We all had some breakfast (Gabe and I ate maple oatmeal and I ordered coffee and bread up from room service for us all to share). One thing I have to say about the room service here; they take their sweet time getting to you (okay, two things, the automatic 18% gratuity really sucks.) So all in all, we are not overly satisfied with the in-suite dining options here. With the long delay for getting breakfast finished, we didn't end up getting up and headed to the bus stop until around 10 and with the long delay from waiting for the bus, we didn't even get to the Animal Kingdom proper until about 11am, which sucked because we'd been in contact with Jason and Markay about meeting them for lunch at around 1pm. We were in line for the first thing we did there, which was to ride on the Kilimanjaro Safari when we decided to call Jason and let them know we were going to skip lunch and hopefully would be able to meet up with them later. They were very cool about it, I think they were still in sightseeing mode at Seaworld also, and we went on with our day.
Our first experience was the safari ride. It was in the Africa section of the Animal Kingdome, which is really a huge animal preserve. The safari had a huge line, but it was really fun. The experience was very immersive and you really felt like you were on an African safari, complete with talking to park rangers over the intercom and even being shot at by poachers (we were helping the rangers who were in an overflying plane. :) We saw lots of awesome African wildlife up close and personal (with no visible separation between the open-air car we were in and things like white rhinos, giraffes, hippos, gazelles, elephants, and even lions and cheetahs. After the safari, we went on the Pagani Forest trail, which was basically a nature trail that looks like you are traveling through some African research stations. We saw gorillas and hippos and lots of interesting birds and reptiles. Obviously, Gabe was loving it and we were glad we went to that place during the heat of the day, because the entire thing is basically inside a dense rain forest, where the humidity was high, but the shade was dense enough to keep us cool.
After this, we were getting a bit hungry, so we stopped at a place in "Africa" called the Tusker House Restaurant. It was a super-nice buffet and we all had a great meal. This helped lift our sagging moods a bit and as we headed to our next stop, we were all well-fed and excited. We left the Tusker and went to Discovery Island, the center of the Animal Kingdom where a huge 140-foot tall man-made "Tree of Life" dominates the entire area. The tree is enormous to say the least, and inside it we saw a movie (it has a 420+ seat theater inside it) called "It's Tough To Be A Bug", a cool 3D experience (not blue/red either, some sort of polarized glasses experience...I could actually see this one, at least mostly) where Flik, the ant from A Bug's Life acted as MC to a whole host of bugs as they talked about how hard it was to be a bug. The show was amazing and extremely immersive, with bugs 'shooting' acid over the audience, crawling under seats, flying over seats, etc. Hopper, the 'mean' character from A Bug's Life briefly stole the show when he tried to 'get' all the humans for all the damage they try to do to bugs (attacking us with fly swatters, insecticides, and even black widow spiders that fell from the ceiling), but then he was almost eaten by a huge on-screen reptile and we were all miraculously saved. Whew! Gabe loved it!
Next we headed to "DinoLand U.S.A." where we traveled back in time in an authentic "time machine" to 65 million years ago and just -barely- made it out alive after being attacked by a huge carnataur and narrowly escaping the destruction of most of the planet by an meteor impact. Another close call! Gabe loved it too! :)
Lastly, we headed to "Asia" where we hunted the Yeti on "Expedition Everest", where Gabe got his first ride on a really awesome roller coaster. The line was long, but it was worth it to hear him say "I don't like this...I think I'm going to die" and then later admit that he loved it!
After this was over it was time to head back. EVERYONE was tired. BUT, we decided to ask Markay and Jason and the kids to just join -us- at our hotel and they did! They came over about 6:30pm and we all had a blast. The kids played for a while and went outside to see the wildlife at the hotel when Jason and I went to the store and then we all went swimming for like 4 hours in the hotel pool. It was a fantastic night and now we're all spent and heading to bed! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment