The Chambers

We all had a great time at Disney World! The resort was great and the parks were a lot fun. We think daily updates might get a bit boring, so we’re going to do a few different posts on some of the things we’ve enjoyed about our holiday here at Walt Disney World.

Theme Parks

Magic Kingdom

We spent most of our time at this park. I have lots to write about, but will come back to do this bit of our holiday later, as well as a couple of special things we did here, which need pictures to accompany the update.

Epcot

Epcot’s an interesting park, with a real mix of attractions. The park is basically split into two parts, with one part being focused on the future and the other part being “World Showcase”, which is like a World Expo.

Some of the ride highlights of Epcot were;

Soarin’ – this is a great ride and we ended up doing it twice. It’s very hard to describe…. You fly over iconic American locations as though you are on a hand glider, the scenes you look at include snow fields, cities, ocean, flying behind jet fighters and a NAVY chopper and more. During the ride different scents, which correlate to the scenery you are enjoying, are pumped into the ride – including a pine scent for the snow scenes and orange for when you fly over a citrus farm. Thankfully, no off prawns for the ocean scenes!

Nemo and Friends was ok, a bit of talk about the Great Barrier Reef. Turtle Talk with Crush (a turtle from the Nemo movie) was great – all the kids sat down the front of the cinema and Crush appeared on a screen and interacted in real time with the audience – even fielding questions from the kids! Test Track is a General Motors sponsored ride which puts you in a GM vehicle and you then move through a series of tests which they put their new model cars through, including breaking tests, tests on the suspension (very bumpy spots), heat / cold / corrosion tests and others – the climax of the ride is you go on a speed test, where you reach speeds up to 70 miles per hour (about 100 km h) and corner at high speed – great fun!!

We had lunch at a Teppanyaki restaurant – communal seating, which Jackson enjoyed, because he ended up being the centre of attention. Jackson got his meal served in a plate shaped like the bullet train. We then had dinner at Le Cellier, which is a Canadian steak house. Our appetizer (entrée) was a cheddar cheese soup – outstanding!!

We even got to enjoy a few (not quite quiet) cold beverages towards the end of the day in “France” – champa’s for big K and a nice red for me.

Disney MGM Studios

As with the Magic Kingdom, we had a great time here and did a couple of special things, I would like to come back and do this update once we have some pictures to put online.

Animal Kingdom

We spent ¾ of a day here and enjoyed the park immensely. The highlights were the Kilimanjaro Safari’s, during which you sit in a truck and do a tour through a few different “African” eco-systems and see animals – a unique type of zoo basically. Kylie particularly enjoyed this as we got VERY close to a giraffe – she could have reached out of the truck to touch it and we also saw Hippo’s, Gorilla’s, Rhino’s, Warthogs and a bunch more of animals through the rest of the park including a great fish tank (like the Polar Bear set up at SeaWorld) which you could the above and underneath the waterline and a waterfall which some ducks were using as a waterslide! A funny story from the Safari ride was that as we come into the giraffe “zone” there were 4 or 5 giraffes in total, with a couple on each side of the road and they were eating from the trees. It turns out that the trees have feed dishes in them and they are loaded up with food to get the giraffes to be on either side of the trucks. That’s the extent to which things are done here to make sure everyone has as great an experience as possible.

We saw a brilliant show, based on the Lion King, which featured great costumes, singing, dancing and aerobatics. (see an earlier post for more info on this) Jackson was telling us he didn’t want to see this show, but he loved it (except for the fire twirler)!

We also rode a few rides and met some Disney characters.

Downtown Disney

Downtown Disney isn’t a theme park per se, it’s more of an entertainment precinct (read another place to get the hard earned out of your wallet and into the pockets of Disney shareholders).

There were some great stores here. The favourites of the Chambers clan were (in no particular order);

The Lego Shop had a few large lego constructed statues outside the store, including a dragon / loch ness monster in the (real) lake, a 2 mtr tall dinosaur (with a real life squirrel clambering all over it’s back) and some sharks and other animals. We also enjoyed walking through the world’s largest Disney store (50,000 square feet of stuff), a store chockers with Christmas goods and chattels (such as Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths, etc), a store full of scrap booking things (Nicole, you would have loved it) and an ESPN store. We had lunch at the Rainforest Café, which Jackson enjoyed. This restaurant had a jungle theme to it and included many mechanical gorilla’s and elephants. One of the gorillas was perched right above our table and every 10 minutes or so the gorilla would come to life and start waving his arms and grunting – Jackson must have thought it was pretty realistic, because each time the gorilla started, he would move his drink a bit closer to himself because he thought the gorilla was going to drink it. Of course, I would then move it back closer to the gorilla so that the next time it started up, Jackson would think that the gorilla was going to take his drink again.

Polynesian Resort

The resort has been great. It’s got great amenities, including a couple of good restaurants, access to all modes of Disney transport, the staff here have been very friendly and helpful and we’ve had nice views of the lagoon and the Magic Kingdom fireworks.

Rides at the parks

Goofy’s barnstormer was Jackson’s first roller coaster, we rode it once at day (with Chris) and another time at night (with Kylie). It’s a coaster built just for kids with a couple of tight turns, but no corkscrew loop-di-loops or such.

Buzz Lightyear. We ended up riding this 4 or 5 times. Jackson says the best bit about this ride was shooting zurg!

Tower of Terror was fantastic, I explained a fair bit of this one earlier. Who knew bouncing like a yo-yo in a haunted lift shaft would be so much fun?

Kilimanjaro safaris was great for all of us and a tour of African

Turtle talk with Crush was good fun.

Soarin’ was excellent! Loved it!

Up and down rides. These were definitely amongst Jackson’s favourite rides, up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down…. Dumbo and Aladdin and Dino.

Dining

The food here has been pretty good. We’ve enjoyed a cooked breakfast most mornings and Jackson has had Fruit Loops or something like that (what are holidays for!!).

There are some restaurants here which are incredibly popular and we wanted to make sure we got to eat at them. For those restaurants you can (and in some cases have to) book up to 180 days in advance – yes 180 days in advance, to be assured of getting a table… thankfully we didn’t book any restaurants and then not feel like that type of food on the day.

Jackson enjoyed Pizzafari at the Animal Kingdom. Cheese Pizza has been a regular meal for Jackson here and we now joke with him about him turning into a piece of cheese pizza.

Our (Chris and Kylie’s) favourites have been “Le Cellier” – which was the Canadian Steakhouse and dinner at “Chef Mickeys”, which was more traditional US food of cornbread and the like and had characters come around to the table to say hi and pose for photos.

The character dining restaurants have been great – they’re mainly buffet restaurants and the characters move around and go to each table and get their photos taken with people (the kids mainly) at the tables.

We’ve also had our share of burgers and chips, pizza, doughnuts and ice creams and waffles shaped like Mickey Mouse….

Characters

The benefit of writing the blog updates is that I am the writer and editor… it’s hard for Kylie to edit my posts and I can say things like “I am not sure who enjoyed the character meetings more, Kylie or Jackson”. Character meetings are exactly that – you line up to meet characters from Disney shows / movies and get your photo taken with them and get their autograph.

I won’t list out all of the characters Jackson (and Kylie) met, but it was a LOT! It might be easier to list off those they did not meet.

The ham…. When Jackson gets to the front of the character greeting line, he hands the photopass over to the photographer and then runs in and gives the character a big hug and turns around, strikes a pose and smiles for the photo. He then shakes the characters hand (or gives them five) and then runs back to Kylie.

Sheesh….

All in all, we’ve had a great time here at Disney. We’ve got a whole bunch of photos (hundreds and hundreds) which we will post here to the bog when we get time.