Disney's Animal Kingdom - Day 5

Animal Kingdom is my favorite park at Disney World after Magic Kingdom.  Its kind of strange though, I am not an animal lover and I wasn't looking forward to this day at all.  In fact, we had heard from a couple different people that you could get away with only spending half a day at this park.  So I started the day thinking maybe we would go back to a different park if we got bored here.  Didn't happen!  Our fast pass for Expedition Everest, the best ride at this park we had heard, was for 2:30 in the afternoon so we decided to rope drop this ride to get it out of the way so we could leave early if we wanted to.  IT WAS AWESOME!  Expedition Everest is the best ride in all of Disney World!  Crazy, Crazy ride!  We all rode it the first time and stayed around to ride it again on our fast passes.  Well, Paul, Mason, and I did.  It was a little much for the girls I guess.  Maybe because you go backwards in the dark at a million miles an hours.  It was so good!

 After Everest we rode the Kali River Rapids.  We learned our lesson about soaked shoes and clothes at Universal Studios so Paul made sure we had our rain ponchos and flip flops to change into for the ride.  We got soaked!  Well, Paul and Mason did.  The girls were smart enough to wear the ponchos.  Bree and I rode twice in a row and then the others went one more time for good measure.  The place wasn't packed yet and it was so hot already it was easy to get back on and get cooled off.  That was a nice ride too.
  We found a dinosaur section with some tamer rides for little ones like the Tricera Top Spin and Primeval Whirl, but we didn't ever go on the Dinosaur ride.  It looked a bit scary for Bree and we were running behind schedule because of the three trips on the river ride.  But it was Paul's fault this time, not mine.  We watched the Finding Nemo musical, Flights of Wonder with real birds, Festival of the Lion King, and Its Tough to be a Bug.  We took the Kilimanjaro Safari which was a ride on a huge safari vehicle through acres of protected wildlife.  We saw giraffes, hippos, zebras, a rhino and all kinds of animals I had never heard of.  It was very cool.  At the end of the day we took the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail where we saw gorillas!  I was so excited, I'd never seen a gorilla in real life before.  They were gorgeous!  Amazing animals.  I was thrilled with the opportunity to see them.  And I was surprised at how many they had too.  Its a real animal conservation place they have at Disney World.  I was also surprised at all the hippos they had.  What a great place it was to visit.  There aren't tons of rides at this park but we loved it anyway.  We managed to spend all day there and enjoyed it all.  The kids all found a stuffed animal to buy here too.  I guess you can count Mason's Yeti as an animal.  Bree got some cross between a kitten and a yeti which she calls a keti named Frost.  Darcy chose a snow leopard and named him Everest, and Drew found yet another hippo and named him Tiki.  Now we will never forget the darn Tiki Room and song that went with it.

 
For lunch we ate at the Flame Tree Barbecue.  Excellent of course.  And for dinner we went to 'Ohana at the Polynesian Resort.  It was so good.  Talk about massive amounts of food!  Even Mason was full after that dinner.  Mason, Darcy, and Bree all participated in the coconut broom races and received leis.  Drew was too mature for such antics I guess. Or she was too full of chocolate milk to move.  That was one of my favorite days of our whole trip.  There were also beautiful flowers and bushes and trees in Animal Kingdom.  Did I mention I loved this park!?