Tuesday, September 30th
Parks Visited: AK and Epcot
Dining: Yak & Yeti (lunch) and Rose & Crown (dinner)
One of Melissas main goals this trip was a day at Blizzard Beach. Unfortunately, BB closed early this year for its refurb, so we had to go to Typhoon Lagoon. In making our plans, I set the TL day for Tuesday, but also made our plans so that if the weather was supposed to be bad, we would go to AK instead and do TL on Friday. (So we would either do TL on Tuesday and AK on Friday, or vice versa). Well, leading up to the trip, Tuesday continually looked to be the worst anticipated weather day, so by the night before, they were forecasting a 70% chance of thunderstorms and heavy rain. So we ended up calling a switch and making Tuesday our AK day.
Instead of taking the bus over to AK, we drove it, and I have to say, driving it was the way to go. Yes its a bit of a hike, but I think it beats out waiting for busses there and back (of course we wouldnt have had any BB stops this time around). One bit of bad news was as we got out of the car, I realized (so I thought) that I had left my camera in our room, so this will be the NO PICTURE DAY OF THE REPORT!
I thought about driving back, but there was no way to pull that off w/o missing the rope drop (and as Mel said, its not like I dont have 5 million pics already) so we decided to proceed w/o it.
We got in line and got up to the rope line, so after the little opening skit, they walked up back to Expedition Everest, and after getting FPs (for 10:30?), we were one of the first to ride that morning. We did EE twice in a row w. no wait. While riding we felt drops of rain. After riding twice (which is about both our limits w/o starting to get sick) we walked over from Asia to Africa to do the safari ride. While walking, it started to rain more, but not enough to get out the ponchos. We did the safari with like a 5 minute wait, and given the weather conditions, we did see a lot of animals. I wished I did have my camera for one part b/c the ride ended up taking much longer than usual b/c in the truck ahead of ours, giraffes stayed on the road and wouldnt move out of the way for like 5 minutes. So we ended up getting super up close to a couple giraffes and saw a couple of lions (never recalled seeing more than one). By the time we got off the ride, the rain had stopped
so we next did the festival of the lion king with no wait (it was the emptiest we had seen the showroom in a long time). After seeing the show and then doing Dinosaur with no wait, we headed back over to Everest to use our FP (the line was still only like 20 minutes long) and then a second time using the single rider line. After dinosaur and two everest rides back to back to back, I was done with the riding for awhile.
By that time, it was almost noon, so we headed over to Yak and Yeti to eat there for the first time ever. Even though it was lunch, we wanted to try it out a bit, so we each got an appetizer - she got 3 each rolls and I got 5 pot stickers and we traded each other a bit. She got a shrimp lo mien dish for her lunch that she didnt love and I got the steak and rice plate with fried coconut-like shrimp which was OK. Given the prices and how we were not really wowed, I doubt we would come back anytime soon.
After lunch, we came back home, where I realized that I had my camera all along, just hidden in the wrong backpack pocket! The weather was getting worse, so we stayed in and took a nap.
Despite all our trips over the years, we have never done the drink around the world thing
, so given we were at Epcot during the food and wine festival, we decided it was time to do so. We started in france and got the grand mariner orange slushy drink that everyone loves.
From there we got beers from moracco, japan, italy, india and looked at the world showcase shops.
We also did the boat ride in mexico to kill some time. (For the rest of the trip, I would randomly yell "DONDE DONALD?!?" at melissa
).
At 7:40 we checked in at R&C (10 minutes before our ressie time) and still waited 40 minutes to get a seat. Despite the fact there were outdoor tables with unobstructed views of the lagoon, we got a bad table view-wise. I asked to move and they wouldnt let us. Given how long we waited to sit down also was problem b/c we either had to watch illuminations from a bad view while we were still eating or had to go to the standing viewing area in between our appitizers and main course. We chose the latter as the lesser of two evils. When we get over to the viewing area, some kids have flashlights and they decide to continually shine them in our faces even after we repeatedly ask them to stop. It got so bad that halfway through the fireworks, we left the viewing area and went back to our bad table. THEN we get our main courses, and the food is cold (at least mine was)! Needless to say, this was our worst R&C (and quite possibly disney dining overall) experience ever. I tried to address everything we went through w. the mgr. and, she didnt care at all, basically saying we didnt have to leave a tip if we didnt want to. All I could say was nice job.
To wrap up, here are some pics from our epcot night. I forgot to say that Sheena Easton was the singer at the Eat to the Beat series and while we waited to get into R&C, we got pics with Pooh, Tigger and Eyeore.
Coming Up: I see the evil R&C manager again!
You and your DW would vacation well with us. Our favorite ride is the RNR. I would have rode that twice in the morning too 
