How the Other Half Lives ~ Updated 10/22: I Forgot Something!

[Dugette]

Great pictures. Although I have to say that during this entire update, I couldn't help but think that you saw the biggest frog ever! Seriously huge.

Yeah, it was. I should probably apologize in advance to jc040404 for when she sees that update, what with the frog fear and all...oops, sorry!

 

[MeMom]

We checked out the monkeys afterwards:

Neat picture!

I am a poncho person.
Brooklynn says it makes me a 'cheater', because I don't get wet.

 

[disneybarbie]

Hi!

I've been reading along but don't think I've commented for a while.. the safari tour looked excellent! I liked the story about the cheetahs and the rabbit run.. it made me think of the dogs we had as pets, we'd throw sticks for them, and they'd just look at us like "oh.. did you want me to fetch that?!"


Look forward to reading more.. not long until your next trip too!


Emma x

 

[jc040404]

Yeah, it was. I should probably apologize in advance to jc040404 for when she sees that update, what with the frog fear and all...oops, sorry!

That update really needed a warning first! I can't believe how big and gross that frog looks. Yuck!!

 

[ChattaAlley]

I have never rode Kali River or Splash with a poncho. I might do it next time. I am not a fan of the water rides.

 

[TheThomsLuvDisney]

I LOVE the gorillas, I could sit and watch them all day!

 

[Dugette]

Neat picture!

We liked that shot too! Those monkeys are just chilling out.

I am a poncho person.
Brooklynn says it makes me a 'cheater', because I don't get wet.

I'm with you! You will see us donning ponchos later in this TR. The one time we rode Kali (on a different trip), it was raining and we still wore ponchos. I think these people were somewhat foolish to do Kali on such a cold day, but at least they were bright enough to poncho up to stay dry.

Hi!

I've been reading along but don't think I've commented for a while.. the safari tour looked excellent! I liked the story about the cheetahs and the rabbit run.. it made me think of the dogs we had as pets, we'd throw sticks for them, and they'd just look at us like "oh.. did you want me to fetch that?!"


Look forward to reading more.. not long until your next trip too!


Emma x

I'm glad you're still here! We've had pet moments like that too...especially our cat. She only does what she wants to do.

And, yes, less than 3 weeks until the next trip!

That update really needed a warning first! I can't believe how big and gross that frog looks. Yuck!!

Sorry! I should have remembered your dislike of frogs BEFORE posting that. I don't think we have any more frog pictures!

I have never rode Kali River or Splash with a poncho. I might do it next time. I am not a fan of the water rides.

Hi, there! I think it really depends on the weather the day you ride. If it's hot, no need for a poncho. But this trip was pretty chilly many days, so the ponchos are really nice to keep you from being wet and freezing. I'm not fond of getting wet (unless it's a scorcher out), so I like using the ponchos!

I LOVE the gorillas, I could sit and watch them all day!

We stayed for quite awhile watching them. They're so fun. And that baby was adorable!

 

[Dugette]

We took the bus from AK to AKL and got off at Kidani Village. We were excited to be going back to one of our favorite places for lunch: Sanaa. We’d visited here once before on a previous trip and really enjoyed the animal views and the food. Our return visit did not disappoint.

Décor at Kidani Village:

Sanaa entry:

We were lucky enough to be seated next to a window again. Unless we’ve just hit it at odd times, it seems pretty easy to get a window seat here at lunch. Both of our visits, the restaurant seemed fairly quiet and there were tables with views available.

We started off by ordering something we’d enjoyed previously—the Tomato Soup with Paneer Cheese:

Yummy! We also decided to try something new and got the Appetizer Sampler for Two (Potato and Pea Samosa, Lamb Kefta Kabobs, Roasted Cauliflower):

All of these were really tasty! We kept an eye on the savanna while we enjoyed our food:

Once again, we reprised a favorite from our previous visit—the Tandoori Chicken (served on Naan Bread with Minted Greens, Tomato, Onion, and Cucumber-Yogurt Raita):

This was as tasty as we remembered. More animal viewing:

The restaurant ceiling:

Once again, we really enjoyed our lunch here. Afterwards, we stopped by the restrooms, which are out in this area:

Outside one of these windows I watched some super-slow creatures try to eat a salad:

I was just fascinated, watching this turtle try to eat a large chunk of apple. He tried and tried and tried and tried, yet it fell out of his mouth. It was so funny (and sad). I will try to post video of it later, although I believe you can see a brief clip in the trailer for this day.

After watching that for a few minutes, we walked outside to view the wildlife:

We actually saw what Chaz had talked about earlier. One of the giraffe was apparently feeling quite safe and comfortable in his environment, because he laid down:

More wildlife:

A couple more shots of Kidani:

After enjoying the savanna, we made our way out to the bus stop to catch a bus to Downtown Disney. We had a bit more shopping left to do.

Up next: Dug will tell you about all of his pictures of the Lego store!

 

[IheartDDuck]

I love Sanaa! I've only eaten there, but the experience was so good.

That Tandoori chicken looks so good. One of my favorite things there is the raita, for sure. I could just put that on everything.

 

[TheThomsLuvDisney]

Great update! Love the pictures of the giraffe relaxing. I honestly don't think I've ever seen that.......weird!

 

[lts5]

Hi,, found your trip report,, and loving it! Loved your behind the scene safari... so interesting!

 

[jc040404]

Awwww.. Turtles are so much cuter than frogs. Loved that! Sounds like a nice lunch with an awesome view. How nifty seeing a giraffe resting like that, too. So gorgeous..

Can't wait to hear about the lego store!

 

[Dugette]

I love Sanaa! I've only eaten there, but the experience was so good.

That Tandoori chicken looks so good. One of my favorite things there is the raita, for sure. I could just put that on everything.

The Tandoori chicken is quite good! Mmmmmm, love Sanaa!

Great update! Love the pictures of the giraffe relaxing. I honestly don't think I've ever seen that.......weird!

Cute, huh? I guess Kidani's savanna is pretty relaxed!

Hi,, found your trip report,, and loving it! Loved your behind the scene safari... so interesting!

I'm glad you are enjoying!

Awwww.. Turtles are so much cuter than frogs. Loved that! Sounds like a nice lunch with an awesome view. How nifty seeing a giraffe resting like that, too. So gorgeous..

Can't wait to hear about the lego store!

I've got a little turtle video coming up too!

 

[Dugette]

Here's the video I mentioned in the last post. About a minute long. Poor guy just keeps trying to eat that apple...I feel bad for him:



On a side note, can I just say how incredibly irritated I am right now with Gowalla?!? I will admit that I have no clue how it works, but Dug switched to using that to record our attraction-by-attraction notes this trip (he was using Twitter). Apparently, they just got rid of ALL of the check-in histories! I needed that to do this TR! That just erased a massive amount of our notes. I'm hoping there's some way to recover them, but for now, it looks like we'll be relying on my shabby memory!

 

[TheThomsLuvDisney]

I just checked my Gowalla account and all my stuff is gone too! During our last trip in February, I too checked in at every ride. Every once in a while I would go to Gowalla and relive my trip!!! Well those days are over! If you figure out how to get that information back, let me know.

 

[jc040404]

Awww.. What a sweet turtle.. Apples are difficult stuff.

I so thought of your TR this evening. Coming home from shopping, I saw some cars stopped in the middle of a busy street. A man was out of his truck, trying to help a snapping turtle cross safely! The little thing was doing its best to attack him, and it all looked too scary. He was actually trying to pick it up. How nuts! Hope he didn't lose a finger! I didn't stick around to see how it ended. Maybe turtles are just as dangerous as frogs after all!

 

[Dugette]

I just checked my Gowalla account and all my stuff is gone too! During our last trip in February, I too checked in at every ride. Every once in a while I would go to Gowalla and relive my trip!!! Well those days are over! If you figure out how to get that information back, let me know.

Dug managed to use his web design skills to pull ours (it's not perfect, but it'll work). It sounds like Gowalla might make the histories available again, so that might be the best bet for non-web-designers. However, for anyone ambitious, this is the how-to that Dug posted on his blog today:

The background to this is that my wife and I love traveling to Disney World. On a trip last year, I used Gowalla to record most of things we did while we were there. My wife enjoys writing up our trips, in combination with the photos of those trips, and this record from Gowalla was a handy resource in creating those trip reports.

Gowalla says they will get the activity history up on their website soon: that may already be the case by the time you read this. They’re busy folks, though, so I didn’t want to wait.

I tried looking around for a functional Drupal module to do the job, but I did not have much luck.

So instead I dug around and found a solution using their API.

Google brought me to a question-and-answer site with a suggested solution..

I tweaked this a bit to suit my needs:

$username = 'INSERT YOUR USERNAME HERE';
$api_key = 'INSERT YOUR API KEY HERE';
$checkin_num = 500;
$url = "http://api.gowalla.com/users/{$username}/stamps?limit={$checkin_num}";

// setup curl
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array (
"Accept: application/json",
"X-Gowalla-API-Key: {$api_key}",
));
$body = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$json = json_decode($body, true);
foreach($json['stamps'] as $stamp) {
print '<h2>';
print $stamp['spot']['name'];
print '</h2>';
print '<p><em>';
print $stamp['last_checkin_at'];
print '</em></p>';
}
It’s pretty easy to get an API key for Gowalla. The only tricky part was the OAUTH 2 callback URL. I just made up a URL on my site to get that to work, and it didn’t cause any problems.

You can change $checkin_num as you please to whatever you like to determine how far back you want to go.

If you want to include some additional information, just add this into the foreach loop:

print "<pre>";
print_r($stamp);
print "</pre>";
That will show you the full range of options you can retrieve. Just plug those options into the code, and away you go!

The date formatting is pretty awkward. It probably wouldn’t take much work to mung that data into a more readable format.

Like I said, you may not need this for much longer, but if you want to make sure you retrieve your Gowalla activity history for archiving purposes, this might be useful to you.

Please don't ask me what any of that means, cause I have no idea!

Awww.. What a sweet turtle.. Apples are difficult stuff.

I so thought of your TR this evening. Coming home from shopping, I saw some cars stopped in the middle of a busy street. A man was out of his truck, trying to help a snapping turtle cross safely! The little thing was doing its best to attack him, and it all looked too scary. He was actually trying to pick it up. How nuts! Hope he didn't lose a finger! I didn't stick around to see how it ended. Maybe turtles are just as dangerous as frogs after all!

Funny! Yikes on the snapping turtle! And the walking in the middle of a busy street! Hope all worked out well!

 

[Dugette]

Written by Dug:

Looking at all the bins of legos available.

Tower Bridge in London and a fire station

Space shuttle

Naval ship

Woody and Dugette

NASCAR and legos

Send in the AT-ATs! (Episode V)

Star Wars shuttle

ARC-170 starfighter: Episode III

Jedi starfighter: Episode II

TIE Phantom? Firespray in background.

Clone Turbo Tank: Episode III

Tantive IV, a Corellian Blockade Runner: Princess Leia’s ship in Episode IV

Droid Tri-Fighter: Episode II

General Grievous’ straighter: Episode III

Firespray: Boba Fett’s ship in Episode V (Bossk can be seen with fellow bounty hunter Boba Fett below)

Emperor Palpatine’s shuttle: Episode VI

Corporate Alliance Tank: Episode II and III

Count Dooku’s solar sailer: Episode II

X-Wing: Episodes IV, V and VI

Imperial Shuttle: Episodes IV, V and VI

Obi-Wan’s Jedi Starfighter: Episode II

Dugette walks the dogs

Up next: Animal Kingdom after dark!

 

[TheThomsLuvDisney]

Thanks for the Gowalla information, I think! I read through the information.....well sort of and I decided that I'm going to hope that Gowalla brings the historys back!

 

[Dugette]

After the Lego store, we stopped into a few more shops. I had read on the DIS that the bath bombs at Basin were awesome, so I thought those might make good gifts for MIL and SIL. Upon further reflection in the store, though, we realized that we don’t think either of them actually take baths, just showers. So, instead, we got them some fun decorative bar soaps (a ducky and a dolphin). The store was fun to wander around to admire (and smell) all the options.

After all that shopping, clearly some ice cream would be needed! We made our way over to Ghirardelli for a treat. We ended up in a line that got closed (for a CM break, I think) immediately before helping us, after we’d been waiting for awhile. And they told us to go to the end of another line! We did so, but were not happy to wait all over again. I think they ended up giving us a discount due to the unnecessarily long wait.

We found a table that just happened to match what we ordered:

Here’s the desciption (from allears.net) of our Mint Bliss: one scoop of mint chip ice cream, one scoop of chocolate ice cream, dark chocolate hot fudge sauce, whipped cream and a square of Mint Bliss Intense Dark chocolate. We also got the Sea Salt Caramel Hot Cocoa - whipped cream and a milk & caramel square. Both were very good!

After we cleaned up our sundae and cocoa, we headed for a bus back to the Poly. It was time to rest for a bit. We took a brief break, then enjoyed some “dinner snacks” in the lounge:

After enjoying the goodies, we headed out to catch a bus to Animal Kingdom, for late Extra Magic Hours. AK is a very different park after dark!

Our Photopass CD has a bunch of AK character shots (stock photos), so here’s a look:

When we arrived, we got some Photopass pictures taken:

Of course, there were also the ones with ghosts in the shot:

Funny. I will say that the Photopass photographers seem to get MUCH better nighttime shots here with their cameras than with ours (one of the reasons we bought the CD). I think this was the only decent one they took with our camera:

Looks like we wandered around the tree a bit:

And then, guess who we ran into (again)?! Donald’s family! I think I ended up holding Dewey for awhile while we chatted. They had come over to ride Everest, as Scrooge McDuck is such a big coaster fan. I believe they enjoyed it quite a bit. We made plans to get in touch the next day, as we would all be in the Studios.

One of our goals at AK this evening was to check out the character-themed Christmas trees in the character trail area. We headed back to take a look and found out that they had closed off the whole area for the night! We asked the CM if we could just take a look at the trees. Nope! Not super nice about it, either. So, we never did get to see them.

However, on our way back from that area, we saw a holiday Mickey and Minnie meet and greet with a not-too-long line. We decided, why not? Might as well make this night at AK worthwhile. Not too often you see them dressed for the holidays. So, we jumped in line. Of course, right before our turn, they needed to take a cocoa and cheese break:

Here’s where you can really see the difference between a Photopass pic and one that a character CM takes with your camera:

Yeah, another reason we bought the CD this time. I don’t think I have a smeared nose like in that first photo! Yikes! (By the way, can't remember if I mentioned, they gave us conservation pins after our safari and that's what Dug is wearing in the photo).

We moved on and ran across another Photopass person. With our camera, the lit up Everest is barely visible in the background. Looks much better on their pic:

I would have to imagine that we rode Everest at least once that night. However, I don’t have any notes, so I’m not sure if we did anything else.

The lighting at night is so pretty while wandering through AK:

Up next: Jiko! Yummy! Must feed my Kalamata Olive Flatbread addiction! (Oh no, I just looked at the most recent menu on allears.net and I think it’s GONE! Sad.)