amanda_lodden

The plan for today was to get up early and get to Animal Kingdom before it got hot and crowded. We managed the "get up early" part (though not "park opening" early-- we got to the park at 10am, an hour after it opened), but it was already hot and crowded. Animal Kingdom is a smaller park, but much of it is open-air, with air conditioned spaces few and far between. There was quite a lot of crankiness all around; everyone's feet hurt from four days of theme parks, everyone was hot, and everyone was tired despite yesterday's early bedtime. Only Shane retained his bouncy nature.

Team Enthusiasm made a quick detour to pick up FastPasses for the Everest rollercoaster, and then we all met up near the safari. Going there early in the day paid off; not only was there a very short wait, but most of the animals hadn't started hiding from the heat yet-- just the lions were disappointing, and even they had the decency to sleep where they could be seen. Hanna was excited to see the cheetahs, and Nick was ecstatic that there were crocodiles. Both name the safari as a highlight of the entire trip.

After the safari, Team Enthusiasm went off to Expedition Everest to use their FastPasses, while Team Lazy meandered around and complained of the heat. John had a brilliant idea and popped into one of the nice restaurants to make lunch reservations. Shane was happy with the choice, and the kids were less thrilled-- John picked an asian restaurant, and the kids profess to not like Chinese food. They were promptly told to suck it up. We had a bit of time to kill before our reservation time, so we went to see the show It's Tough To Be A Bug. Then it was off to lunch. In the spirit of tormenting them... er, I mean, encouraging them to try new things, I ordered three different entrees for myself and the kids, and made them try some of each. Neither one cared for my salmon, though I have to say that it was the blandest salmon I'd ever had and I didn't care that much for it either.

Both kids had been asking if we could just skip the rest of the park and go back to the condo. The air conditioned bug show and an air conditioned lunch helped them chill out a little (no pun intended), so we decided to check out one more ride, Dinosaur, which is also indoors and air conditioned. Sadly, when we got there, the ride had a 35 minute wait time, and the kids refused to wait that long. John, the kids and I ended up heading back to the car and the condo while Shane went off to do some souveiner shopping. Total time spent at Animal Kingdom: about 4 hours.

After a good long soak in the pool, everyone was considerably more pleasant to deal with. John wanted to see Green Lantern, which opened today, so we went to dinner at Shoney's and then off to the movie theater at Downtown Disney. Shane decidely did NOT want to see Green Lantern but hadn't yet seen Pirates of the Caribbean 4, so we picked showtimes that coincided. The kids and I promptly jumped ship and went for PotC, leaving John to see GL by himself.

While we were driving to the theater, the sky was pretty dark, and just before we turned into the parking lot the first fat raindrop fell. And then another and another, so that by the time we parked, it was flat-out pouring. We waited in the car til the rain let up... and it didn't. Eventually it slowed a little, and we declared that to be our best chance to go. By the time we got across the parking lot to the theater, the rain had picked up again and we were soaked. We sent John to get tickets while the four of us huddled under an overhang, wet and cold. Then we raced through the raindrops again to get to the theater entrance.

All of us headed to the restrooms whether we needed to go or not-- the thought was to use the hand dryers to dry ourselves off a bit. This theater uses the new air-blade dryers, and while those are awesome for drying your hands, they really suck for drying out your shirt or hair or pants or shoes. The end result was "still soaking, but with a single dry stripe somewhere."

We split up, the four of us heading to our movie while John hung out and waited for his to start 10 minutes later. We enjoyed ours very much. John got to watch the previews, and then his projector broke. The theater gave everyone free passes, and most people just went to the next showing... but that was 2 hours later, and John didn't want to go to that showing and leave the rest of us hanging around for 2 hours. It would have been especially difficult to coordinate, seeing as how both my phone and John's were so low on battery that they were threatening to turn off.

Tomorrow's plan is to just take the day off. We'll rest and recharge, and hopefully that will make Sunday much more pleasant. We've still got Epcot to go, and that's a really big park. It would be intolerable with today's cranky attitudes.