Epcot - Day 3

  Epcot!  That iconic ball is recognized anywhere.  When we first saw it I was kind of disappointed.  I thought it would be huge but its really not that humongous.  Epcot was an interesting park.  You enter right at the ball, then there is the amusement park part, then past that there is the World Showcase where you walk around a lake and you find food and small bits of culture from all over the world. 

  We rope dropped Soarin though that wasn't the original plan.  I had overheard the day before a guy telling his friends his favorite ride at DW is Soarin.  So I told Paul and he adjusted our schedule accordingly so we could rope drop it.  It was a really good ride, skimming over the Golden Gate Bridge, fields of wheat, mountains, and cities.  Not my all time favorite but still pretty good.  We also rode Spaceship Earth, The Seas with Nemo and Friends, Turtle Talk With Crush, The American Adventure, and Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros.  Living With the Land was a leisurely ride through pretty much test labs they have set up to try different methods of farming.  It was pretty cool for me because I love to garden and I came away with a couple of ideas I would like to try in the spring.  We rode Mission: Space, a ride in which 2 people died after riding it years ago.  Since then they modified it and took out some of the g-forces and spins.  If you choose to.  We all chose to ride the wussy version but that was still a crazy ride.  I've developed some claustrophobia as I've gotten older and that ride kind of got to me.  You are strapped in and then they close you in a fake spaceship cockpit and you can't move and even if you could there is no place to go.  Lets just say I will never volunteer to really go to Mars in a spaceship.  It was fun though if I concentrated on looking out my "window" at the martian landscape.  The last, and best ride of the day, was Test Track.  It was cool because we got to design our own vehicle with a bunch of different parameters and then we competed against each other on the track as to whose vehicle performed better.  I'm pretty sure Drew, Bree, and I had the vehicle that won, though Paul, Darcy, and Mason had a nice one too.  At one point on the ride the car you're in just takes off and you are going so fast!  It was lots of fun.  That was a family favorite.  You see how much I'm enjoying it.

The afternoon was spent walking around the World Showcase.  We had lunch in Mexico and dinner in Norway at Akershus Royal Banquet.  We had dinner with the princesses and some very good food.  I was proud of Darcy and her willingness to try all the great food.  She even ordered salmon for dinner.  While Drew drank her chocolate milk.  And a good time was had by all!

We watched a lumberjack show in Canada and looked around France, Japan, and Morocco.  That part of Epcot definitely caters to a more mature crowd.  There weren't many ears on little girl's heads wandering around and the alcohol was flowing freely.  We even got to witness a war of words between some tipsy people about who knocked into whom.  It was a different experience than the other DW parks.  We stayed till dark to watch Illuminations:  Reflections of Earth, which was a fireworks and light show in the middle of the lake.  Pretty cool.  It was very strange while we there having everything decorated for Christmas, but having the weather in the high 80's.  And then it was even stranger when it got dark at 5:30.  It was hard for us to wrap our heads around it being winter, not summer.  Paul and I made a pact that we would never retire to Florida.  Too weird for me.