Shane Willard

Today was our first full day at Disney World. WOW, what an adventure.

Before we took off, we all met in the lobby. Grandma Tonya had a surprise for all the kids. She gave them each $10 to spend on whatever they wanted. Boston immediately disappeared, but he didn’t go far. When we found him his head was buried in the couch and he was crying. Grandma Tonya went to get him and when she asked him what was wrong he just sobbed and said, “Grandma, you’re just too nice to me……you’re always just too nice to me.” Sweet kid.

Shortly thereafter, we decided to go to the Animal Kingdom. Because we were up so late the night before we ended up leaving the hotel a little later than we would have liked. Around 10:00 AM or so, we boarded the buses headed for Animal Kingdom when Kelli gasps and says, “Oh, shoot. I forgot Kate’s bottle.” (Now, there is only ONE bottle that Kate will eat from, so this was trama.) Our plans soon changed, and I was going to be swapping buses and heading back to the hotel so Mom and the kids could get started at the park. I was in the line to get on the first bus back to the hotel when Kelli called me on my cell phone and told me that I had all the park hopper passes and that I should hop on the next bus headed towards the Animal Kingdom so that they could get in the park. 15 minutes later when we were all at the Animal Kingdom I boarded another bus headed back to the hotel. Needless to say, our morning did not transpire according to plan. About 12:00 or 12:30 PM we finally reconnected. Funny!!

The Animal Kingdom was a lot more fun than I had expected. The only thing I missed through my travels back to the hotel was a musical play about Nemo. Kelli said it was REALLY good; it was a broadway-style musical. From there we went on various rides and watched several shows. It turns out Luci is quite a fraidy-cat. She didn’t like very many rides at all.

There were three attractions that we really enjoyed: the Bug’s Life 3D show, the Lion King’s theatrical show, and the Jungle Safari. Because we didn’t have our “Fast Pass” faces on, we ended up spending a lot more time in lines than we should have. Oh well it was still great!

So I think we actually went on the Jungle Safari before the other two attractions. The jungle safari was WAY better than I expected. The line was long, but worth standing in. Inside the ride we saw all sorts of real live animals such as: lions, tigers, ducks, flamingos, rhino’s, elephants, hippo’s, antelope, wart-hogs, wildebeests, alligators or crocs, and giraffes.

We went on a ride or two then ended up at the Lion King theatrical. This show was GREAT!!! It featured singing, dancing, trampoline gymnasium stunts, and lots of Lion King characters. Near the end of the show one of the dancers ran up into the crowd and picked Boston to help her out. He was SOOOO proud. See below.

INSERT LION KING PICS

A little later in the day we went to the Bug’s Life 3D show. It was a great show, but Luci was scared to death the whole time. It was really funny. For lunch we all sat down under a shaded picnic area and ate food from one of the nearby shops. The food was only marginal, but what did we expect? While there I found a pair of sunglasses on the other side of a fence. I lowered Boston down the other side, had him pick them up, and hoisted him back over. They were great. I wore them the rest of the day.

The Animal Kingdom closes at 8:00 PM each night, and at about 7:00 it was obvious that the majority of the patrons had left. This was best evidenced by the short lines. At one point we decided to go on a river rafting ride. A group of us went on it and since we got through SO fast we decided we could go on it a second time before our wives noticed we were gone long. Luci loved this one. We ended up going on that ride 3 times in a row. It was fabulous, but it got us all drenched. The last ride we went on was Everest Expedition. This ride was a really wonderful roller-coaster. Unfortunately, when we got off this ride and were on our way to another I realized that I had left my newly-found sunglasses on the ride. After 25 minutes of waiting for them to find the sunglasses I gave up and found the fam heading toward the bus stop. We showered the kids and slept like babies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.