Thanks!
To get caught up...
Day 4: A somewhat late start to Hollywood Studios. Breakfast at Starring Rolls; it's no Main St Bakery but it's pretty good. Next, Toy Story, fairly long wait but we weren't spending the whole day so fastpasses were not an option. I got what I
think is my high, but I know that I can do better! 191,700. By now, we were already late for our 50s Prime Time reservation. That's one of my favorite restaurants on propery; great food and lots of fun. After that, a show that's been pretty much ignored by the Photo Board - Playhouse Disney Live on Stage.
This was my first time seeing it; usually Mrs Groucho takes the kid(s) while I wander around One Man's Dream. It's fine for what it is, and is more or less tolerable.
Since this was supposed to be probably the warmest day of our trip, we went back to our hotel to check out the swimming facilities. Unfortunately, Leila was overdue for a nap and Mrs was a little tired too, so they napped while Jack and I headed out. The pool is very nice (easily beats the main AKL one, from what I saw of that one), with a pretty tall slide, zero entry area, etc. Not very deep though. The kid's water play area is the real star though; very big, very imaginative, and very fun. If you have kids and are staying at AKL, definitely check it out. Finally the women arrived to join us, but by then it was getting towards dusk and cooling off fast... then it started raining, too!
We regrouped and hopped on a bus to Downtown Disney, grabbing dinner at Earl of Sandwich. Good stuff. We did some store wandering and grabbed sundaes at Ghiradelli's. It's too bad that that place doesn't offer smaller sundaes - we weren't exactly starved and probably half of the sundaes got wasted. Which brings us to...
Day 5. Animal Kingdom. Since AK is not exactly brimming with breakfast options, we decided to stop at Jambo House (the main AKL building)... and we ended up at Boma. Mmmmm, Boma! Funnily enough, our server hailed from Rochester and had actually put a deposit on a house about a half-mile form ours, but was not able to sell his Florida house. We went to the park and the guy at the turnstile was also from Rochester, here on the college program. Coincidences abound!
Crowd levels were pretty high. We caught Festival of the Lion King and It's Tough To Be a Bug, before the rest of the family went to the Boneyard (the kid's playground) and I headed for Dinosaur... then stopped when I saw that it had an
80 minute wait! I'm used to it nearly being a walk-on! Instead, I made a beeline for the single rider line at Everest. Let's see... no smoke around the peak... a static yeti with a strobe on him... and now, not even the puff of steam from the engine when it stops in the load zone. All that work on the effects and they're not even working... kind of sad. Still, what a great ride!
I met up with the family and after the usual potty and diaper breaks, we ate at Restaurantosaurus. We've always ignored this in the past since it used to be just McDonalds, but we will probably go back again. The theming is really terrific. I also had one of the new 1/3rd lb angus burgers - I had noticed that the buns looked different, but some quick research shows that these are
really new - like maybe less than a month old. The buns look great but are thicker than I like - my favorite is a nice soft wheat bun, these are more like rolls. The beef itself is OK. Overall, the burger is decent enough but not astonishing... but certainly an improvement over the old burgers. Knowing now how new it is, maybe I'll have to take a pic next time I get one.
We then went to Finding Nemo, after which the park was switching to EMH mode so there wasn't much left. We rode the Dumbo clone then Primeval Whirl, which Jack was just
barely tall enough for. As we were about to do the child swap so Jack could ride, my wife realized that her new Minnie jacket, which was in or on the stroller, had disappeared. After some anxious moments waiting for Disney Security, it turned out that it (and Leila's sweatshirt) had fallen off or out of the stroller and that they were found, so we got them back. Phew! While they were on (which takes a while, even with fastpasses - it's extremely slow-loading especially for a constantly-loading ride), Leila was content just long enough for me to get one single tripod shot, then she needed more attention. We all went to Everest at this point. It was starting to sprinkle but was still running. The single-rider line was closed so I went through the queue.. and when I was done, Jack had had a change of heart. He had no interest in riding it - too scary! He did the Dinosaur ride last trip but doesn't want to ride it again. But this time, despite it being very dark out, he decided that he wanted to ride it, as long as I protected him when we saw the yeti. Well, sure enough, we went on and he had a good time though he was scared a little, but he says that he will ride it again. Yay! Three Everest rides in fairly short succession were starting to have an effect on my not-as-tough-as-it-used-to-be stomach so it was getting time to go! In fact, we were pretty much trailed out by the park sweepers.
That brings us to today...which has been a mixed bag... definitely not the best day we've ever had. Today was the day to pick up the marathon packets, which didn't open until 10. We ate at the quick-service spot in Jambo House, then followed the paperwork's direction, which told us to go to DHS then hop on a bus to Wide World of Sports. But oh no, that wasn't what we were supposed to do. There are dedicated buses at each resort. It was suggested that we hop on a Pop Century bus then grab the marathon bus then... which we did. (As a side note - despite other complaints, we really had pretty great timing with buses today.) We get there and wander around for a couple minutes then go to get the packets. This is inside the "HP Field House"... which requires all sorts of round-about walking just to get through. We get the packets for everyone, then head over to the Josten's Center, which is the main Heath and Fitness Expo and marathon/RunDisney merchandise. Well, they must have been trying to warm up the runners as the place was blazingly hot! Today was supposed to be relatively cool and have thunderstorms, so we'd pretty warm, too. (It ended up being very hot in the morning with clear blue skies, but did cool down in the afternoon, but no sign of rain at all.)
By the time we were finished there, all four of us were overheated and cranky. We headed to DHS via Pop Century again, and were faced with pretty huge crowds. At one point, Toy Story Mania was up to a 160 minute wait time! We didn't even try going near it. We watched Beauty and the Beast then rode Great Movie Ride, in the last row of a two-car train. I'm not sure if I've seen it with two vehicles in the same place at once...
After that, it was MuppetVision. It's great that this was done while Jim was still alive - Brian seems to be getting better but his Kermit still just doesn't sound quite right. I love this yet I can't stand Bean Bunny or the wretched Waldo, "spirit of 3, D!"... I can only imagine how much I'd like it if it didn't have them!
At this point, we had to choose between going through some of the animation area thing (One Man's Dream, etc) or Fantasmic. There were two showings and I wasn't sure which one we'd try... it was 5:10 and the first show was 6:30. I remembered a year or two ago, getting there 45-60 minutes early and it was standing room only already, and I was fairly miserable. So, we decided to check Fantasmic and if the crowds were awful, we'd skip and try the 8:00 show. This was definitely the right decision as the show was far from full; in fact we got a seat in the center-ring maybe 5 rows back from the front. Jack, who had been whiny all day, was miserable now - apparently one of his ears was really hurting and he "didn't want to be here"... probably another ear infection. Well, we toughed it out and had a fairly smooth wait and another fun performance. Afterward, the park had another hour or so, but being 5k day tomorrow, we decided to all make it an early evening. Did I mention that Mrs was now concerned about a very sore throat she started having? She thinks that she's getting a cold... and Jack probably has an ear infection... they'll be in
great shape for the runs.
I stopped by Mara, the quick-service at AKL, while the rest went straight to our room to get some medicine in Jack. Now everyone's conked out and I'm heading there myself, and that gets us current!
Now, a couple more shots from day 3.
A view from our hotel window into the dark...
She has been ratcheting up the cute level a lot recently, and gleefully says "HI!!!" to everyone she sees. Ever during the Beauty and the Beast show, she was saying "HI!" to all the people as they came out on stage. 
I even got to meet, albeit briefly, Disboard's own Todd H. We were both with our families so didn't have time to chat for more than a couple minutes, but it was fun to meet another person from the boards.
