Animal Kingdom afternoon
Now refueled, we had some park touring to do. Next up was a fastpass for Dinosaur. There isn’t a huge demand for this ride in my family, but we’d skipped it the last couple of trips so I wanted to re-experience it since it had been quite a while. We made our way into Dinoland, as evidenced by this photo of the dinosaur skeleton at the entrance. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone but I actually took this photo on the way out.)
Once at the ride, Judy decided to give it a try, using her patented neck-protecting/scare-preventing technique®.
We all have strange looks on our faces, but the kid in the front row looks just plain bored.
The ride was fine, and basically as I remembered: bumpy, kinda fun, but I can’t believe that anyone actually gets scared by the dinosaur lunge at the moment the ride photo is taken. And now we can check this ride off the list for the next trip or two.
We perused the gift shop. I believe this is Chester & Hester’s Dinosaur Treasures.
They did have a lot of stuff in there. I could see this place being a world of wonder for any young child with a dinosaur obsession, of which there are many.
I took a picture of this t-shirt because Marlene had a couple of T Rex shirts that make fun of his short arms. She had one that says “T Rex can’t do push-ups”, but I’ve seen them that say “Reach for the stars!”, “If you’re happy and you know it...”, “Licensed to carry small arms”, or my favorite: “T Rex Gym, where every day is leg day”. It’s easy to make fun of him now that he isn’t here to defend himself, being extinct and all. If it wasn’t for that danged cataclysmic event, I bet we’d all be keeping our short-arm comments to ourselves!
We decided to make our way back to Asia, to catch the next Flights of Wonder show. On the way, I took a picture of the construction efforts that would become Rivers of Light.
The fam heading into Asia.
These boats look very inviting. I wish they had a little boat ride around Discovery Island.
I’m only going to post a couple of pictures from Flights of Wonder because I can never get good pictures in that show. First you have the comedic foil: the “lost” tour guide.
Here’s a blurry bird picture just to demonstrate how all of my Flights of Wonder pictures turn out.
Fortunately, the bald eagle held still so that I could finally get a picture that wasn’t blurry. It shows just how big those birds are!
Regardless of how hard it is to get not-blurry pictures, it’s a fun little show and a great opportunity to get off of your feet for a few minutes. We enjoyed it, as always.
After the show we remembered to reapply sunscreen and went down to a little pavilion-type of place near the water (not to be confused with a van, down by the river), in order to get out of the way of the crowds.
With our sun protection factors now at appropriate levels, we left. On our way out we passed by these two guys, Baloo and King Louie.
I didn’t realize it when we passed them but they were making their way down to their meet-and-greet area, which happens to be a little pavilion-type of place near the water. (ie. Where we just were. We would’ve been overrun had we stayed at our little out-of-the-way sunscreen spot a moment longer. Or first-in-line, for Baloo and King Louie, however you want to look at it.) Here’s a shot of it, on our way out of Asia.
This long-legged bird proclaimed, “None shall pass!”
I said, “I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight, but I must cross this bridge.” Eventually flesh wounds were delivered and we were again on our way.
There was some construction going on at the Tree of Life, so the trails would only let us in so far before we encountered barricades. We were disappointed by that, but I still got some decent pictures, such as this walrus. (According to John Lennon, the walrus was Paul.)
We were running out of steam and ready to make for the exit.
There was quite a bit of construction going on in this section of Discovery Island, near Island Mercantile and Disney Outfitters.
We stopped for a Photopass picture in front of the Tree of Life.
Lauren bought a “Tangled” towel at Island Mercantile.
Judy bought a Disneyfied Starbucks mug at the Starbucks store and Lauren and Marlene got frapuccinos. It was 91 degrees (again), so I’m sure they tasted great!
It was hot, we were spent, time to head out. But we weren’t going back to the Boardwalk just yet.
Up next:
Visiting our home away from home
TinkHappy! Thanks for reading and thanks for commenting! A lot of DISers have followed our trips over the years so I knew they'd want to see some pictures from the big day. It was quite a day!
I was glad we got done and got out of there!
