Walt Disney 2020
Day 5: Disney Animal Kingdom: Animals, awesome rides, a safari, a tree that don't light, and burr it's cold!
Up at the crack of dawn, well that's nothing new for Sakari, it was her normal time to get up for school. BUT, today she was playing hooky and no school for her because we were going to Animal Kingdom!
We ate breakfast and headed out the door..layered in clothing because it was quite chilly today. I did not order this weather! We are in Florida. It's not supposed to be like this. If this is the kinda weather everyone migrates to for winter then I'm going to have to go further south next time!
We put the location in the GPS and....once again it told me to get on the coin $1 freeway! Ugh! I.don't.have.any.coins! I'm on vacation. Do you accept a credit card? No? Well fine then...I flew on past the coin machine and never looked back this time. I didn't hear any sirens and I calculated in my head how many tickets that was for me so far.
Once on the Mickey Mouse freeway, Animal Kingdom was easy to find.
Did I mention that it cost $25 to park at each of the Disney theme
parks? That's just so crazy to me! The hubby had brought a few
fifties and several hundreds with him and it was eating up that
money!
We managed to park in the "I can't walk long distances" parking
lot and grabbed a people mover to get the rest of the way in. Out
at the entrance there was a lovely couple having their picture taken
so I figured I'd take their picture too obviously. They were in shorts
and short sleeves! Are they crazy? They must have been visiting
from the north.
We immediately headed to the people mover desk, turned in my
manual stick shift model for an updated automatic with turbo
boost and they gave me usage instructions: no piggyback riding, do
NOT run over other people, share the road, give a nod when you encounter
someone else on a people mover (it's the I can't walk code of ethics), "we are not responsible for your belongings left in the extra wide shopping cart in the front, and sign here that you promise to purchase your people mover should you decide to mod it.
I was armed with my personal map I had designed prior to vacation, equipped with the "must do's" and people mover information. (I don't think I shared my Disney one, but it was just like this...only
Disney World stuff of course.)
Once again, I had studied this map and knew exactly where we wanted to go. I checked the wait times at each attraction and said "this way" to the fam. Putt putt putt this people mover just had absolutely no speed to it, even on the turbo function. Geesh! My family was walking faster than me and sometimes they would get so far out of my sight that they thought they had lost me. No worries "beep beep" here I am. Sorry, didn't mean to draw attention to myself for those around me wondering why I am honking. Don't worry, it's not for you...it's for my hubby who has managed to gain 2 football fields ahead of me.
So Animal Kingdom is divided up into these little "lands" with the middle section being the "tree of life" area. It's a beautiful large tree with many many carvings in them. It's like playing where's waldo trying to spot how many animals are in the tree. Just when you think you have it all figured out, there's more. It was my goal to head to the first ride, but we got caught up in this beautiful area a little longer than expected.
They did have some animals situated around the Tree of Life as well. Like REAL animals. The kind that moved.
My goal was to head straight to the Avatar or Na'vi River ride. However, since we had spent quite a bit of time and the Tree, after checking my app, we decided to head over to the Safari instead. It said the wait was not long at all and I had read up on this place and most people suggested going on the safari early in the morning or late in the evening. They said most of the animals are more active during those times.
Off to Africa we went where we would see our first giraffe.
There was a lot of twisting and turning in line for my people mover and despite what others around me thought about my driving skills, I thought I did ok. The line moved along pretty quick and before long, they instructed me to "go this way" with a bunch of other people movers. We had our own loading dock. The safari trucks would pull over in areas to load people and then pull out to start the safari. We were the first one's on the truck and we ask if we could sit in the back seat. He told me "no, then the count would be off. Please go to the 3rd row from the front". Um...ok. I counted the rows of seats and no matter how you sat people, it would have turned out the same. THEN after we sat down, he loaded ALL THE ROWS! Wait, what? I wanted in the back because we had these plastic dividers in the front and back of us and I know if I wanted to take a picture on the opposite side of what I was sitting on, I was not going to be able to get it with plastic in my way. So aggravating. If I was sitting in the back, then I would have the entire back open to get pictures as we passed by turning around.
We had a good time on the safari. There were a lot of animals out. The driver told us about the animals and made jokes. He was very informative and did a great job to keep our attention.