"Disneyworld: Day Two"

10/23/2001

MONDAY: Animal Kingdom
Our luggage finally arrives at about 9:00 am. There is much rejoicing as we all get to take showers and change clothes. Sharon and Mawk (who is called so because CL can't pronounce "Mark" distinctly) decide to spend their first day playing golf. I forget now what UJ and AC decided to do, but that left Mom, CL and I to hit Animal Kingdom by ourselves.

We leave about 11:30 am and arrive at the gate to the parking lot before noon. (How cool is it to be staying that close to DisneyWorld?!? *g*) It cost $6 to park but when the money-taker guy finds out it's our first time in the Land of the Mouse, he lets us park for free. Bonus! We parked in the Giraffe Lot for those of you keeping score.

We take a shuttle tram from there to the front gate. We flash our 5 day passes and waltz in. It's pretty sunny and hot out so I buy CL a baseball cap with mouse ears on it and I purchase a tan safari type hat with a wide brim. We rent my mom a motorized cart because she has trouble walking. It takes her a while to get the hang of driving it without backing into things and running down tourists.

We see lots of animals (a turtle, an iguana, parrots) on our way to the Tree of Life. I remember seeing a documentary a few years ago about how they built it. It's manmade (they didn't actually carve up a live tree) and covered in animals. It sits in the middle of the park and you can't get any closer than about 100 feet. I'm not sure if it's on it's own island or what. I couldn't see an obvious way to get to it so I just took pictures from a distance. I hope you can see some of the animals in the pictures.

Once we were past the Tree, we headed for the Safari Tour. We boarded a big 20 person, open air bus for our "two week trip through the bush". Actually it's about a 30 minute bus ride. You may notice that most of the animal pictures are very out of focus and off center. This is because the bus was bouncing all over and the driver never stopped for pictures. There also seemed to be some kind of plot to the trip. Evidently we were supposed to be "helping" a Kenya game warden catch some "rahtha naesty poachas". Yes, our driver had the worst Australian accent in the history of bad accents.

From there we went to the opposite side of the park and entered... Dinoland! We had Dino-meals from the Dinoland McDonald's and then went to the Dino Playground. Okay, I don't think it was really called the "Dino Playground" but I was on a roll. Anyway, this play area had lots of things for CL to climb on and hide in. Then he found the Dino-Dig. Alright, so it's not called the "Dino-Dig" but y'know... that whole on a roll thing. After CL got a sufficient amount of sand in his pants, we all went to see the Tarzan Rocks! show. It was pretty good. Lots of acrobatics and swinging on vines. Since it's the off-season, the park closes at 5:30, so we headed for home right after that.

When I was at DisneyWorld a couple years ago, the Tree of Life housed a theater below it, and my mom & I went to see a 3-D show based on "A Bug's Life" there. (Of course, since we saw it before "A Bug's Life" was released, we really didn't get the significance of the show. But it was still cool.) The carvings go all the way around the base of the tree -- it's really neat to see up close. ~ sunni @ 6:38 p.m. EST on 10/23/2001