Animal Kingdom

For our third day at Disney we started with a character breakfast at the Grand Floridian Hotel, that is the original classy high-end hotel at Disney. As we had breakfast, many Disney characters including Mary Poppins, Tigger, Alice from Wonderland and Pooh, visited our table.

After breakfast, we drove to the third of our Disney theme parks, Animal Kingdom. This is a park we haven’t seen since it opened in 1998, after we had finished our annual March Break pilgrimages to Disney. Unlike other parks, there are actually living critters here, but we began with a ride on the Triceratops in Dinoland USA.

This part of the park also featured live theatre with a Broadway style production of Finding Nemo. This half hour show totally captivated everyone, including the girls, as they gave us a Lion King type half hour show. This was probably the highlight of the park.

Next, we traveled to Africa where drumming warriors greeted us.

Then we fast passed our way to the Kilimanjaro Safari, which trucked us into both the jungle and grasslands of Africa.

I suspect we saw more on this safari than we would actually going to Africa. There were elephants, flamingoes, African crocodiles and close ups with ostriches.

As the day wore on we had an ice cream refresher, with the classic Mickey ice cream bar.

The centerpiece of this park is the giant Tree of Life, which is Disney’s take on the baobob tree.

Back at Sandy Ridge, Dawn caught some late afternoon sun while the girls had the obligatory afternoon nap. As she read, our pond gator wandered up to watch her. You can see him far left in the first pic and then closeup in the next.

When Sadie & Ella finally awoke there was lots of laughter in the pool with mommy and daddy.

Slowdown time featured Omi at the hot tub with the girls.

In the last day or so the temperature has been so delightful that we never want to escape the outdoors. Fortunately the lanai surrounding the backyard, keeps us totally protected from the extremely vicious mosquitoes that appear late in the day.