Sun. Nov. 28 - Animal Kingdom and More

Sun. Nov. 28

I have to say, it's a great vacation when you don't "have" to get up early every single day.  It's been nice to not feel rushed.

We got up and I made pancakes for breakfast today.  No one had any other preference, so we headed to Animal Kingdom.

We got there about 9:15am and headed for Dinoland.  We love Primeval Whirl and figured that just about everyone else heads for Everest or Kilimanjaro Safaris.  We waiting maybe 5 minutes before getting on PW.  Seriously fun.  We were going to do it again, but by the time we exited, the line was too long.  Ok, too long that I didn't want to wait in it.  It said it was only 10 minutes, but this one looked way more than 10 minutes long to me.  PW is a slow loader, too.  But I digress...

Stefan needed his first Mickey head ice cream of the day. He got his treat, which Cate & I did some quality control on.  :-)

Cate & Bryan wanted to do Dinosaur;  Stefan and I had zero interest in that so we decided to walk to Asia in preparation for Kali River Rapids.

Once Bryan and Cate caught up, the kids and I divested all out stuff on to Bryan and headed to Kali.

Thank goodness we gave him all our stuff.  We've ridden Kali many, many times and we've gotten wet.  We don't mind being wet at all, but this was a colossal soaking!  The wettest we've ever gotten. I think our ridemates were a little appalled at how wet we were. Thank goodness is was warmer today than it was on Saturday.

Cate wanted to do the Maharajah Jungle Trek, so we meandered through there.  Nice easy walk.

Stefan was hungry again when we got out of there.  Seriously...I'm not kidding when I say this kid has a hollow leg.  He got the side order of chicken fried rice from Yak & Yeti.  He thought it was a little dry, but ate the whole thing.

He wanted to get on the safari, but it was a 60 minute wait by that time and we didn't want to wait an hour for a Fastpass return time so we headed out of the park.

Once we got back, we had leftovers for lunch.  That's a bonus thing for cooking in the room - leftovers!

We're having turkey dinner tonight so we needed to get that in the oven.  We got one of those dinners from SuperTarget.  Basically, cook from frozen without babysitting.

We headed for the pool and spent a good, long, enjoyable time just fooling around.  It was never crowded. Stefan actually volunteered to help herd a mama duck and her ducklings out of the pool area, but it wasn't working too well.  At least he did his Boy Scout good deed for the day.

Bryan decided the kids needed ice cream so he went over to Beaches & Cream and got Stefan a cone and Cate a hot fudge sundae.

Once we got back to the room, I started a load of laundry and then Bryan and I headed for Downtown Disney. That place was crazy busy.  But we were target shopping/browsing.  We headed to Mickey's Pantry to check out the Spice & Tea Exchange.  Wicked cool place.  If you like to cook, you'll love what this place has to offer.

We popped in to the Christmas store, but it was just too busy for browsing so we left.  I wanted to stop by the new Pollo Campero and Fresh A-Peel and see what it looked like.  Pretty cool place.  We didn't eat there, but I stopped into the little corner that is Babycakes.

Babycakes makes gluten free treats and uses agave sugar in its frostings.  I bought two chocolate cupcake tops with chocolate frosting, a banana bread cupcake with chocolate frosting and a frosting shot.  Yes, that's right - a frosting shot.  What a great idea!

I'm sorry to say that I'm not a fan of Babycakes.  The flavor just was not right and while agave is natural, it just tasted artificial to me.  My kids didn't like it either and that's saying something.  Sorry, Babycakes.

Back at home, we had the turkey dinner and right now, I'm so stuffed I can barely see straight.  I'm going to pull up a piece of couch and watch some TV for a while.  Stefan says he wants to head to MGM...I just don't think I can make it tonight.  Though walking off some of this turkey is probably a good thing.  We'll see how it goes.

One final thought for today...that I should have included in the post for yesterday...you know it's a great vacation when your teenage daughter randomly says to you while walking through Epcot, "Mom, I'm so happy.  I don't know why, but I'm so happy."

Checkmark in the Awesome column for me.