Vacation Day 2

Day 2

Woke up late :(

I was supposed to return the car by 10 and I wanted to return it at 8 so that Susan and I could go straight to Epcot. But that didn’t work as Susan couldn’t get up and then I fell asleep again after she wouldn’t get up. So I didn’t get up till 9:40 so I had to high tail it to the Double Tree to get the car dropped off. I made it at 10:10 (had to gas it up again) but the car rental booth was empty! So I had to wait for 30 minutes for the dude to get back but finally got that taken care of. But as I walked back to Downtown Disney (to take transport back to the hotel), it started raining! Man what’s up with it raining in sunny Orlando? So I had to wait in the rain (at the Downtown Disney bus stop) for about 20 minutes and then got the bus to go back to the Port Orleans. Somehow during the walk to Downtown Disney, I managed to hurt myself. I was looking at his pond with turtles in it and suddenly my neck started hurting (the kind when you sleep wrong). So that bothered me for most of the rest of the trip. I didn’t get back to the hotel till about 11:45 so we didn’t get to Epcot till about 12:50. So we had 8 hours to do 9 rides and get through the 12 country pavilions. Could we do it? Well Phil and I could have (and probably made it to another park too).

Our first stop was some pictures as Susan’s Disney vacation started here. The only ride that I can think of that is in Epcot and in Disneyland is Soarin’ (in California Adventure) so everything was new to her. Then we headed off to Spaceship Earth (the big golf ball looking thing). That ride is a bit old (and God forbid…… educational) so we had to wait for about 45 seconds to get on the ride. I haven’t been on this ride in ages (I don’t think Mark and I rode it last year) so if I didn’t ride it with Mark, the last time I rode it was back in 1994. Today’s list of rides includes:

Mission: Space (barf bags included at no extra charge)

Test Track (kick ass)

Soarin’

Journey Into Imagination (the old school one was better)

Spaceship Earth

Circle of Life

Maelstrom (in the Norway Pavilion)

El Rio del Tiempo (in the Mexico Pavilion)

China Movie at the China Pavilion (with a sneak peak at Disney Hong Kong)

All the other Pavilions

But the Living Seas ride was closed! DENIED!

Oh Mission Space is a ride a kid died on a few months ago. Last i read, they still don't know why.

After finishing up the LAND ride, we went to the Pavilions. We got through 9 of the pavilions before it got dark and we decided to stop since it was hard to see and harder to take pictures. The plan here was to come back again on Wednesday morning or on Tuesday afternoon (foreshadowing to a disaster of “It ain’t gonna happen!”)

We stopped at the German pavilion because I wanted to eat some bratwurst. I haven’t had that in ages. We discovered that there is a German restaurant there (buffet with live entertainment!) which was about $21 plus drink (not bad for a theme park) but it was 8:30, the park closed at 9 (what’s with all these early park closings?) and it was Susan and me eating ha ha ha. The buffet was ok. I had forgotten that German food is kinda bitter/sour tasting and the bratwurst wasn’t that great. We watched the fireworks (every park has fireworks every night so that’s cool) and then went home. Naturally (and almost like clockwork!) as soon as the fireworks stopped and they kicked us out of the park, it started raining again. We got back to the hotel and it had stopped raining so we went swimming again. The pool at the Port Orleans is heated so it was luke warm still so I was nice to swim in. We were in the pool for almost 2 hours and I think this got Susan sick.