We are staying at a Disney World hotel and one of the benefits is something they call Magic Mornings. On select days during the week that we are here the parks open one hour early for us than everyone else. This meant that rather than starting at 8:00a we got to enter the park at 7:00a and in Florida at this time of year this was before the sun was even up. The fun part of arriving in the dark was that Animal Kingdom has Pandora which is based on the Avatar movie. They've colored everything with neon and glow in the dark paint and being able to enter with so few people was amazing.
Our plan was to walk right to the Avatar Flight of Passage ride but it seems everyone had this same idea and the wait was already over an hour by the time we got to it. We had a Fast Pass for later so we decided to try something else. Unfortunately the other Avatar ride was broken so we exited and headed over to to Dinoland USA and the Dinosaur ride. The entire time we were on the ride we only saw 2 other guests. The ride takes you back in time to get something for some guy right before the asteroid kills the dinosaur. (I didn't follow the story very well.)
We finished off the rest of the rides in Dinoland including Primeval Whirl and Triceratop Spin then headed over to the Asia area and the Expedition Everest ride. This is a roller coaster ride that surpasses my roller coaster ride threshold so I looked after the bags while the rest of the family rode. It may seem like I spend more time watching rides then going on them, but there is only about 10% that are too much for me. My limits are spinning and big drops and anything upside down.
One thing we've noticed at Disney World is that there are not a lot of spontaneous opportunities for pictures with characters. Most of the picture areas seem to be in controlled settings sometimes with wait times listed. The line-up for Minnie and Mickey looked manageable so we stopped for a quick picture. I like to take a bunch of pictures as the kids walk up to them because that's when they have the best smiles. Only then do I hand our camera off. The park is great about having a volunteer person take your picture with your own camera so you don't have to buy the picture from them.
A couple months ago Kerry signed us up for Fast Passes for everything including the Kilimanjaro Safari and a few weeks ago got an e-mail indicating the time we chose was no longer available. She signed up for something else at the time but asked about it at the front desk when we got here. They didn't know why the cancellation happened and said we could get a special pass for anytime on the day of our stay. We didn't know which day we would go so they gave us a pass for both days. This meant we got an extra pass to go at a time of our choosing!
We connected with Callie's school friend again for a ride on Expedition Everest. We have wrist bands with our passes on them and since I wasn't going to use it we gave it to her. There's no picture of us with our pass though I do wonder if she was listed as an adult male when she went through. After that we did the Avatar ride which has you on a motorbike like seat as you fly over Pandora. Definitely one of the best 4D rides I've been on. Carter was very excited to finally spend some of his money and he bought a banchee from the movie. It allows you to control it's wings and head and he's named it Cheech.
The pass we bought for the park allows us to go to more than one park each day but it also gives us access to the two water parks. The first one we went to is called Typhoon Lagoon and is themed on a shipwreck. I've been to most of the water parks in BC and this one blows them all away. There is a lazy river around the entire park that takes about 15 minutes to get through and water slides for all ages. The sitting areas have sand, sun ,and shade and with the weather at 28 degrees it was a great day to come to the park for the afternoon.
The water parks don't have direct access from all the hotels and instead you have to transfer at either a hotel that does have direct access or in our case Disney Springs. This is a shopping district area that does not require a ticket and it was a good place to stop for dinner. We plan on coming back here on our last day so we didn't do any shopping or exploring. We stopped for dinner at Wolfgang Pucks and I already knew where we were stopping for dessert. I visited the Ghiradelli shop when I was in San Fransisco for a Salted Caramel sundae so now whenever I see one of their stores I have to stop. Callie and I shared so I didn't go into diabetic shock.
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