Okay, last park.  This one is my favorite park.  Epcot has a little bit for everyone and it is a huge park, too.  Lots of walking will be done in this park.  Lots and lots of walking.  We spent 2 full days here and part of another.  You definitely need at least 2 days to see the whole thing.  I’ll try not to make this post too long!

Epcot is really 2 parks in one.  There is Future World, where all of the current and new things are built.  Here is John holding up Spaceship Earth!

Like Mission Space.

Last time we were here, Mission Space had just opened and a lot of people were getting sick on it, so we passed.  Now they have a lighter version available if you want to try that, so we decided to go with that.  They kept saying to drop out if you were feeling uncomfortable over and over again, so I actually was nervous for the ride.  Honestly?  I think the ride was m’eh.  It was not even as intense as Star Tours.  It was claustrophobic, though, so I could see that being a problem.  We didn’t bother trying the more intense version of the ride.

Test Track is a super fun ride where you ride in a GM vehicle through some road tests and then take a banking ride outside at 60 mph.  Felt way faster than that!

Also new to us is the ride Soarin’.  This ride was awesome! It is a glider ride, much like IMAX with big screens.  You are in a seat and buckled in and then it actually rises up from the floor and gently moves you around to the movie screen.  It is a very freeing ride because there are no bars or harnesses.  So cool!  They even mist some scent out during the ride.  When we went over the forests, it smelled like pine.  When we went over the orange groves, it smelled like oranges.  We did this ride twice because we liked it so much (Fast Pass option!).

The Land also has a neat boat ride (did I mention I am a sucker for any boat or train ride?) that takes you through Disney’s hydroponic gardens where they grow produce for the restaurants in the Land.

 

Next time we come, I am going to take the behind the scenes tour of this as well.

We also love Ellen’s Energy Adventure.  If you like Ellen Degeneres, Jeopardy, and dinosaurs – you will love this!  It is an enormous attraction that moves the whole audience around.  Pretty cool.  It is a long ride, though, at almost 40 minutes, so don’t drink a lot before going on it!

The other half of Epcot is the World Showcase.  I love the World Showcase!  There are pavilions from different countries with replicas of famous monuments or architecture.

You can see across the lagoon to the different skylines.

There is Mexico:

Norway:

Home of the Maelstrom flume ride.  And also where we had a very good pastry!

France complete with uber expensive perfume shops.

Japan. Where I bought 2 bowls.  Imagine that!  They were so inexpensive!

Where we alsohad lunch.

Udon noodles with tempura shrimp.  Epcot has really great food!

My favorite is Morocco.  I love the buildings.

I want these lights.  Bad.

I also love mosaics.

Then there is Canada.

There are also character visits in Epcot as well.  If you cross the promenade past Canada to England just after the World Showcase opens (2 hours later than the rest of the park), there will be no line to meet these guys!

We had an awesome trip, even though I was a little under the weather for the last few days.  It sure does feel good to be back home and in routine again. Thanks for reading!

** Your trivia for the day.  EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow**

Ready for park #3? I am saving my favorite park for talking about last tomorrow.  

Hollywood Studios used to be known as MGM.  I don’t know why the name changed and I keep calling it by the old name.  Not that it really matters.  HS is probably the least “Disney” of all 4 parks.  It is really a tribute to 1950s Hollywood and has a very cool feeling to it.  I think it is also the smallest park.  A topiary Mickey as the Sorcerer’s apprentice greets you.

The brooms were tossing buckets of blue salvia for water.  Very cute!  Must steal that idea for my garden.

The park is just like a big Hollywood set.  You walk down different streets to get to areas.  They have a crossroads where one corner looks down like NY and another looks like California.  This is a cool picture.

In the back where the white barricade is and the man in the orange shirt is – that is a giant mural and not a street.  Looks just like it, though, doesn’t it??

We had a nice quiet breakfast at a place called Starring Rolls.  They also had locally roasted coffee there, which is why we went, but the breakfast was certainly nothing to sneeze at!

Apple Cranberry turnover.  Yep – it was really good.  Did I mention that I only gained 1 pound from vacation?  And that was weighing in the day  after getting back.  I was happy with that.  I think the scale will actually be lower since I am always bloated from plane travel.  Lots and lots of walking was done.

Continuing on. There is also a copy of the Mann’s Chinese Theater:

This is home to the Great Movie Ride. It is a ride that takes you through scenes of famous movies from the noir era, Casablanca, Singing in the Rain, Cassablanca, Alien, Wizard of Oz.  Fun.

Then there is the fun Star Tours! Hello Imperial Walker!

 

Hello C3PO!

This is a fun, fun ride that is now 3D, which I actually was thinking I was annoyed by (must everything now be in 3D??), but it actually was well done.  They have 50 different possible tours you can take so you can ride this many times and not repeat the tour.  We did it twice.

We did not do the 2 biggest draws here, which are the Tower of Terror and the Aerosmith roller coaster.  Too much ride for this lady.  I’ll stick with the Muppets!

Muppets in 3D vision.  The only people I cut a break for to do cheesy 3D jokes are the muppets!   We catch this show every time we come here and it just cracks me up every single time.

We also hit another favorite spot to eat lunch, which is the Sci-Fi Dine in Theater.  You eat almost in the dark.  You sit in cars in front of a big projection screen.

The screen plays trailers to old sci-fi movies the whole time.

I heard my favorite trailer – Beware of the Blob!  That got in my head for the rest of the day.

Lovebirds eating by dashboard light.

It really is hard to see what you are eating LOL!

After lunch, John went off to see a stunt show (snore….), so I went to see Little Mermaid.

It was a live action puppet show.  Very cute and I think I was the only one in the theater without a little one in tow.

And I couldn’t pass up this opportunity!

I love Pooh!  When there aren’t long lines, I go ahead and have pictures taken with characters.

Hollywood Studios is definitely easy to do in 1 day without feeling over tired.  The Fanstasmic show was not running while we were there, which is unfortunate because that is a cool, cool show at night.

Bye Hollywood Studios!

Tomorrow is Epcot!  My favorite park.

If you missed the post on Animal Kingdom, you can read about it here.  Second park to post about is Magic Kingdom.  The first of the 4 Disney parks to be built in Florida.  This is actually my 6th time visiting the Magic Kingdom!  1 time as a child and 5 times as an adult.  Plus Disneyland once!

We actually visited the Magic Kingdom 3 times during this vacation. Since we stayed on Disney property, we had the park hopper pass.  Another benefit of staying on property is that the parks are open extended hours for those people staying there.  You just need to show your room key (aka the Key to the Kingdom) to ride attractions.  When we arrived Sunday evening,  Magic Kingdom was open until 1 a.m. with extended hours, so we popped over for a few hours.

Disney does the fireworks shows at park closing for all their parks with the exception of Animal Kingdom. No fireworks there because of the animals.  This makes for a huge mass exodus once the fireworks are done, which I really, really hate.  So, since the park had extended hours for on property guests, that meant after the fireworks at 9 pm, everyone else left and the park was open to the resort patrons for another few hours.  Here is a tip for you.  Visit Fantasy Land in this park on a night like this because it gets swamped with little children during the daytime hours.  So, we rode this:

Welcome to your ear worm for the day.   It’s like a nightmare by the time you get to the end LOL!

Please note – you are not allowed to take flash pictures on rides, but you can take them sometimes without flash or  you can video rides if you have no external light source.  Listen to the attraction attendants as to what they allow. They will always tell you.  It ruins the ride for other people if you use flash, so just don’t do it.

Fantasy Land has another of my favorites –  the Winney the Pooh ride!  You get to go in a big hunny pot.

My most favorite ride in the Magic Kingdom is the Haunted Mansion.  In fact, that was the very first ride we went on Sunday night!

I was giggling like a little kid on this ride.  I love it!

This is the daytime view at the entrance to Magic Kingdom.  They actually are doing a lot of rennovation on this particular park, so a fair number of things were closed.  You can see the big crane in the background behind the castle working on Fantasy Land.  They are supposed to be opening up the new stuff later this year.

Daytime view of Cinderella’s castle

It has a beautiful mosaic walk through depicting the Cinderella story. The detail is just incredible.

On to Frontier Land and Splash Mountain!  This is a cool log flume ride.  I took this shot while on the ride as we floated by the big drop.  Then I put my camera away to keep it dry!

The ride is really lovely and goes through the story of Br’er Rabbit.  Then there is the drop at the end as he escapes through the briar patch.  The camera catches you as you go down the hill to make a big splash.

Note John ducking down.  I was full head up and got soaked LOL!  This is a very fun ride.  No line either.  We walked in all the way up to the line and got right on!  Loved it when that happened.

When there is a long line, another benefit of staying on property is that you can use the Fast Pass option.  You put your room card into a kiosk and it prints out a ticket for you with what time to come back to ride an attraction.  Instead of waiting in the long lines, you just go during the time on the Fast Pass ticket and only wait maybe 5 or 10 minutes in a special line.

That is very, very cool.  Jungle cruise is a classic ride.

It’s cute.  I am a sucker for any train or boat ride.

Of course, I like the safari ride much better in Animal Kingdom with the real animals.  😀

Adventure Land also has the Pirates of the Caribbean, another one of my favorite rides. It was updated adding in Johnny Depp as an animatronic, which was cool.

This daytime visit was on Friday, and I have to say I was really tired of people at this point. This park had the most people in it during our whole visit.  Plus, I had laryngitis and John had to do any talking or ordering for me.  The next time we come, I would definitely *not* do Magic Kingdom on a Friday.

I had the yummiest snack that day, too.  Fruit tart! This was from the Main Street Bakery.

We ate some very good food this week, even for mass produced food!

Something not to overlook is the castle rose garden.  This is just past the castle before the entrance to Tomorrow Land.

You know I was all over this!  On my bucket list is to come here during the Flower and Garden show at Epcot.

Tomorrow Land has been updated since the last time we were here (and it needed it!).

They replaced the Alien Adventure attraction with Stitch and that was totally lame.  Boo on that one.  Otherwise, the updates were nice.

Bye Magic Kingdom!

Next park up will be Hollywood Studios, formerly known as MGM.

We had a wonderful trip, fabulous weather – except for me getting sick near the end of the trip.

I thought I would recap the parks.  We had the park hopper option, which allows you to go from park to park at any time, so you can do more than one park in a day.  This is nice for those parks that have extended hours at night and you want to pop over there for the evening after visiting a different one during the day.  We stayed at the Pop Century resort, which is one of the value resorts.

When staying on the property, there are buses that pick you up for each of the parks that leave every 20 minutes.  We decided to do Animal Kingdom on Monday.  This was the only park that we did just one day at.

Animal Kingdom is sort of a zoo/theme park hybrid.  There are lots of animal exhibits and then sections with ride attractions.  

The newest attraction is Expedition Everest.  Scary!!!  This was an intense coaster ride, which I dragged John on, much to his dismay.

This coaster goes forward and backwards.  As you go along, the tracks stop and are broken (because the yeti got to them), then you start going backwards.  It is very fast and goes in and out of the dark.

Poor John did not like that ride at all LOL!  I would do it again, but it was pretty scary.

One of our favorite things at Animal Kingdom is the Safari ride.  Disney does such a great job of giving the animals an natural environment with enclosures that you actually can’t see from the people side – so it looks like all the animals interact together.  The Safari ride is a tram that takes you out into the animal enclosures.

They can come near the trucks if they want, but they are not like animals in other safari places that are used to people feeding them.  That is not allowed at this park (thank goodness).

This park was not crowded at all.  No lines for anything, which was great!

We had a character lunch at Harambe. 

We didn’t actually know it was going to be a character lunch, we thought the buffet food sounded interesting and then decided to go ahead and eat there.

Lots of seafood, samosas and plaintains!

Goofy stopped by to visit us.

John is not a character hugger.  Me?  I get right in there!

There are also walking trails that take you through other animal exhibits.

No bars, ever.

John and I had the most outrageous snack.  You think when you get a cupcake at a them park that it won’t be big, right?  Wrong!

That’s a chocolate lollipop stuck in each cupcake!  I about died laughing at the size of these.  We would have just ordered one if we had known.  Could not finish them… probably a good thing.

Animal Kingdom also has a dinosaur section.  A little odd, but there you go.

We went on the Dinosaur ride, which is really rocky and a bit hard on the back (ouch!).  This big dinosaur pops out and they snap a picture of you when it happens.  I laughed really hard at the lady in front of us (we are in the back row):

This is one park that you can actually get through in a single day without having to hurry.

This is the large tree of life in the center of the park. It is nice to just appreciate all of the work that went into the carving of it.