Day Five -- Dinosaurs and Yetis

I woke up to find that Tink had struck again! This time, she left me some nail stickers that went with my pretty new painted princess nails. That sneaky fairy!

Today we were looking forward to a nice, relaxing day at Animal Kingdom. No strict schedules, no must-see rides and no early reservations. We even got to the park half an hour after opening time! Mom must have been going nuts. First stop, DinoLand USA (duh!). This place was a ghost town! We literally rode the rides over and over with no wait. I had fun running around the place without having to worry about other people or their strollers. I did Triceratops Spin twice, played in the Boneyard and did fun carnival games with Dad. Mom left us and walked to Asia to get fastpasses for Expedition Everest. I was relieved that I was too short for this ride so Mom and Dad couldn't force me to try it. I did let them talk me into the "Dinosaur" ride. We knew ahead of time this was scary. That was an understatement. Mom screamed a lot, closed her eyes and almost puked a coupled times. There were meteor showers, scary meat eaters and a lot of jerking, jolting and bouncing around. Very uncomfortable! I was proud to say I tried it, but never again!

So we headed off to Asia. Mom and Dad took turns riding the Everest roller coaster alone. Dad didn't tell Mom about the backwards in the dark part. She looked like she saw a ghost when she got off. The photo shot of Mom on the ride had her screaming with her eyes shut. She was afraid of the Yeti on the ride and kept her eyes closed. She coincidentally rode with a young girl who lives only 10 miles from us! She helped calm Mom down. They said it was a pretty awesome ride.

After almost losing our lunch, we went to have lunch at Yak and Yeti. It was yummy chinese food in cool take out boxes. Definitely our best counter service meal of the trip. We then went to Kali River Rapids. Mom and Dad expected to get a little wet, but seeing the people in line in their swimsuits, should've given them a clue. They totally lied to me and said it was a lazy river ride. They should have been punished. It was a wild ride down a river that had all 3 of us wringing water out of our clothes the rest of the day. We had to buy a brush just to get the tangles out of our wet hair. There was a small waterfall, but I handled it ok and reluctantly admitted that it was fun. We then went to Africa for the safari. This was a really cool 20 minute safari ride that had lots of real African animals roaming around in a nice habitat. I enjoyed this a lot, too bad we were all wet and chilly! We then caught a quick performance of Bug's Life 3-D, which was way too realistic, complete with effects that made you feel like you were getting stung by bees, swatted with flyswatters, sprayed with bug spray and having spiders crawl on you. Mom HATED this show. We were wet and grouchy, so we headed back to the hotel. We swam for a couple hours in the big rock pool (our building had a small pool, this was the giant one) and had lots of fun. It was a hot day and the sun felt great!

After getting cleaned up, we had to figure out how to get to a hotel way up by the Magic Kingdom for dinner. As fancy as our resort was, it was a considerable distance from anything other than Downtown Disney. We ended up having to take 2 buses and it took an hour each way. A major pain and we're glad we didn't do all of our dinners this way. We ate at the Whispering Canyon Cafe which is in the Wilderness Lodge resort. Here, the waitstaff is super-silly and loud! If you ask for ketchup, they bring every single bottle of ketchup to your table to embarass you. The food was BBQ style and they had all you could drink milkshakes. They even had singalongs and a stick pony race! I was SO cold from my Cotton Candy Milkshake, our sweet waitress wrapped me up in a blanket. Mom and Dad ate way too much and moaned and groaned all the way home. The Disney Dining Plan was a bargain to say the least. Everyday, we got one counter service meal, one sit-down meal (including character meals) with everything included and one snack per day. We ate SO MUCH food, we were never hungry and had to get creative to use up all of our snack credits. Mom had ordered some groceries from a delivery service, but we ended up taking most of it home, we never went hungry, that's for sure. And after adding up the receipts, we literally saved hundreds, maybe even more by doing the Dining Plan. Granted, we would never have eaten so much had we been paying per meal, but it was nice to not have to count pennies at each meal. The tipping part was a bit frustrating -- having to tip 20% on a meal that Disney says was worth $120 was a little misleading, but we sucked it up.

Back to that night, getting home was another crazy transportation adventure that ended up with us walking in the dark across the Epcot bus lot searching for our hotel bus. Long, long story, but Mom will never forget it. We finally got back, did some packing and sadly got ready for our departure.