Keane's March 2012 Trip Report - Part 4
"Let The Memories Begin... Again..."
Please see Part 1 for cast and plot summary...
Day 3. Tuesday, March 6th. Animal Kingdom 1.
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[Note: In the interim between March 6, and the week after, someone wised up and moved the G8 to Camp David. We're still going to entertain the NATO summit, though. A lot of the same people will be at both. Why not have the NATO summit at Camp David, too?]
Jenny eventually rises, and she's going to cook breakfast. Eggs, bacon, and raisin bread. I even take food porn. No Mickey waffle, though. *sniff*
We leave and get to Animal Kingdom an hour after opening, and am sorta stunned to see long lines at the ticket booths, and even longer lines at the entrance gates. I get Mom into the park and get four park maps and a couple of times guides. The main path to Discovery Island on the right is closed, making it seem more crowded than it already is. There is a small trickle of guests trying to swim upstream toward the entrance. I wonder if they're bailing out of Animal Kingdom to another park...
We're going to go see Flights of Wonder. I think I once said of this attraction that there's nothing wrong with it, except maybe it needs a NEW SCRIPT. Otherwise, there's that human/animal interaction that people seem to love.
Next up was to travel back down to Camp Minnie Mickey to attend a Festival of the Lion King. Boy, this place looks different during the day. The last time I was down here was at night, and CMM was completely reconfigured.
Interestingly, The Festival of the Lion King theater is now enclosed and dark. It used to be an open air theater. I think the show is much better in the dark. The tumble monkeys are still my favorite part of the show.
One of the problems I had with the show, was the amount of particulate matter in the air, maybe from not having the windows open. It was worse after the tumble monkeys bounced all over the trampoline, which probably has chalk residue on it from when I first saw the show in 2000...
Anyway, the only thing it affected were any flash pictures I had taken, where the flash reflected off the particles, causing hundreds of small orbs to fill the frame and underexpose the subject. But I digress...
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| Miss Marie and Jenny at Conservations Station |
Half-way there, Miss Marie spies a ice cream quick service. We hadn't eaten since Breakfast, and instead of real food... well... So I get her a cup, and we go and sit on one of the pathways that cuts across Discovery Island. True to Disney, they serve so much she can't finish it. Jenny in the meantime needs a bathroom, and goes into Africa. Fail. There's a long line. Boy, wimmin and those bathroom lines...
The train to Rafiki's Planet Watch is as slow and as rickety as I remember, and the walk from the train station to Conservation Station is as long as I remember.
This place was known as Conservation Station before a mid-2000 make-over when Disney found it really had to distinguish itself from a zoo. (NaHTaZu!) I seem to remember Epcot had a similar identity crisis. (NaHTaSkuul!) But I digress.
So the place is no longer about "Conservation". So old school. It's now "Environmentalism". This is the home to Rafiki and Jimney Cricket.
The main building is still known as Conservation Station, even though the area was renamed after Rafiki. (Jimney was ripped off. Age discrimination, I'll bet.) I can understand that, if they changed the name of the building, they'd have to rip out that great looking mosaic in front of the entrance doors. Mom and Jenny go to the bathroom, and while I'm waiting, look around at the walls for hidden mickeys. Well, heck, I've gotten arrogant enough to take panoramic pictures of the insides of our bathroom at Kidani, I take one of the walls. (It turned out okay! :-))
We talk go out to Affection Section and get close to a few friendly animals, then return by train to Harambe. (We won't talk about the part where Miss Marie wasn't paying attention to her driving and tried to run off the road. That's the type of thing that sticks out in your memory of a trip. Not my memory, the guests behind us who witnessed the event.) From there we walk through Tibet and pass Mount Everest, and end out trek at the Theater in the Wild.
End March 2012 Trip Report - Part 4.
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