Magic Kingdom

Towards the end of our Orlando visit, we finally made it to the Disney theme park of Disney World. It’s definitely aimed at the younger crowd, but it was good to revisit the ‘classics’!

The lines here were not as nice… back and forth drudgery :p but we survived…

mostly…

We had fun despite the boring lines.

oh yea.. the rides were fun too.

Of course, there were parades and such.

The actor made a good ‘Bert’… he really had the mannerisms down pat!

Cinderella had her poses practiced too.

Bella just waved, but Tatiana (I think? She’s one of the newer Princesses and I don’t know her as well…) was picking people out of the crowd and exclaiming over their ‘Birthday celebration’ pins or whatever.

After some wandering around, we found ourselves in Tomorrow Land, waiting in line (again) for the Space Mountain ride.

It was long and winding…

Seriously… miles of mind-numbing back and forthing…

but eventually, we made it, and the ride was good!

When we walked outside again, the clouds that had been threatening all morning, made good on their soggy promise. It was pouring! Lightning and thunder too.

This is not something they get to do very often… play in the rain and splash in deep puddles!

Disney ‘must’s. You have to ride the Tea Cups.

And you have to go to “It’s a Small World” … yea, we made Brian come with, and he was a good sport about it (mostly).

We didn’t have to ride multiple times for a certain little girl this visit, although I think she still liked it .. maybe not as fanatically as she did at 3yo!

Let’s see… we had to go see the Haunted Mansion….

and The Pirates too.

Eventually though, it started raining again. Brad found a hat to try to keep a little rain off, but this time, the storm wasn’t messing around and we started to get quite chilly (not to mention, thoroughly soaked) we gave up for the evening.

Back in our room, too soaked to go out to dinner!

Animal Kingdom

We’ve moved on to California and, except for one record-breaking chilly day (ok, so it was only about 70F but darn chilly for what it should be…), we are now basking in the central valley heat, hanging out here to let the kids catch up on grandparent time and relaxing. We’ve also done a couple of important things like get our eyes examined (all good, with new glasses ordered for those who need them… the Dr. even fixed Brian’s soccer-battered current pair) and today we got a bit of back to school shopping done. Eventually we’ll mail some stuff home, but enough work for one day.

I still have some nice photos from Orlando to share, so here’s some of us at Animal Kingdom.

Walking to the bus from our resort room. I liked having all transportation covered! All we had to do was wander over from our room to a bus or water taxi stop and go for a ride.

Animal Kingdom is as much a nice zoo as it is a theme park. We enjoyed walking about looking at the animals and plants.

The big tree, in the background below, is a fake… it’s a huge, wonderful piece, covered in carved animal art.

The nice thing about the newer parks is that it seems more planning went into the layout and scenery.

Waiting in line is not a boring ordeal of empty rooms with massive zig-zag queues… we did have to spend time in lines(!), but unlike Disney (an older park), the experience was more pleasant at Animal Kingdom, a fact that led us to choose return to this park a second day rather than go back to the Magic Kingdom.

The second day we attended this park it rained… hard!… and most people left! We stayed and enjoyed riding the rides over and over again, with barely any lines! A popular raft ride that took us over an hour in line the first day, was empty enough the next time to allow us to ride FOUR times in a row. It was a nice line to wait in at any rate.

 

It does seem weird to think of standing in line for an hour as ‘nice’, it wasn’t much fun, really, but at least the experience was much more pleasant at Animal Kingdom than elsewhere. After walking through these lines, with pretty scenery and art work, the Disney, boring, back and forth, cattle lines were pure torture!

Animals… oh yea… the theme of the park. They had the coolest bats!

A nice tiger park too.

Honor summons big cats as easily as she attracts little ones. He came right to the window.

The bird show was spectacular too.

There were birds flying all over the open air auditorium.

 

In honor of our Independence Day, I’ll include this pretty bird too :)

To ‘cool off’ we went mountain climbing on Expedition Everest.

Actually, this ‘mountain’ was the setting for a very awesome roller coaster, another one we were able to ride multiple times after the crowds left when it rained. You can see the train heading uphill on the left side there. The lines for this were also long (usually – but not for us!) and nicely decorated.

We found the yeti… and it chased us all over the place. Lines or no lines, this is definitely not a ride to miss!

After exploring ‘Asia’, we wandered on over to ‘Africa’… it was a bit noisier there for some reason…

Of course, we went on safari, which is another ‘do not miss’ ride at the Animal Kingdom.

Brad’s favorite critters. The horns were massive!

I love this photo. Pretty good for a point and click camera aimed out of a moving truck on a bouncey road.

Another good thing about going to the park on a rainy day is that the rain cut the heat and the animals were out and very active. 

Baby elephant! I think the guide said the second one here is a sister, not the mother. The baby was very small.

Can’t you just hear the Circle of Life movie theme song? Where’s Rafiqi holding up the cub?

Oh.. there he is.. with my cubs and my sweetie.

Rafiqi’s area of the park has an animal care and education area. You can see displays about the rainforests and smaller animals such as frogs and scorpions. While we were there the kids heard talks about macaws and a bearded dragon. Honor also got to pet some critters. Brian did too, but it was Honor who had insisted we fit in a visit to this section… or else! Yea… she loves animals!

My brave (silly) explorers.