Day Seven - 9/23/2015...Part One, Animal Kingdom
We ended up sleeping a little too long this day. I mean it wasn't a major loss - we ended up getting to the park at the normal opening time and missing the EMH. At the time I didn't think it was too awful but by the end of the day I was bummed because we didn't get to do everything. We had FP for Kilimanjaro Safaris, Kali River Rapids and Expedition Everest. When we first got to the park we started to poke around the Discovery Island Trails, watched It's Tough to be a Bug!, the girls stopped to meet Dug and Russel and by then we were kind of starving. We decided to grab lunch at Flame Tree. It was pretty good...except for the beans. I hated the beans. I like sweet BBQ stuff and they were not sweet...they were more along the tangy side in my opinion. Everything else was good and the kids were almost more entertained by the ducks and birds that were roaming around the dining area than other animals they saw throughout the day lol.
By the time we finished eating it was time for our first FP at Kilimanjaro Safaris. This was kind of the beginning to the end in regards of time lost. Starting the day before, (9/22) my mom had to start renting an ECV. She was REALLY bummed about it but did not have much of a choice...she's older now, may even need a hip and/or knee replacement, etc. and she tried really hard the first part to fight the pain and power through but she just couldn't anymore. So anyway, she's on the ECV and she goes up to one of the cast members and asks them where the best place to park it was so she could go on the ride. The cast member tells her she doesn't need to park it and that she can take it through the special side of the line and park it up front. She was all like "okay but I can walk in the lines" and he was all like "no, no, no...no need for that
". So she takes the ECV into the special line, we get all the way up until there's like maybe 15/20 people in front of us and we just stop and wait....and wait....
and wait...
I promise you I am not exaggerating when I say we were waiting for at least 45 minutes. At. Least. I do not know what the problem was. I am assuming after seeing what was going on once we got up front that if persons 1 and 2 in line could not transfer out of their wheelchairs/ECVs the rest of the linhad to wait behind them. Which meant the line was just stopped until the wheelchair accessible vehicle(s) rolled back around. That and the fact that there was one girl working this side of the line and after each set of people got off she would then move all of the wheelchairs/ECVs up to the now empty spaces and so on and so forth. I feel like she could have used help and there should have been a better system in place TBH. Oh well...the ride was still good and we actually got to see some active elephants playing in the water, baby giraffes, swimming hippos...it was worth it
After KS we stopped at the Harambe Market and grabbed some drinks. We grabbed a couple of pops to share and Willow wanted the watermelon lemonade. I was super jealous because that stuff was so tasty and I wanted to snatch it from her lol. I should have just grabbed another for myself but I hate carrying cups and felt we had too many as it was. After we chugged our drinks we went through the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail...Shade really loved getting the laminated info sheets and trying to spot all the birds. There were also 2 baby gorillas that were SO FREAKING CUTE, I WANT ONE!!!! We kind of rushed through this though because we knew at this point we would not get to do everything. I had to tell my mom at this point that if she really wanted to see the Festival of the Lion King she would have to venture off alone because we had FPs we needed to catch and no one else wanted to see it...I felt bad but I didn't want to not give her the option knowing she missed Hall of Presidents at MK
But I also didn't want to be like "sorry , kids...can't get to the other FPs because grandma wants to see this show". I know...you think I am a hateful B word now
She was okay with it though and was all "bye, felica" and went off to see her show. We really wanted to visit some of the Rafiki's Planet Watch stuff but we had to get going to our next FP. We swore we would come back to all of it if we had time but we never made it back. I know Push the garbage can is gone, but we had such good memories here of him harassing my husband on our trip in '05.
On our way to our Kali FP we were able to stop and meet Baloo and King Louie since the line was pretty short so that was a bonus. Kali River Rapids is always fun but it felt so short this time. I wanted to go again but the line was so long and we had zero time to spare. We had just enough time to make our way through the Maharajah Jungle Trek before our last FP at EE, but we were all bummed because not only were the tigers sleeping, they were no where to be seen...booooo. It was really funny at this point because we could hear the screams of people riding Expedition Everest and so Shade said to me "Mommy, I want to ride that, it sounds like fun". When I told him that's where we were headed, he made sure to be clear by saying "I want to ride the one that's making people scream". I just thought it was funny since I was so stressed for the whole year leading up to this vacation, afraid he wouldn't want to try anything and here he was all ready to scream. He ended up really liking it and fortunately once we got off the stand by line was only around 15 minutes so we went on again.
At this point we headed over to Dinosaur. In '05 Robin was 12 and got off this ride in tears. No lie. So she felt this was her redeeming moment. Someone handed us a paper FP thing that I didn't even know existed and so she used it to go on a second time with my mom just to prove a point haha. While they were doing that SHade and Willow met Safari Donald. After Dinosaur we rode TriceraTop Spin and then shopped a bit at Chester and Hester's. Then it was literally closing time.
Next up...back to Epcot for an ADR at The Garden Grill...
