Disney Day 2

Found this in the archives and thought I would post it. It's pretty dated, but I'm sure it's got lots of good stuff in it!


Good Night's Sleep

Our first night in the hotel was blissfully uneventful.  My biggest worry coming to this resort with an infant was that he would be up and unconsolable in the night and he would wake people up.  Turns out I had nothing to worry about all along.  In fact, I would say that Quin probably slept better at the hotel than he does at home.  That is most likely because we were so close by and it was easy to get up to tend to him.  Either way, it worked out well and I had nothing to complain about.

Ethan slept in Grandpa and Grandma's room the first night, as we thought he might be kept awake by Quin more than by Grandma's snoring.  Nothing really stirred him, though, and he slept quite well through the night.

In the morning, Jenny and I got up somewhat more rested than the day before.  We slept in until around 8:30 having only gotten up once each with Quin during the night, so we felt good enough to try out the 1.4 mile track that surrounds the lake in the middle of the grounds.  The Caribbean Beach Resort is a number of buildings organized into Islands.  Ours was Martinique.  Each of the islands surrounds a big lake in the middle with beaches surrounding it.  Each island also had its own pool, which we took advantage of several times.  Anyway, Jenny and I went for a small run then stopped by the central shop to get water for Quin's bottles and some snacks for breakfast.  After that, off to the parks!

EPCOT

Our first stop for this day was EPCOT, which again stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.  We grabbed a quick snack for breakfast as we had reservations in EPCOT for a character lunch, then jumped on the bus to EPCOT.

Have I mentioned how big the Disney World Resort is?  Let me put it another way in case I haven't properly explained that yet.  From our hotel, we could see Spaceship Earth, the big ball in the center of EPCOT.  It seemed not at all far away.  However, after boarding the bus in the morning, it took us no less than 20 minutes to get to the park!  Now, after having consulted a map, I now know that it took a long time to get there because the park entrance was all the way around the park, forcing us to weave in and out of several highways to get there, but still, 20 minutes, and they are both on the same property!

EPCOT, much like the Magic Kingdom before it, was BUSY!  There were people walking all over the place.  The weather was somewhat better than yesterday, but still not hot, which was OK since there were so many people around, hot weather would have made things uncomfortable.

The first look at EPCOT is no less amazing than that of the Magic Kingdom.  The huge Spaceship Earth structure dominating the sky right at the entrance, with the Beach Boys music playing (why the Beach Boys, I couldn't say), water fountains splashing about everywhere...  They definitely went the extra mile with this park to make it seem different.

EPCOT is separated into two separate parts, Futureworld where there are a bunch of rides and attractions that deal with imagination, conservation, and life in the future, and the World Showcase, which has buildings and attractions attempting to capture the feel of different countries around the world.  Since it was quite busy, we decided to check out the newest attraction first, Soarin', which was located in "The Land," one of the buildings in Futureworld.  Well, that line was already around 2 hours long, so we did the next best thing, we caught a couple of shows.

The first show we saw was called "Live With the Land," which was narrated by Pumba, Timone, and Simba from the Lion King.  This, along with most attractions, seemed to have the actual actors doing the voice work for the video, which is impressive.  The show was pretty neat.  It was all about how we should conserve and live with the land instead of against it.  I found it somewhat ironic that Disney of all companies was preaching conservation when they pump millions of gallons of water through their fountains and use tons of plastic to deliver food to their hungry customers each day, but hey, the message is still important, and the show wasn't too bad.

The next attraction we took in was again in The Land.  This time we boarded a boat (a common theme in many Disney attractions) and toured through some labs that Disney had setup in an attempt to grow things in different ways.  This trip was pretty cool as it showed all kinds of different plants being grown in a huge greenhouse.  They also tried new ways of growing things, like suspending tomato plants in the air so that the air can get to the leaves properly, or growing tomatoes upside-down.  Fairly interesting stuff.

We had made reservations for a character lunch in The Land's table service restaurant for around 2:00, but after taking in our two shows we still had some time to burn, so we headed outside and went into a building titled "Imagineering."  This was basically a big hands-on playground of all sorts of technology that could change the future, stimulate the imagination, or educate in some other way.  They had stations setup with video games, fire

Disney's Hollywood Studio

Wore Out Part II