Our plan was to stay at Animal Kingdom for half a day and then go hit up one of the water parks at Disney. In the end, we felt there was a lot more to do at Animal Kingdom than we were led to believe from people we talked to before our vacation. Animal Kingdom had my favorite ride and show! As with all the parks, I loved the atmosphere of the park and the attention to detail, but I thought Animal Kingdom was especially well done.
When we arrived at the park, we immediately ran to Expedition Everest. We were able to ride it four times in a row, using a FastPass once, before the line started picking up. Favorite ride out of all the Disney parks! Loved it!
The bird show was neat and creative.
The tree of life
Tinker Bell visited us!
Mt. Everest in the background
Our next ride was Kali River Rapids. This was the most disappointing ride! The sole purpose of the ride is to get wet. I knew going into the ride that I would probably get wet, but every other ride that we had been on had all these cool things to see and was relatively lengthy. This ride was really short and there was very little to see. And the gentleman to my right and I got the most wet :o(. So I went around for the next several hours soaked and cold with squishy shoes. I took every opportunity to stand in the sun to try to dry. I would have been okay with getting wet if the ride would have been a really cool experience. But it wasn't worth it... We're wet in the next several pictures.
Stitch!
My pal, Winnie
Tigger
We enjoyed lunch at The Rainforest Cafe and stuffed ourselves silly since that was the only meal we ate that day besides a light snack for breakfast. I froze in the restaurant from being wet in the air conditioning. After we ate, I spent a good 15 minutes drying in the sun trying to warm up and let my socks/shoes dry a little.
The Kilimanjaro Safari was awesome. I was sitting on the wrong side to capture good pictures, but it was still really neat.
Afternoon parade--Rafiki on this raft
After the parade, we went to see Lion King. Best show at Disney! Loved it! The talent was amazing!
DinoLand was a lot of fun. We really liked Primeval Whirl and rode that one 3 times.
We were pleasantly surprised by the Dinosaur ride. So much fun!
We went and saw the Finding Nemo show then ended the night with 5 more rides of Expedition Everest. This ride had so many awesome elements and never got old. We had plenty of opportunities to get creative with the camera shots. :o)
Matt thought it would be fun to track our walking each day, just out of curiosity. Magic Kingdom was our least day of walking at 9 miles (we left the park early on that day), and Epcot was our most miles walked at 14. Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom were 12 and 13 miles. We know we wouldn't have been able to cover that much ground with our kids in tow!
I have to include our horrendous airplane ride home for my own memory. Matt had to remind me that we had similar issues on our way home from New York for our 5 year anniversary so I have to write these things down!
We had 3 different options of times to fly out on Sunday morning: 6am, 8am, and later, around noon I think. We didn't want to leave super, super early but wanted to get home to our kids quickly and in time to attend our ward so I could teach my Primary class. We opted for 8am. In order to utilize Disney's free transportation to the airport, we had to be to our bus at 4:45 am, so we were up at 4:15, but really 3:15 CST. (We were all packed the night before.) Again to take advantage of the free breakfast, we ate at 4:30am just before getting on the bus. The airport was pretty busy, but we still had over an hour to kill. We got loaded on the airplane, and I was super excited at this point knowing that we'd be home in just a few short hours to see our kids. Our flight time of 7:50 am came and went. After 30 minutes, the flight attendant announced that there were some technical issues and that we'd all have to exit the airplane. They kept us informed every 30 minutes with bad news. Rebooting the plane didn't work so a part had to be replaced. We spent a total of 7 hours at the airport and just over 2 hours on an airplane that day. I was grateful that they didn't let us fly on a plane that was unsafe, but it was hard to make the phone call to my parents and to the Primary counselor saying we weren't going to be home any time soon. We didn't make it home in time for church, and my parents had to take my children to church which they weren't planning on. I know it made their day so much more difficult as they both have heavy responsibilities at church.
On the plus side, Matt was able to help out a woman on our flight who didn't speak very good English (Chinese) and who was trying to make it onto a cruise by 2:30pm CST. She was meeting her family there for a family reunion and had invested $8,000 into the trip with no traveler's insurance. She was alone with her son and freaking out a bit because the line was so long to talk to the travel agent, while her window of time kept shrinking. Matt decided to see what he could do to help, and after making some phone calls to the cruise line and looking at other flight options, he was able to get her on another flight with a taxi from the cruise line waiting for her at the airport upon her arrival. Matt had a few more people approach him after that for help since they thought he worked for the airline!
After finally making it to my parent's house at 3:40pm, we immediately raided their fridge since we hadn't eaten since 3:30am CST. They arrived home from church within 10 minutes of when we got to their house, and it was great to be reunited with our kids and talk about our trip. Mr. Bryson, who is attached to me at the hip, wanted nothing to do with me when I got home! He got pretty attached to Grandma and gave me the cold shoulder. "How dare you leave me for so long!" might have been what he was thinking. We gave Caleb and Carter the souvenirs we bought them then finally headed back to our house. I'm so glad that I had the following Thanksgiving week to recover with no preschool and no school for Caleb. It's always tricky after a vacation getting back on track with routines and cleaning schedules.
So we are destined to have things go wrong on a flight home from being away from our kids. Both times we were flying home on a Sunday, both times things went wrong with the plane, and both times we were absolutely starving! (For the New York trip, our plane taxied for so long before we took off due to issues that we ran out of gas and had to refuel halfway home. We also happened to be fasting that day, and didn't get home to eat dinner until around 8pm!) We'll just have to plan for the worst next time. For both of these instances, we were so grateful not to have our kids with us. It makes for extra misery being cooped up in an airport all day with kids and nothing to do. And of course, the most important thing is getting home safely :o).
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