We flew out Wednesday July 4th.  Our bus took us straight to the airport but our last night was spent watching the fireworks over the Magic Kingdom.  Unfortunately, without a tripod, the photos weren’t too spectacular.  Over all we had a good time but Disney World is a fairly expensive proposition no matter what the marketing commercials say on TV.

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Exhausted from the heat and long walks, we decided to head out to the Animal Kingdom with the intent of not staying there too long. We didn’t expect too many attractions that we or the kids would like but we were grateful and surprised about some of the Animal Kingdom’s hidden features.

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First, the Animal Kingdom was built to include many many trees! There were plenty of shaded areas to walk along and stand by when visiting attractions. The sun’s rays were tamed by so much shading.

Secondly, many of the attractions had heavy foliage which also limited the sun’s powerful heat.

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Like other parks, Animal Kingdom suffered from “commercialism” and “consumerism” and lacked some creativity. Here’s a shot of A Bug’s Life character.
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We took the Safari and encountered various animals during the trip….

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The exciting part was how close up we could get to some of these animals.  The ride takes about 30 minutes and is entertaining but we were too exhausted to take advantage of too many other attractions.

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The last shot we took by the Tree of Life.  Note the shade!

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We didn’t have a late start on Sunday despite being very weary and tired from our first two days at Disney World. On arrival, we had booked a fishing tour to go out on the lake and catch a few fish. Our scheduled departure was 7:00 a.m. so we got up at 6:00 a.m. to get ready and head out.

Marge surprised us all by catching the first three fish. Bart was getting a little agitated that he and no one else was catching any fish. Our boat captain took us over to a different part of the lake where the fish were biting for everyone.

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After our two hour fishing tour, we headed back to the hotel to clean up and have breakfast. We ate at the snack facility and headed out to MGM Studios. Unfortunately, there was no monorail connecting our hotel to MGM, so we had to wait for and take a bus from our hotel to MGM Studios.

This was our first visit to MGM for all of us and we enjoyed our day although I had a few complaints. Evidently Disney didn’t think it necessary to plant any trees at MGM because the whole facility seems to be made entirely of concrete and brick. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem were it not for the fact that the sun bears down on you all day long and there is very little shading. The concrete also reflects the heat so it makes it even worse as you walk around.

I won’t complain about the “creativity” factor here because MGM Studios is by default all about making movies and mass consumerism. We visited the Chronicles of Narnia exhibit, A Bug’s Life Playground, and various other attractions which were fun for the kids but rather lame for the adults.

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The more memorable ones however were the stunt shows for Indiana Jones and Light’s, Camera, Stunts.

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The kids had fun painting their faces, meeting various characters and taking photos with them.

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Our night concluded with dinner at our hotel with a few Disney characters from Cinderella’s Castle:

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We started the day late on Saturday. We were dead tired from Epcot and slept in till 9:00 a.m. We headed down for breakfast at one of the snack eateries and weren’t surprised to see a charge for $20 for breakfast. We took the monorail from our hotel over to the Magic Kingdom. We were surprised to have to connect at a transportation center to get on board a second monorail to actually get to the Magic Kingdom.
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I stated yesterday that I had visited this park about 20 years ago and the park looked relatively the same although it did seem a bit smaller than I remembered it. Marge & Bart headed out to space mountain while Lisa and I rode the kiddie rides. Lisa was too short to get on many of the bigger kid rides but we had fun nonetheless at the Teacups, Carousel, Dumbo, and Cinderella’s Castle.
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We regrouped and waited around for Bart & Marge to ride splash mountain. The wait there was about an hour for them to ride while I waited patiently below to capture the screaming terror as they plunged and splashed down the mountain. I did have some fun taking pictures of other people’s expressions and I’ve included my favorites below.

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We spend the rest of the day visiting various shows and attractions. We stopped by to see one of the many shows at Cinderella’s Castle in the afternoon.

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We left around 5pm that evening right after the above pictures were taken since a storm rolled in and hit hard.  We took a boat ferry from the Magic Kingdom back to our hotel, the Grand Floridian and the rain pounded the little boat.   After the rain cleared, we headed out to the rock pool and relaxed for a few hours.

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