Our main goal that night was to ride It's a Small World, and we got on without much of a wait. Carter really seemed to like it, and at the end was bouncing up and down and laughing. That's definitely one we'll try to ride again!
After that we found a Pooh-themed playground and let Carter run around for a while.
As usual, he enjoyed the monorail ride and tram ride back to the car as much as anything else! The parking lot tram is definitely his favorite ride. He talks about it whenever we get in the car, and says, "Bye tram!" when we get off. He even woke up from his nap today mumbling about the tram, so I'm guessing he dreamed about it too!
This morning we got up early to go get on the safari ride at the Animal Kingdom park. Doug got us FastPass tickets (which let you come back at a certain time to skip the line), and we had 45 minutes to kill. But the regular line was only 20 minutes long, so we went ahead and got on anyway. After riding it once, we used our FastPass tickets to ride again! It was pretty cool.
The ride simulates a safari game drive, and it's actually pretty realistic. Well, except for the fact that you see interesting animals around every turn. There's not that density of animals in the wild, and half the fun of going on safari is finding them. But still, the feeling of the ride and the scenery was startling accurate, and it brought back great memories. Hree we are in the truck, which is set up like a really big land rover:
The truck drives along rough-paved roads through the "game reserve", and there is lots of banter on the radio between the guide and the other guides, with tips about where to look for elephants and lions. They even made it look like there were lots of possible roads we could go down, even though we were clearly on a well-designed path. Here are just a few of the animals we saw. Wildebeest and Ankole cattle:
Giraffes:
Rhinos:
We also saw elephants, lions, cheetahs, hippos, another species of rhino, some baboons, and lots of antelope. When we got off, we were treated to an up-close view of a gorilla. Carter is sitting on Doug's shoulders here:
After that we went over to the Asia section of the park and saw some very noisy gibbons and some tigers:
Carter was excited about the tigers and kept saying "more tiger!"
We then headed over to a part of the park called "Dinoland", where there was a playground Carter could run around on. It was set up like a dinosaur dig site, and there were lots of fossils and things to climb on. There were huge platforms set up like scaffolding with big tube slides for bigger kids to slide down. Carter mostly played in the toddler area:
I left him there with Doug to go find a bathroom, and when I came back five minutes later, Doug was chasing him around under the scaffolding. He said, "He ran up the stairs and is going down the big kid slides head-first!" I was like 0_0, but it was true. In the four minutes while I was gone, he got tired of the toddler area, figured out how to climb up the scaffolding, and decided to go down 20-foot tube slides head-first. This is something I should have got on video, but I was having too much fun following him down the slides! I think he's really going to love riding roller coasters when he's big enough. That will be a lot of fun!
After that we headed back to the hotel for lunch and a nap. We were all tired and ended up all taking a nap together. One of the nicest things about being on vacation is taking mid-afternoon naps with Carter and not having to worry about all the stuff I should be getting done, LOL.
We ended up getting dinner at a teppan yaki steakhouse, and then Doug was tired and wanted to come back to the hotel instead of going to another park tonight. So I took Carter down to the hotel's playground to play for a while. It was dark and cold, but he loved it, and I think he really enjoyed the time to run around and play. I practically had to drag him back up to the room at 9:00, and he was not very happy about it, heh. I keep hoping it will be warm enough that we can go swimming, but it's been colder here than it is at home. Of course, that doesn't stop other people from swimming! Even though the pool is heated, 50 degrees is a little chilly for me to get in anything other than a hot tub!
Tomorrow is out last full day, and we're planning to get up early and open the Magic Kingdom. There are quite a few more rides we want to check out. I can't believe our vacation is almost over! It's been a lot of fun, and this is a place we'll definitely be coming back to. There's so much to do, and we can see that Carter will be able to do even more fun things as he gets older. We might yet become one of those families that does WDW on a regular basis, heh.
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