For Princess this year we got on the bus about 3:45 for the 10k. Got to the corrals pretty early, about 45 minutes before the start and got tired and cold waiting. Thought we would leave about 30 minutes later for the half the next day since we didn't really care about being at the front of our corral (H)
WELL! We got on the bus at 4:10 for the half. Our first clue that something was wrong was there was no bus attendant. We were staying at the Grand Floridian. We were the only ones on the bus. The roads apparently closed at 4am on one side, so the bus could get in the parking lot of GF, but could not get out. We sat in the parking lot for 20 minutes waiting for a police escort to let us turn out of the parking lot and onto the road. We finally get out of the parking lot and turn onto the road by the Poly. Sat there for quite awhile too. Finally, things opened up a little and we were moving to Epcot. Somewhere around the corner from Epcot everything just stopped and didn't move. AT ALL. We inched along for about 35 minutes. We finally made it to a road where we could see the staged corrals. The bus driver let us out and we walked over hoping to join our corral. Security would not let us join the corral there, saying we had to go through the security screening at the main entrance. By this point, it was 5:10. We had no bags, nothing to check, just ourselves, but the security guy would not budge. We had to get back on the bus, the bus we just got off that still hadn't moved at all in the 10 minutes we spent arguing with security. In fact, some other walkers also joined us on the bus because they got turned away too. Someone from up on high must have given an all clear to open up some roads because our bus finally started moving at 5:25. We got dropped off at the Epcot parking lot at 5:35. Breezed through security WHICH DIDN'T EVEN LOOK AT US!!!!!! And walked/ran ALLLLLLLL the way back to the corral area by 5:45. We missed our corral and ended up in J. What should have been a 10 minutes bus ride turned into almost 90 minutes.
Moral of the story? Don't try to get an extra few minutes of sleep. I think I got an ulcer from that experience.