide a few — and the resort's front desk will sometimes hand out a Hidden Mickey guide if you ask.

🐻 Humphrey the Bear, an old Disney cartoon character who never got much attention elsewhere, is quietly the lodge's unofficial mascot, showing up carved into a totem pole outside the Mercantile shop and in bear imagery scattered throughout the resort.