Tue, Feb 22
02.22.05
We woke up this morning and Brenda called around to see if there were other ways to save money on tickets to DisneyWorld. Nothing worth pursuing. We decided to take the 11:15 free shuttle from the hotel, and it may have only been 30 minutes late.
We arrived at Epcot and eventually decided to get a pair of 2-day “hopper” passes that let us visit as many of the 4 local parks as we want each day. We went to The Living Sea, and it was mostly OK. The best part was the turtle talk with Crush, an animated turtle that interacted with the audience. From there we walked across the park to the China area for lunch, and it was less than 3 times the price of what we’d pay for the same food back home. Not too bad. After lunch we walk back across the park to the Test Track, which turned out to be a giant advertisement for GM cars. Brenda decided that she did not want to go on the “test track” ride, so we headed over to “Imagination”, which turned out to be an advertisement for Kodak. They also had “Honey, I Shrank the Audience” which was a lot of fun.
From there, we took a bus (with a suitable wait) to the Animal Kingdom, where we went straight over to the Kilimanjaro Safari, which was a lot of fun and we bemoaned the fact that Brenda did not bring the video camera. We went to the Pangani Forest Exploration trail, and that was interesting too, even though we wore out the batteries in Harlan’s digital camera. We’d like to return here with both fresh batteries and the video camera.
Next we went to Discovery Island and saw “It’s Tough to be a Bug” which was also really fun. We walked around Discovery Island for a while and decided on dinner at Pizzafari, which was OK. After dinner we waited for a bus back to Epocot, and arriving there we took the monorail to the ticket center and back again. We visited “Spaceship Earth” as it had no line, and it was OK. We walked around a bit more and found a spot to watch “Illuminations”, the fireworks display. Pretty good! Our feet were getting real tired by then.
After the fireworks, we looked (unsuccessfully) for a refrigerator magnet and waited even longer for the shuttle bus back to the hotel. It was only a bit late. We got back to the hotel around 10:40 or so, and brought up some supplies from the car (the camera battery stuff). We did forget to bring up the video camera, so we’ll have to get it in the morning and make sure its batteries are charged.
There’s a chance we’ll rest tomorrow and do our second day at DisneyWorld on Thursday, as Harlan has some blisters.