Anywho, Thursday was Animal Kingdom day. I was a little on the fence about going to this park; I had heard mixed reviews about it as far as families with small kids and such. But it turned out to be a great park! We only spent half of the day there, which was more than enough for the kids, but I could have easily spent two days there on my own. There was a ton to see and do. Oh well.
What do you do when you enter a Disney park for the first time? You take a picture, of course! YOU TAKE A PICTURE.
That massive tree in the back is actually fake. (But still looks really real, I think.) It has all sorts of shapes of animals and such formed in the bark and in the vines on its trunk. Pretty impressive, actually. As you can see, Tess was not impressed. (Actually, by Thursday I think Tess was over Disney. It was a lot for a four year old and all in all I have to give her credit for holding it together as well as she did.)
The photographer had this great idea for all of us to turn around so that Tess would be facing forward, but it didn't work out too well. Great idea in theory...
Josh was looking up at the sign they had on the roof of the jeep - it was a picture "menu" of all of the animals we could potentially see.
Cole was disappointed the jeeps did not go faster. He wanted his adrenaline fix first thing in the morning. He also kept asking ALL MORNING when we were going to have lunch, because he knew that after lunch we would go swimming.
Like Lance's new hat? He had picked it up that morning to replace the one he had lost on the first day. It has all sorts of fancy Animal Kingdom pins on it, which I think he only tolerates. Tess liked them!
I won't bore you with a bunch of pictures of the animals we saw. We saw rhinos and elephants (and even some teenage elephants rough housing, which was pretty entertaining), and this cow with GINORMOUS horns, and all sorts of gazelle and things of that nature. The one thing I really wanted to see was the hippos, and here they are. You can barely see them! There was one you could see better that was out of water and eating cabbages, but this dang guy in front of us got in the way to show his baby - his BABY. Seriously, dude. Why did you even bring a baby to the Animal Kingdom?! Yes, I'm still bitter.
Here's what a lot of the safari looked like. It was actually quite pretty.
After the safari we parted ways - Tess and Grandma to the Bone Yard playground, and us to the Expedition Everest roller coaster. We were a few minutes early for our FastPass, and since the line wasn't that long we decided to go twice. The thing with FastPass is that you miss a lot of the detailed stuff Disney puts in line for people who are waiting for a while. So while it's great to not wait in line forever, sometimes you miss some really cool things. Everest had LOTS of cool things to look at.
It was all based around this story about the "Mystery of the Lost Expedition" - this group of Everest hikers who mysteriously disappeared, perhaps because a YETI attacked them.
They had this museum wrapped through the line where you could look at all of these "artifacts" from the expedition. I especially loved the Yeti photo bomb pictures supposedly taken from the camera of one of the hikers. Oh Disney, I love you.
I also like the shredded backpack. The details were just great!
We were probably in line 15 minutes, but it was actually fun and interesting!
We finally got on the ride, it was so fun! This coaster goes backward for a bit, which was new and fun. At the end there's this really realistic animatronic yeti that looks like it's going to grab you. (The lights are flashing and it was actually kinda freaky.) He would never admit it, but I think it freaked Cole out a bit! When we got off and waited a few minutes for our FastPass time he said he didn't want to go again. It only took a little bit of peer pressure to convince him to go again!
You might have noticed that I sat with Cole a lot on the bigger rides. He's an adrenaline junky and fiercely independent, but he always wanted to sit with me on those rides and was always holding my hand in the park. It was really quite sweet. Maybe Cole does love me after all! (Because some days I really have to wonder...)
Nice posing, Lance! I never paid attention or just forgot where the camera was, hence my goofy looks.
Here's quick snapshot I took just outside of Everest. It looked so cool! I really wish I could've wandered around there all afternoon. Also, one of the signs around there had some Nepalese saying like "I would rather spend one day as a tiger than 1000 years as a sheep". I kept teasing Josh and Spencer about being sheep or tigers, which I'm sure they appreciated... :)
We eventually met back up with Tess and Susie at the Boneyard and played for a bit. There was a whole carnival-like section that I think the kids would have really enjoyed, but we decided it would be better to see a show and then get some lunch. (Side note: even my dad admits that he is now old enough to wear sandals with socks. Grandpa Roper, indeed!)
Once again we made the mistake of having lunch at the same time as 5000 of our closest friends. Dangit. Also, the Animal Kingdom did not have many places to take a family to eat. So we chose Pizzafarie; you can guess what they offered. Anyways, it was a madhouse and the kids were crazy and they forgot half our order and one of the drinks was leaking and poor Lance had to go back into the restaurant several times, but the manager was really nice about the drink and about helping us. So after what felt like an eternity we finally all sat down and ate and it was yummy and in the shade and life was good.
Side note: I have decided that Disney is definitely NOT designed for large families or groups. I would say 95% of all the rooms are for families of four. Cinderella's Royal Table could only seat up to six per reservation. And these quick dining places were really, really hard to deal with 9 people. I'm sure 9 is a pretty big group, but I think we would've had the same issue if it'd just been the 6 of us. (Actually, it would've been a million times harder without Dad and Susie. We owe them. Big Time.) It just makes me wonder when a family of 6 became a big family.
I took a random picture of this hibiscus plant where we ate, because it was pretty and apparently I was bored.
That afternoon we went back to the resort. We really needed to do this - the kids needed some non-park time. In fact, if we did Disney again any time soon I would totally rearrange our schedules and do more swimming afternoons. The kids had a fantastic time. There was a good-sized water slide that Cole must've gone down at least 30 times. (Not an exaggeration.) Despite my use of spf 70 I still got a little red. Dang it.
That evening we ate at an African buffet restaurant called Boma, which was in the Animal Kingdom resort. The food: awesome. The children: not so much. Cole and Josh were especially naughty, teasing and play fighting and such. The final straw was when they started wrestling and fell to the floor and kept wrestling. I know this is Disney and they've probably seen all sorts of wild kid behavior, but I was horrified! I picked them both up by the arms and dragged them up two flights of stairs to the main lobby and made them sit on a couch and boy did I let them have it! (Well, as much as I could in a public place. There was no yelling... there was very angry, very intense whispering...) Josh was adequately abashed, but Cole was his usual defiant self and that made me even angrier. Growl. Dang naughty kids!
Eventually the rest of the family joined us and we looked at the animals for a little while and then made the long shuttle ride home. (Made all the longer because there was no direct shuttle from there to our resort - we had to go to one of the big parks and then transfer.) Let the record show, though, that there was no wrestling on the shuttle!
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