March 18, 2014
Animal Kingdom
Animal kingdom day, with no real idea what to expect. Walking into the park felt immediatey like walking around a well-landscaped zoo. We scooted over to a Fast Pass kiosk to get passes for the Safari, which was already lined up with a 75 minute wait, and we also opted for the Expection Everest roller coaster and the Kali River Rapids.
We headed over to Everest to see if we could jump on an earlier ride, since the FP was for 4:20 and found what would become commonplace for our day at the park – a posted 60 minute line that in fact took about 30 minutes. The line meandered through one of the best presentations I’ve seen, a museum-style exhibit of Everest-hiking memorabilia, some historical information about the local Everest region and some insight into the local communities that support the transient hikers. Oh, and also a bit of Yeti “evidence” blended in. The roller coaster was excellent, with an unexpected backwards bit that occurred in the dark!
We took the Maharjah Jungle walk, the only disappointment being that the komodo dragon was disinclined to make an appearance for Andrew. We did get to see some ridiculously large bats that I would NEVER want to encounter uncaged, a tiger, and many, many species of exotic birds. Oh, and one overly excited monkey …
Hocus pocus, I’m a vampire! Abracadabra, I’m an umpire!
Another excursion we took was the Pangani Forest Trail which took us past the lions, a hippo having a nice underwater swim, a pen of sleeping gorillas and, most breathtaking, a pair of silverbacks, uncaged but separated from the people by a water-filled moat. While we watched, the silverbacks drifted across their pen, pulling and eating grass in such a tranquil manner it caused most of the viewers to whisper. We spent as much time watching as we could, until our Safari was scheduled to depart.
Nobody wants to mess with this guy.
The Safari was a nice little excursion gratingly narrated by a woman who was also a high-pitched fast-talker who we basically just tried to tune out. The “ride” takes viewers past lions, zebras, okapi (with the zebra-striped legs), elephants, rhinos, hippos, a cheetah, and several prey-animals like gazelles. It was very nice, but probably not worth the 120 minute lineup that was now forming.
We took an early ride on the Kali River Rapids which was just okay as river rapids rides go, and we ultimately ended up skipping our early evening fast pass for this one. We also decided to go on DINOSAUR, even though the line up was posted at 80 minutes, because we’d had so few lineups for far and we figured it wouldn’t matter in the long run if we spent some time in one. In the most extreme case of lineup time mismatch, we were on the ride in 15 minutes (!) and it was fun enough and fast enough that we ran through immediately for a second ride, and this time we were on in less than 5. The opening sequence featured a video starring Mrs. Cosby and the nerdy guy from CSI, and the ride itself featured us, the visitors, being sent back in time to just before the asteroid impact of 65 million years ago in order to capture a dinosaur. The ride was a bit of Indiana Jones style fun, totally worth the grand total of 19 minutes that we waited to ride twice.
A few of the kids decided to take advantage of the lack of lineups and went on the Primeval Whirl, and Taryn went to the Finding Nemo musical and the Dinosaur boneyard. We also managed to get in a second Everest ride before heading back.
For dinner, we figured we would nip in the bud the growing complaints from the kids what we had not yet dined at the local Sizzler. Yummmmmmmy. Turns out, Sizzler is not all it’s cracked up to be! The food was mysterious – the ice cream looked more like icing than a frozen dairy treat and I can’t even comment on the meat available in the buffet (mostly because I didn’t have any of it).
Back at the house, we are having a bad feeling about the pool – the hot tub is no longer heating up when the jets are on. Previous behaviour was that it would heat up incessantly until we’d have to turn the jets off in order to cool it down.
Meltdown count: 0
Breakdown count: 2 (Intermittent wireless, and choppy cable reception making TV unwatchable.)