This post was written by Greg, with photos and comments by Maria.
5 Days of Disney!
Today we decided to tackle Disney's Animal Kingdom park. This park opened just after Maria and I went to Disney World on our honeymoon in 1998. It was completely brand new to all of us, which made it a bit of an unknown quantity. We had to refer completely to our various guides to help us plan the day.
This is the fountain we spent time at every morning while waiting for the bus
Our first view of Animal Kingdom
We all got up and ready this morning and hit the 8:45 bus to the park. We were all dressed in our gray T-shirts today. I made the choice to cut back on the amount of shirts we brought and decided to abandon our orange shirts which seemed a bit less fashionably chic. After 4 previous days of being able to look out and easily see the family, I wished we'd kept the orange shirts over the gray ones.
We arrived at Animal Kingdom just after it opened and strolled on in. The park opens with a feel of a very dense jungle. The path circles around with little viewing areas to see wildlife. Despite the name "Animal Kingdom," the boys and Maria initially seemed uninterested in viewing the animals and wanted to get into the park to find the rides.
Even the lamp posts were cool. Check out that cute turtle!
So we headed directly to the back of the park for Expedition Everest. Everest is one of the newer big attractions in the park. It's a thrilling roller coaster ride that is set in a giant mountain. It's got a great line that really builds the idea of going on an expedition up the enormous mountain. The ride itself starts rather tamely, then half way through the ride, the track appears to be broken as the cart is going uphill, so it stops and falls swiftly backwards for about 10 seconds. You hear and see evidence of a giant monster messing with things until the very end when you finally see the giant Yeti. Unfortunately, the monster was only visible for the briefest of moments under a strobe light. From what I understand, it used to jump completely out at the car as though it was trying to grab you, but it's been broken and is supposedly unfixable without completely shutting down the ride for several years. So now it barely moves an arm and can only be seen in a blink-and-you-missed-it instant.
The guys posing in front of Mount Everest
Colin looking excited for the ride. He wasn't smiling as much afterward.
Everest was quite thrilling - a little too much so for the boys. Spencer came out a bit put off. Not quite upset or crying, but not whooping it up and laughing like most of the other riders. To cheer him back up, we decided to head to "Dinosaurland" where we could find some younger-style attractions.
The boys on a bench by some cool-looking "ruins."
We walked into the next section of the park and went on some paths with dinosaur replicas all around. I (Greg) got some Fast Passes to DINOSAUR, another thrill ride, and then we went over to a small coaster called Primeval Whirl. This is in a section of the park that is built to look like a carnival with carnival games (complete with barkers and pay-for-play prizes). I was actually surprised because this is exactly the type of thing I hate about other theme parks and what I like about Disney. Usually the rides are dressed up and become more about a story and an experience than just the thrills. Here in the middle of the park was a coaster that was completely bare of any dressing and just about as typical as they come. The only hook was the car on the coaster spins around. Which was why Colin and I stayed off and let Maria and Spencer ride on their own. They seemed to enjoy it, but I've had other theme-park visits ruined by riding spinning rides--especially early on, throwing my stomach off for the rest of the day.
Spencer and Colin posing on a dinosaur
Colin loved finding "Hidden Mickeys." Here he is pointing one out.
Spencer in front of the "Primeval Whirl" ride
After that small coaster ride, we took the boys over to a play area and mock Dinosaur excavation site called the Boneyard. It's interesting that the play areas in Disney have this really nice cushioned, spongy ground that I guess makes it more gentle to fall on. It's amazing how great it feels on your feet. I wish they'd make all the park's pathways with this stuff! The kids played for a bit while an employee who we traded pins with kept talking and talking about nothing to us and wouldn't go away. When I noticed it was almost time for "Finding Nemo: The Musical" to start--a show I wasn't particularly interested in attending--I used that as an excuse to call the kids and get away from that incessant talking! We started to call for the kids only to discover they'd completely disappeared. Apparently there was a bridge over to a totally separate section of the play area which was the actual excavation part of the Boneyard which we didn't ever see. Shortly after looking for the boys and just as we started to get a bit worried, they showed up at the bottom of a slide with a bunch of pebbles in their shoes and a few new pins they traded on their own with someone in the other part they returned from.
Colin at the Boneyard
We left the Boneyard and ran over to the "Finding Nemo" theater which was making last calls to see the show. The show was about 40 minutes long and it was actually rather entertaining. The sea creatures were all puppeteered by live performers, who I assume were actually singing--though it could have all been lip-synched. The puppets were all very technically impressive and sometimes very huge. The songs were a little less impressive. If I'd never seen the movie I probably wouldn't have been able to follow the story through the performances. Still spectacle made up for any difficulties in following lyrics. I particularly enjoyed the very "Good Vibrations"-esque song that Crush and the sea turtles performed mid-way through the show.
We saw cranes everywhere we went. Here's Spencer near a couple.
From the Nemo theater, we walked over to the Dinosaur ride, stopping for a bathroom break and a gift shop look-through in dino-land. Once again, our Fast Passes took us right through a fairly crowded line (relatively speaking, on a summer day the line would have been way longer), and took us to the front very quickly. We boarded some time-traveling safari jeeps and went back in time on a crazy, jerky, bumpy ride through dinosaurs and a big asteroid shower. At the end of the tour a giant dinosaur came right at the vehicle to scare everyone and then we came back through time to exit the ride. And of course, like all the other thrill rides, there were pictures waiting at the end showing everyone screaming that Disney tries to sell you.
The entry to Dinosaur. It's not a ride that lends itself well to pictures, so this will have to do.
We decided it was about lunch time so we headed to the opposite side of the park to find some lunch and get passes to the Kilimanjaro Safari. On our way, we passed the Bug's Life 4D show, "It's Tough To Be A Bug," and decided to let lunch wait a little longer and go see that since we were there.
Our first real view of the Tree of Life
The line into the attraction winds its way through the roots of the giant "Tree of Life" that is the centerpiece of the entire park. The tree is full of hundreds of carvings of various animals and creatures. It's like a real life I Spy painting and we had fun while going down the line looking for all the different animals we could find.
Of course the guys all had to pose by the giant monkey head!
The Bug's Life movie itself was pretty fun. There were a lot of funny, unexpected live audience moments, especially right at the end when they tell the audience to remain seated while they let the bugs leave. Suddenly from the opposite side of the theater in a wave down the row toward us we started to hear screaming and chuckling as a special effect in the actual seats makes it feel like bugs are crawling under you to get out.
Spencer with his 3D bug glasses
There were several clever bug-themed movie posters to look at while we waited
After that show we went went back to our prior plan and headed to Africa where I picked up passes to Kilimanjaro Safari and Maria got lunch at a vending window. We ate some burgers in a little patio garden where there were lots of birds waiting to swoop down and pick up dropped food. Unfortunately, Colin's hair got pooped on midway through the meal--we were just happy it didn't land in our expensive park food!
Unsurprisingly, after lunch Colin bought a hat. While waiting for the time on our passes to arrive, we explored some gift shops, and Maria found a relatively cheap safari hat that came with a pair of sunglasses (with a cool little clip on the brim of the hat to store the glasses). Colin had been looking for Mickey ears unsuccessfully for the past few days since he didn't want to pay the outrageous price they charge for them, so he welcomed something that fit, made him look cool, and kept him shaded for not much more than the price of the simple Mickey ear hat.
This hat is so perfect for Colin!
A really cool drum display in one of the shops
Next we rode on the Kilimanjaro Safari attraction. We were loaded onto an open air safari tour bus where we toured around some jungles and grassland past dozens of different types of animals like giraffes, ostriches, rhinos, and other more exotic animals that I don't remember the names of. I could see this being a ride to go on multiple times at different times of day to be able to see different animals. This being the middle of the day, I'm assuming there were probably less animals in view than maybe earlier in the cooler part of the day.
Here you can see another Jungle Safari bus in front of us.
After the tour, we went on an adjacent foot trail called the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail. There we saw some more animals including some gorillas.
There was a really cute baby monkey that was swinging all over the cage and going crazy that we enjoyed watching.
Colin being eaten by a hippo skull.
Spencer grinning at something.
Greg holding Spencer up to see a gorilla in the distance.
It was early afternoon and hot at this point, so we headed back to Asia for Fast Passes to the Kali River Rapids attraction where we knew we'd get wet and cool down. Sadly, no passes were being given out today and there was currently a 30 minute wait. Not wanting to get caught in something like our Norway debacle and miss the bus in an hour, we decided to give up on this ride.
The boys stopping for some pin trading.
Instead, we took a snack/rest break and then visited a few shops. Maria found a Tinkerbell hand mirror-styled pillbox sculpted item in one shop, where she also fell in love with a series of figures from Jim Shore labeled Disney Traditions.
I loved this entire display!!
Some more really cute figures
Greg and Colin finding hidden elements in this Pinocchio painting
Following the shop, we toured around the Tree of Life some more on another walking path, once again in awe of all the cool carvings we could find.
How many animals can YOU find?
The guys looking up at all the carvings.
Another shot. It was just amazing.
Then we headed down to the last section of the park we hadn't visited called Camp Minnie-Mickey. There was really nothing down there other than a Lion King show that we didn't have time for and character greetings. Reading up on the park, this section was actually originally supposed to be for mythological creatures like dragons and unicorns. You can still see evidence throughout the park of carvings and symbols with dragons on them. I was wondering why they were there when there was nothing in the park directly tied to them. I read up on it later that day when we returned to our apartment.
The sign for Camp Minnie-Mickey was amusing.
The boys posing as explorers. Colin was on his tiptoes, but wasn't quite tall enough.
The boys near a totem pole.
Some cute large statues of Mickey, Goofy and Pluto fishing.
We decided it was about time to leave at this point. We wanted to get out of the park before the 3:45 parade started so that we wouldn't find ourselves trapped behind crowds and unable to walk the main street to get out. We also needed to catch the 4:00 bus if we wanted to get home.
On the ride home we ran into our new Utah friends and chatted with them to compare our experiences on the crowded ride back.
We came home and swam around the lazy river a bit and then bummed around the rest of the day in our apartment. After five days, we just didn't have a whole lot of energy to get out and do anything else! So we ate some leftovers for dinner, watched a movie (once I figured out how to get the DVD player working), ate some fresh-baked cookies, and went to bed.
5 Days of Disney!
Today we decided to tackle Disney's Animal Kingdom park. This park opened just after Maria and I went to Disney World on our honeymoon in 1998. It was completely brand new to all of us, which made it a bit of an unknown quantity. We had to refer completely to our various guides to help us plan the day.
This is the fountain we spent time at every morning while waiting for the bus
Our first view of Animal Kingdom
We all got up and ready this morning and hit the 8:45 bus to the park. We were all dressed in our gray T-shirts today. I made the choice to cut back on the amount of shirts we brought and decided to abandon our orange shirts which seemed a bit less fashionably chic. After 4 previous days of being able to look out and easily see the family, I wished we'd kept the orange shirts over the gray ones.
We arrived at Animal Kingdom just after it opened and strolled on in. The park opens with a feel of a very dense jungle. The path circles around with little viewing areas to see wildlife. Despite the name "Animal Kingdom," the boys and Maria initially seemed uninterested in viewing the animals and wanted to get into the park to find the rides.
Even the lamp posts were cool. Check out that cute turtle!
So we headed directly to the back of the park for Expedition Everest. Everest is one of the newer big attractions in the park. It's a thrilling roller coaster ride that is set in a giant mountain. It's got a great line that really builds the idea of going on an expedition up the enormous mountain. The ride itself starts rather tamely, then half way through the ride, the track appears to be broken as the cart is going uphill, so it stops and falls swiftly backwards for about 10 seconds. You hear and see evidence of a giant monster messing with things until the very end when you finally see the giant Yeti. Unfortunately, the monster was only visible for the briefest of moments under a strobe light. From what I understand, it used to jump completely out at the car as though it was trying to grab you, but it's been broken and is supposedly unfixable without completely shutting down the ride for several years. So now it barely moves an arm and can only be seen in a blink-and-you-missed-it instant.
The guys posing in front of Mount Everest
Colin looking excited for the ride. He wasn't smiling as much afterward.
Everest was quite thrilling - a little too much so for the boys. Spencer came out a bit put off. Not quite upset or crying, but not whooping it up and laughing like most of the other riders. To cheer him back up, we decided to head to "Dinosaurland" where we could find some younger-style attractions.
The boys on a bench by some cool-looking "ruins."
We walked into the next section of the park and went on some paths with dinosaur replicas all around. I (Greg) got some Fast Passes to DINOSAUR, another thrill ride, and then we went over to a small coaster called Primeval Whirl. This is in a section of the park that is built to look like a carnival with carnival games (complete with barkers and pay-for-play prizes). I was actually surprised because this is exactly the type of thing I hate about other theme parks and what I like about Disney. Usually the rides are dressed up and become more about a story and an experience than just the thrills. Here in the middle of the park was a coaster that was completely bare of any dressing and just about as typical as they come. The only hook was the car on the coaster spins around. Which was why Colin and I stayed off and let Maria and Spencer ride on their own. They seemed to enjoy it, but I've had other theme-park visits ruined by riding spinning rides--especially early on, throwing my stomach off for the rest of the day.
Spencer and Colin posing on a dinosaur
Colin loved finding "Hidden Mickeys." Here he is pointing one out.
Spencer in front of the "Primeval Whirl" ride
After that small coaster ride, we took the boys over to a play area and mock Dinosaur excavation site called the Boneyard. It's interesting that the play areas in Disney have this really nice cushioned, spongy ground that I guess makes it more gentle to fall on. It's amazing how great it feels on your feet. I wish they'd make all the park's pathways with this stuff! The kids played for a bit while an employee who we traded pins with kept talking and talking about nothing to us and wouldn't go away. When I noticed it was almost time for "Finding Nemo: The Musical" to start--a show I wasn't particularly interested in attending--I used that as an excuse to call the kids and get away from that incessant talking! We started to call for the kids only to discover they'd completely disappeared. Apparently there was a bridge over to a totally separate section of the play area which was the actual excavation part of the Boneyard which we didn't ever see. Shortly after looking for the boys and just as we started to get a bit worried, they showed up at the bottom of a slide with a bunch of pebbles in their shoes and a few new pins they traded on their own with someone in the other part they returned from.
Colin at the Boneyard
We left the Boneyard and ran over to the "Finding Nemo" theater which was making last calls to see the show. The show was about 40 minutes long and it was actually rather entertaining. The sea creatures were all puppeteered by live performers, who I assume were actually singing--though it could have all been lip-synched. The puppets were all very technically impressive and sometimes very huge. The songs were a little less impressive. If I'd never seen the movie I probably wouldn't have been able to follow the story through the performances. Still spectacle made up for any difficulties in following lyrics. I particularly enjoyed the very "Good Vibrations"-esque song that Crush and the sea turtles performed mid-way through the show.
We saw cranes everywhere we went. Here's Spencer near a couple.
From the Nemo theater, we walked over to the Dinosaur ride, stopping for a bathroom break and a gift shop look-through in dino-land. Once again, our Fast Passes took us right through a fairly crowded line (relatively speaking, on a summer day the line would have been way longer), and took us to the front very quickly. We boarded some time-traveling safari jeeps and went back in time on a crazy, jerky, bumpy ride through dinosaurs and a big asteroid shower. At the end of the tour a giant dinosaur came right at the vehicle to scare everyone and then we came back through time to exit the ride. And of course, like all the other thrill rides, there were pictures waiting at the end showing everyone screaming that Disney tries to sell you.
The entry to Dinosaur. It's not a ride that lends itself well to pictures, so this will have to do.
We decided it was about lunch time so we headed to the opposite side of the park to find some lunch and get passes to the Kilimanjaro Safari. On our way, we passed the Bug's Life 4D show, "It's Tough To Be A Bug," and decided to let lunch wait a little longer and go see that since we were there.
Our first real view of the Tree of Life
The line into the attraction winds its way through the roots of the giant "Tree of Life" that is the centerpiece of the entire park. The tree is full of hundreds of carvings of various animals and creatures. It's like a real life I Spy painting and we had fun while going down the line looking for all the different animals we could find.
Of course the guys all had to pose by the giant monkey head!
The Bug's Life movie itself was pretty fun. There were a lot of funny, unexpected live audience moments, especially right at the end when they tell the audience to remain seated while they let the bugs leave. Suddenly from the opposite side of the theater in a wave down the row toward us we started to hear screaming and chuckling as a special effect in the actual seats makes it feel like bugs are crawling under you to get out.
Spencer with his 3D bug glasses
There were several clever bug-themed movie posters to look at while we waited
After that show we went went back to our prior plan and headed to Africa where I picked up passes to Kilimanjaro Safari and Maria got lunch at a vending window. We ate some burgers in a little patio garden where there were lots of birds waiting to swoop down and pick up dropped food. Unfortunately, Colin's hair got pooped on midway through the meal--we were just happy it didn't land in our expensive park food!
Unsurprisingly, after lunch Colin bought a hat. While waiting for the time on our passes to arrive, we explored some gift shops, and Maria found a relatively cheap safari hat that came with a pair of sunglasses (with a cool little clip on the brim of the hat to store the glasses). Colin had been looking for Mickey ears unsuccessfully for the past few days since he didn't want to pay the outrageous price they charge for them, so he welcomed something that fit, made him look cool, and kept him shaded for not much more than the price of the simple Mickey ear hat.
This hat is so perfect for Colin!
A really cool drum display in one of the shops
Next we rode on the Kilimanjaro Safari attraction. We were loaded onto an open air safari tour bus where we toured around some jungles and grassland past dozens of different types of animals like giraffes, ostriches, rhinos, and other more exotic animals that I don't remember the names of. I could see this being a ride to go on multiple times at different times of day to be able to see different animals. This being the middle of the day, I'm assuming there were probably less animals in view than maybe earlier in the cooler part of the day.
Here you can see another Jungle Safari bus in front of us.
After the tour, we went on an adjacent foot trail called the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail. There we saw some more animals including some gorillas.
There was a really cute baby monkey that was swinging all over the cage and going crazy that we enjoyed watching.
Colin being eaten by a hippo skull.
Spencer grinning at something.
Greg holding Spencer up to see a gorilla in the distance.
It was early afternoon and hot at this point, so we headed back to Asia for Fast Passes to the Kali River Rapids attraction where we knew we'd get wet and cool down. Sadly, no passes were being given out today and there was currently a 30 minute wait. Not wanting to get caught in something like our Norway debacle and miss the bus in an hour, we decided to give up on this ride.
The boys stopping for some pin trading.
Instead, we took a snack/rest break and then visited a few shops. Maria found a Tinkerbell hand mirror-styled pillbox sculpted item in one shop, where she also fell in love with a series of figures from Jim Shore labeled Disney Traditions.
I loved this entire display!!
Some more really cute figures
Greg and Colin finding hidden elements in this Pinocchio painting
Following the shop, we toured around the Tree of Life some more on another walking path, once again in awe of all the cool carvings we could find.
How many animals can YOU find?
The guys looking up at all the carvings.
Another shot. It was just amazing.
Then we headed down to the last section of the park we hadn't visited called Camp Minnie-Mickey. There was really nothing down there other than a Lion King show that we didn't have time for and character greetings. Reading up on the park, this section was actually originally supposed to be for mythological creatures like dragons and unicorns. You can still see evidence throughout the park of carvings and symbols with dragons on them. I was wondering why they were there when there was nothing in the park directly tied to them. I read up on it later that day when we returned to our apartment.
The sign for Camp Minnie-Mickey was amusing.
The boys posing as explorers. Colin was on his tiptoes, but wasn't quite tall enough.
The boys near a totem pole.
Some cute large statues of Mickey, Goofy and Pluto fishing.
We decided it was about time to leave at this point. We wanted to get out of the park before the 3:45 parade started so that we wouldn't find ourselves trapped behind crowds and unable to walk the main street to get out. We also needed to catch the 4:00 bus if we wanted to get home.
On the ride home we ran into our new Utah friends and chatted with them to compare our experiences on the crowded ride back.
We came home and swam around the lazy river a bit and then bummed around the rest of the day in our apartment. After five days, we just didn't have a whole lot of energy to get out and do anything else! So we ate some leftovers for dinner, watched a movie (once I figured out how to get the DVD player working), ate some fresh-baked cookies, and went to bed.
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