Animal Kingdom

We spent only two days at Disney parks during our Orlando vacation - we chose to visit Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom.  Both were awesome!  We spent a full day at Animal Kingdom - learning and experiencing lots of new things. 

 

The biggest roller coaster at this park goes through "Mount Everest" - shown in the background here.  After watching the big drop and hearing all the screams, Ava decided she wasn't interested in riding this one!  Blaine wasn't tall enough anyway, so no problem to skip this.

 However, we found the Triceratops Spin ride in the Dinoland section and both kids fell in love with it!  They loved flying high and being able to control the dinosaur to go higher or lower or to tip forward or backward.  Our kids really hadn't ridden rides before, so this was a fun start for them!  Ava and I also rode a bit bigger ride that Blaine was too short for - she wasn't sure about all the jerking and spinning, but was laughing and smiling the whole way!  Blaine and John took that time to ride the Triceratops Spin again...

 The "Tree of Life" is an Animal Kingdom icon and is a really cool sight.  So much detail on all the animals that make up the trunk of this tree and absolutely huge!

We happened to walk by Daisy Duck with only a couple of kids in line to greet her, so the kids got her signature and a picture.

 The safari ride was really cool.  So many animals to see in a natural habitat - and a fun safari bus ride through mud, rivers and rickety bridges.  Definitely a highlight of this park!  The kids also became "Wilderness Explorers" - earning badges throughout the park after they learned about specific subjects in their handbooks.  The kids soon were excitedly spotting the troop leaders with the orange bags from far away and eagerly completed the activities.  The kids are still tracking animals around our house in ways that they learned when earning their tracking badge - by tracks, poop, fur or rubbings.

 We also got to meet Chip and Dale - they were recruiting kids for a game of follow the leader as we walked by and got Ava and Blaine involved.  The kids then got to play with the mischievous chipmunks - they loved being squeezed in a Chip & Dale sandwich and still laugh about the furry critters covering their eyes for pictures.

We had scheduled a character lunch, where multiple characters visited our tables while we ate our lunch.  We got to meet Mickey, Daisy, Donald and Goofy.  This was a fun lunch and a great variety of food for the buffet lunch, however, I never in my life thought that I would spend so much $$ on lunch!!  We ensure that the kids ate their fill as we warned them that we didn't want to stop for snacks that afternoon!  It was a good lunch, but I think that we mostly paid for Mickey!

We had tons of fun at Animal Kingdom and learned a lot.  It was a beautiful day and full of many new experiences.  The bus to our hotel ran every half hour and we unfortunately watched it pull away as we walked to the Animal Kingdom parking lot.  So we ended up with a while to wait for the next bus - this required a rest for some tired kiddos!