DisneyJedi
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2001
- Messages
- 39
It is now May 10th, 2001 and we are about halfway through our honeymoon. My wife and I are still going strong, but are finding it increasongly difficult to wake up early to get to the parks at opening. Today was no exception. I think Animal Kingdom opened at 8am and we didn't get there until about 9:30am. Again I choose to just drive there and pay the $6-bucks to park.
Entering the park, it felt real "zooish", but that's ok cause this is Disney and neither of us had ever been to this park before. I took note of the Rainforest Cafe to the right for lunch later. I could finally use the gift certificates I got for it at mypoints.com a year ago. We grabbed a map and decided it would be great to grab a fastpass to the safari first, so that is exactly what we did. A short walk down the trail and soon our eyes were momentarily fixated on the tree of life in the middle of the park. The carvings were beautiful. I had to get a picture before moving to the safari.
We grabbed our fast passes and next headed back to the tree of life to see Its Tought to Be a Bug. We didn't have a very long wait beneath the tree. We grabbed our seats soon after and had a fun time at the show. The interactivity of the audience with the movie was great. A certain something happens towards the end of the show that made me jump 3 feet in the air. I think everyone hopped out of their site. We had fun on this one.
By the time the show was over, it was about time for our safari ride. We noticed the Rafiki's Conservation Station and decided we'd try for that later. In little time we were boarding our safari bus seated right in the front row. We had a great South American girl as our driver. She was a crazy driver and never stopped talking. She was great, except her wild driving made it very difficult to get any good pictures of the animals. I wish she could have slowed it down a bit, especially at parts where the animals were actually in view. I was too busy fumbling with the camera and missed the lioness which was a let-down, but I did see the cheetah briefly and that was cool. The crazy driving reminded me of the good old days on my family's farm having to drive in the mud and pot holes, splashing water everywhere to pick corn as soon as possible to get it back to sell in the farm stand. Anyway, the safarri was cool!
I am having a mental block as to what we did next. It may have been late enough for lunch, so we went to the Rainforest Cafe which is technically outside the park, so we had our hands stamped. The food line was growing rapidly. I think it was about 11:30am. Right before I approached the area to request your seat, some teenage girls ran in front of me and said they wanted a table for 12. Oh sheesh! Luckiky the friendly Rainforest Cafe people advised us to sit at the bar for immediate service and that is exactly what we did. The chairs we sat in looked like animal butts. They were quite unique. My wife and I both ordered hamburgers when the bartender came around (which was about instantly). They were absurdly large and surrounded by a sea of french fries. The bartender also made us cherry cokes with unlimited refills, so we were in quite a happy situation. The themeing at Rainforest Cafe is really cool. At one point, it thunderstormed while we were waiting for our food and it got all dark inside. This is what I call a lunch! After a very stuffing and delicious meal, my wife and I paid with our gift certificate and then did a little shopping in the gift shop there. We had to take it easy out of the restaurant. We decided a show would be best for us at this point.
Exiting the Rainforest Cafe and re-entering the park, we immediately moved to Tarzan Rocks and just barely got a seat. I really liked the show. It was action-packed and entertaining. I heard many people don;t like the show, but we both liked it and would recommend it to anyone.
After the show we walked over to dinoland, passing the boneyard. The boneyard looked like it was for kids, so we didn;t bother with it. We looked at the standby line at Dinosaur: 60 minutes! That was just too crazy. We decided to move through Asia instead. We saw a bunch of exotic birds in this trail in the middle of the park. We wound-up walking over to the Lion King show.
We were early for the Lion King show, but that was ok. How anyone can do this entire park in 4 hours is beyond me. Do they even stop to look at the animals and read the signs or enjoy the shows? I bet they see Its Tough to Be a Bug, go on Dinosaur and hit the safarri and call it a day. We had planned to use one of our plus options on our passes today, but we were too busy at Animal Kingdom.
Now about the Festival of the Lion King.. this was a superb show. The acrobats are incredible! The animatronics are cool. You gotta see this one! We sat in the elephant section and had the big guy with the deep voice as our 'sponsor'. He was great! That guy could probably do a mean Darth Vader impression if he tried. My wife really liked the show a whole bunch. I felt the same about it. This is one to not miss!
After this show we wandered over to the Kali River Rapids. It was pretty hot and humid outside and I didn't care if I got wet. My wife didn't mind either. We'd been spraying each other down with sunscreen our entire honeymoon, but her fair skin was still getting burnt. I don't think she minded the water either. We had almost no wait at all to get on this. It was about 4pm by now and man did I get drenched. For most of the ride, I was facing backwards (I really hate that too) meaning I got the most water dumped on me. I was soaked after we got done on this one.
Finally, we returned to dinoland and the wait line was 20 minutes for Dinosaur, so we finally went on. We missed the queing area and the ride was right what I expected. Nothing jumped out enough to scare me. I'm glad we waited til the end of the day to go on this as we saw so much more in the hour we would have been waiting if we had stayed earlier.
Still drying off from Kali River Rapids, we headed back to Rafiki's Conservation Station and waited something like 25 minutes to a half hour for the train to return. The park was going to close in a half hour by the time we got to Rafiki's station. We primarily went to go to the petting zoo and pet some goats and pigs. It's not everyday that one gets to touch these animals. I'm sure they appreciated our brushes. This area of the park was so deserted. By the time we left, it was maybe 5:05pm and the park was officially closed.
We had a great day at Animal Kingdom. I wish it had longer operating hours. I guess we could have gotten out of bed earlier and gotten there when the park opened, but I like how we handled the attractions. I still don't see how it is possible to do this park in 4 hours. We didn't have a long wait anywhere except at Rafiki's station.
We immediately took a drive over to Epcot because I figured it would be better to park there to avoid the crowds (boy was I wrong). I took a wrong turn and wound-up driving our car behind Space Mountain in a resticted area (oops) and then did an illegal U-turn (oops again). It is surprisingly office-building-like behind Space Mountain, though I will admit I wasn't looking all that good because I realized I wasnt suppossed to be there. There was no easy way into the parking lot there as we were driving around with the busses. I had to go way out of the park and U-turn it back in line to get the right entrance. Mission accomplished!
We took the monorail over to the TTC and then
we took the ferry boat over the the Magic Kingdom this time. We hopped right on a boat about to depart and had a small stand before we arrived at the Magic Kingdom. The first thing on our minds was to find food. We decided we wanted Pecos Bill again since the food was decently good there. We must have waited on line 30 minutes before we got to the cash register and then the ordering person told us that they didn;t have any more chili!!! How could they not have chili?!?! Gwwaa.. we waited a half hour on line to find this out. Couldn;t they have posted it somewhere. We heard a bunch of other people ask for chili also. Everyone wanted what they didn't have. We decided to not get upset and settled for a large communcal Sprite and a couple cups of french fries. The next problem was finding a place to eat. We spotted a ledge by the cafe with some native birds cleaning up food people were throwing at them. They really shouldn't feed them, but I watched parents allowing their children to feed these birds. These birds were vicious. I had gone back in Pecos to get ketchup and salt for the fries and my wife waited outside. She said one of the birds flew down so close to her that its wings brushed up on her. Then the bird proceeded to dodge for our fries right in the cut next to my wife. These birds had some nerve. My wife and I ate our fries quickly watching the riverboat pass. We figured we'd watch the Spectromagic Parade from the Liberty part of the park, so we moved to grab some places to sit by the road.
I thought the parade started at 8pm. It was 7:35pm now, so we were rushing to stake out our spots. We plopped down in a spot across from where they were selling silouttes. I'm tall enough (6'2") so when I leaned back, a flower pot provided some back support and well as kept my but 2 and half feet away on the curb to keep my spot. I relaxed like this awhile and got to talking to the lady and her husband next to us. I discovered the parade didn't start until 9pm, but she assured us that we got our place at the right time. She even slid over a piece to give my wife and I closer access to the curb. She told us to protect the spot in front of my legs by putting my backpack in the way. Boy was she dead-on. Floods of people positioned behind and all around us. These people behind me had their kids jumping off my back. I really didn't care as I can tolerate kids. I sort of zone them out.
The mother was continuously apologizing, but I really could care less about the kids. Just as long as my wife and I could stay up front, it was fine with me. The woman next to use shared some good tips about where to stay and what to experience at Disney. I don't know if we could do the time-share thing for a place to stay, but it sounded interesting. I believe these folks were from New Jersey, but they were incredibly friendly. It is nice to meet nice people while on vacation.
The Spectromagic Parade was super cool! We videotaped it. I had the camcorder on my bag pointed down the street, but when the parade started, evenone moved forward tight and close and it blocked the exceptional view on the camcorder. My wife picked it up and taped the whole thing. Meanwhile I was watching and taking digital still photos. We both enjoyed the parade, but decided the next time we would try to not use the cameras, so we could focus better on what was going on. There was another parade coming up that saturday, so we planned to check it again then.
After the parade, it seems in no time at all we were standing to watch the fireworks. A lovely building totally blocked our view except for the highest fireworks. Still with the little we saw, we was enough to be satisfied. We planned to watch them again on Saturday for a better view. During the show, a couple from Winnepeg started asking me questions about my digital camera, so I was busy showing them how it worked during the fireworks for the most part. They were a very friendly couple enjoying Disney as much as we were. The guy was much taller than me.. probably 7 feet or thereabouts. I felt short. We met the friendlist guests between the parade and the fireworks that night. It was great!
The next part of the night was absolutely horrible. I think a record number of people attended the parade and fireworks that night. Main St USA was packed like sardines. I had to take very small baby steps to avoid stepping on people. My feet are size 13 and this is very challenging with kids in carts and parents making abrupt stops. We moved as quickly as possible to get to the ferry boat. We had to watch about 4 ferry boats come and go before we finally got on one. The worst of it was that I had parked at Epcot, so we had to take the monorail from the TTC back to there. See my post on the debate board for the meanest CMs at Disney. Do a search for "Monorail Nazi" and you will see the problem at the TTC. I don't care to mention it here. I'm trying to forget it.
After finally leaving the parks for the day, we grabbed some Wendy's Chili and fries and fell asleep eating it on the couch at our hotel. We had an exhausting day with a horrendous park departure.
Tomorrow we planned to visit Universal Studios for a day. I'll mention that and probably saturday also for next time..
Entering the park, it felt real "zooish", but that's ok cause this is Disney and neither of us had ever been to this park before. I took note of the Rainforest Cafe to the right for lunch later. I could finally use the gift certificates I got for it at mypoints.com a year ago. We grabbed a map and decided it would be great to grab a fastpass to the safari first, so that is exactly what we did. A short walk down the trail and soon our eyes were momentarily fixated on the tree of life in the middle of the park. The carvings were beautiful. I had to get a picture before moving to the safari.
We grabbed our fast passes and next headed back to the tree of life to see Its Tought to Be a Bug. We didn't have a very long wait beneath the tree. We grabbed our seats soon after and had a fun time at the show. The interactivity of the audience with the movie was great. A certain something happens towards the end of the show that made me jump 3 feet in the air. I think everyone hopped out of their site. We had fun on this one.
By the time the show was over, it was about time for our safari ride. We noticed the Rafiki's Conservation Station and decided we'd try for that later. In little time we were boarding our safari bus seated right in the front row. We had a great South American girl as our driver. She was a crazy driver and never stopped talking. She was great, except her wild driving made it very difficult to get any good pictures of the animals. I wish she could have slowed it down a bit, especially at parts where the animals were actually in view. I was too busy fumbling with the camera and missed the lioness which was a let-down, but I did see the cheetah briefly and that was cool. The crazy driving reminded me of the good old days on my family's farm having to drive in the mud and pot holes, splashing water everywhere to pick corn as soon as possible to get it back to sell in the farm stand. Anyway, the safarri was cool!
I am having a mental block as to what we did next. It may have been late enough for lunch, so we went to the Rainforest Cafe which is technically outside the park, so we had our hands stamped. The food line was growing rapidly. I think it was about 11:30am. Right before I approached the area to request your seat, some teenage girls ran in front of me and said they wanted a table for 12. Oh sheesh! Luckiky the friendly Rainforest Cafe people advised us to sit at the bar for immediate service and that is exactly what we did. The chairs we sat in looked like animal butts. They were quite unique. My wife and I both ordered hamburgers when the bartender came around (which was about instantly). They were absurdly large and surrounded by a sea of french fries. The bartender also made us cherry cokes with unlimited refills, so we were in quite a happy situation. The themeing at Rainforest Cafe is really cool. At one point, it thunderstormed while we were waiting for our food and it got all dark inside. This is what I call a lunch! After a very stuffing and delicious meal, my wife and I paid with our gift certificate and then did a little shopping in the gift shop there. We had to take it easy out of the restaurant. We decided a show would be best for us at this point.
Exiting the Rainforest Cafe and re-entering the park, we immediately moved to Tarzan Rocks and just barely got a seat. I really liked the show. It was action-packed and entertaining. I heard many people don;t like the show, but we both liked it and would recommend it to anyone.
After the show we walked over to dinoland, passing the boneyard. The boneyard looked like it was for kids, so we didn;t bother with it. We looked at the standby line at Dinosaur: 60 minutes! That was just too crazy. We decided to move through Asia instead. We saw a bunch of exotic birds in this trail in the middle of the park. We wound-up walking over to the Lion King show.
We were early for the Lion King show, but that was ok. How anyone can do this entire park in 4 hours is beyond me. Do they even stop to look at the animals and read the signs or enjoy the shows? I bet they see Its Tough to Be a Bug, go on Dinosaur and hit the safarri and call it a day. We had planned to use one of our plus options on our passes today, but we were too busy at Animal Kingdom.
Now about the Festival of the Lion King.. this was a superb show. The acrobats are incredible! The animatronics are cool. You gotta see this one! We sat in the elephant section and had the big guy with the deep voice as our 'sponsor'. He was great! That guy could probably do a mean Darth Vader impression if he tried. My wife really liked the show a whole bunch. I felt the same about it. This is one to not miss!
After this show we wandered over to the Kali River Rapids. It was pretty hot and humid outside and I didn't care if I got wet. My wife didn't mind either. We'd been spraying each other down with sunscreen our entire honeymoon, but her fair skin was still getting burnt. I don't think she minded the water either. We had almost no wait at all to get on this. It was about 4pm by now and man did I get drenched. For most of the ride, I was facing backwards (I really hate that too) meaning I got the most water dumped on me. I was soaked after we got done on this one.
Finally, we returned to dinoland and the wait line was 20 minutes for Dinosaur, so we finally went on. We missed the queing area and the ride was right what I expected. Nothing jumped out enough to scare me. I'm glad we waited til the end of the day to go on this as we saw so much more in the hour we would have been waiting if we had stayed earlier.
Still drying off from Kali River Rapids, we headed back to Rafiki's Conservation Station and waited something like 25 minutes to a half hour for the train to return. The park was going to close in a half hour by the time we got to Rafiki's station. We primarily went to go to the petting zoo and pet some goats and pigs. It's not everyday that one gets to touch these animals. I'm sure they appreciated our brushes. This area of the park was so deserted. By the time we left, it was maybe 5:05pm and the park was officially closed.
We had a great day at Animal Kingdom. I wish it had longer operating hours. I guess we could have gotten out of bed earlier and gotten there when the park opened, but I like how we handled the attractions. I still don't see how it is possible to do this park in 4 hours. We didn't have a long wait anywhere except at Rafiki's station.
We immediately took a drive over to Epcot because I figured it would be better to park there to avoid the crowds (boy was I wrong). I took a wrong turn and wound-up driving our car behind Space Mountain in a resticted area (oops) and then did an illegal U-turn (oops again). It is surprisingly office-building-like behind Space Mountain, though I will admit I wasn't looking all that good because I realized I wasnt suppossed to be there. There was no easy way into the parking lot there as we were driving around with the busses. I had to go way out of the park and U-turn it back in line to get the right entrance. Mission accomplished!
We took the monorail over to the TTC and then
we took the ferry boat over the the Magic Kingdom this time. We hopped right on a boat about to depart and had a small stand before we arrived at the Magic Kingdom. The first thing on our minds was to find food. We decided we wanted Pecos Bill again since the food was decently good there. We must have waited on line 30 minutes before we got to the cash register and then the ordering person told us that they didn;t have any more chili!!! How could they not have chili?!?! Gwwaa.. we waited a half hour on line to find this out. Couldn;t they have posted it somewhere. We heard a bunch of other people ask for chili also. Everyone wanted what they didn't have. We decided to not get upset and settled for a large communcal Sprite and a couple cups of french fries. The next problem was finding a place to eat. We spotted a ledge by the cafe with some native birds cleaning up food people were throwing at them. They really shouldn't feed them, but I watched parents allowing their children to feed these birds. These birds were vicious. I had gone back in Pecos to get ketchup and salt for the fries and my wife waited outside. She said one of the birds flew down so close to her that its wings brushed up on her. Then the bird proceeded to dodge for our fries right in the cut next to my wife. These birds had some nerve. My wife and I ate our fries quickly watching the riverboat pass. We figured we'd watch the Spectromagic Parade from the Liberty part of the park, so we moved to grab some places to sit by the road.
I thought the parade started at 8pm. It was 7:35pm now, so we were rushing to stake out our spots. We plopped down in a spot across from where they were selling silouttes. I'm tall enough (6'2") so when I leaned back, a flower pot provided some back support and well as kept my but 2 and half feet away on the curb to keep my spot. I relaxed like this awhile and got to talking to the lady and her husband next to us. I discovered the parade didn't start until 9pm, but she assured us that we got our place at the right time. She even slid over a piece to give my wife and I closer access to the curb. She told us to protect the spot in front of my legs by putting my backpack in the way. Boy was she dead-on. Floods of people positioned behind and all around us. These people behind me had their kids jumping off my back. I really didn't care as I can tolerate kids. I sort of zone them out.
The mother was continuously apologizing, but I really could care less about the kids. Just as long as my wife and I could stay up front, it was fine with me. The woman next to use shared some good tips about where to stay and what to experience at Disney. I don't know if we could do the time-share thing for a place to stay, but it sounded interesting. I believe these folks were from New Jersey, but they were incredibly friendly. It is nice to meet nice people while on vacation. The Spectromagic Parade was super cool! We videotaped it. I had the camcorder on my bag pointed down the street, but when the parade started, evenone moved forward tight and close and it blocked the exceptional view on the camcorder. My wife picked it up and taped the whole thing.
Meanwhile I was watching and taking digital still photos. We both enjoyed the parade, but decided the next time we would try to not use the cameras, so we could focus better on what was going on. There was another parade coming up that saturday, so we planned to check it again then. After the parade, it seems in no time at all we were standing to watch the fireworks. A lovely building totally blocked our view except for the highest fireworks. Still with the little we saw, we was enough to be satisfied. We planned to watch them again on Saturday for a better view. During the show, a couple from Winnepeg started asking me questions about my digital camera, so I was busy showing them how it worked during the fireworks for the most part. They were a very friendly couple enjoying Disney as much as we were. The guy was much taller than me.. probably 7 feet or thereabouts. I felt short.
We met the friendlist guests between the parade and the fireworks that night. It was great!The next part of the night was absolutely horrible. I think a record number of people attended the parade and fireworks that night. Main St USA was packed like sardines. I had to take very small baby steps to avoid stepping on people. My feet are size 13 and this is very challenging with kids in carts and parents making abrupt stops. We moved as quickly as possible to get to the ferry boat. We had to watch about 4 ferry boats come and go before we finally got on one. The worst of it was that I had parked at Epcot, so we had to take the monorail from the TTC back to there. See my post on the debate board for the meanest CMs at Disney. Do a search for "Monorail Nazi" and you will see the problem at the TTC. I don't care to mention it here. I'm trying to forget it.
After finally leaving the parks for the day, we grabbed some Wendy's Chili and fries and fell asleep eating it on the couch at our hotel. We had an exhausting day with a horrendous park departure.
Tomorrow we planned to visit Universal Studios for a day. I'll mention that and probably saturday also for next time..
