Animal Kingdom {Disney World}

After spending a FULL day (15+ hours!!) at the Magic Kingdom on Monday, we got up early again on Tuesday to spend the day at Animal Kingdom.  I LOVE going to zoos and was REALLY looking forward to exploring this park.  It sounded so much more relaxing and low-key than the Magic Kingdom – the perfect day to follow up our big day at the Magic Kingdom.  Or so we thought...  More about that later.

We started our morning by getting up at 6:15am and catching the 7:15 bus to Animal Kingdom, so that we would be ready and waiting when the park opened for Magic Hours at 8:00.  The morning started out perfectly!  We were there, excited, and ready to go!

When we entered the park we watched the crowd split into two directions.  One group was heading to Asia for Expedition Everest (a big roller coaster) and the other group was headed to Africa for the Kilimanjaro Safari.  We followed the group to Africa, because we knew Anthony would go on the safari, and we were not too sure about Expedition Everest.

The Kilimanjaro Safari was fun!  They take you out in an oversized jeep-like truck and drive you around throughout the safari.  We saw hippos, rhinos, giraffe, long-horn cattle, flamingos, lions, cheetahs, etc.  The animals appeared to be essentially “in the wild”. 


It was neat!  I had heard that every time you go on the safari it’s a little different because the animals move around (sometimes really close), so even before our safari, we grabbed FASTPASSes to come back later.  (They were our first FASTPASSes of the day)


After experiencing the crazy crowds at Magic Kingdom, we decided that if there ever was a time to ride Expedition Everest, the time was now, since it was still early in the morning – during the Magic Hour.  We decided to leave Africa and walk over to Asia to check it out.  It sure sounds funny to say that.  We walked from Africa to Asia. Ha!

When we got over to Expedition Everest we grabbed FASTPASSes for later and jumped in line.  Anthony was a little worried, but we kept telling him that it would be similar to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.  Ummm, it’s not.  At all.  Much bigger.  But we didn’t know that at the time, so we forged ahead.

Here’s the boys, right before our turn -


Anthony looks happy enough, right?  He was pretty excited at this point!

Here are a few pictures that I took from the ride.  I sure wish I could have seen Anthony’s face!

Going up, up, up!

Zooming around through the mountain

and then we reached the end of the track! umm…

Here’s where the ride started to get really awesome, or super scary, depending on which one of us you ask...  The track changed behind us, so when they pulled the brakes (we were “frozen” when I took this picture) we begin zooming backwards along the track.  Up and down, through the mountain, in the dark, etc. Then we came to another halt and we were suspended pointing forward and down.  Then a yeti flashed up on the wall of the mountain and appeared to be wrecking the track (this was while the track was changed in front of us) and off we went again, on another different path.  It was fun for us big kids, but pretty scary for Anthony.  Definitely his biggest roller coaster to date!  We were super proud of how brave he was during the ride.  Afterwards he was super scared and we just relaxed for about 15 minutes right near the exit of the ride while Anthony caught his breath.  Hubby and I sure enjoyed it though!  Wish we could have ridden it again!

After riding Expedition Everest, we knew we needed to take a break and find some more activities suited for littler ones, so we headed to DinoLand U.S.A.  Here we found a much more kid friendly ride – the TriceraTop Spin (a ride appropriate for any height).


Anthony was so excited to be on a smaller ride that I think we rode it 3 times in a row.  At that point, we were willing to do anything to help him relax, because we had pushed it pretty good by taking him on Expedition Everest.

Then we headed over to find the Dinosaur ride.  I had heard that it was scary, but people were telling us that it was fine.  He was more than tall enough for this one, so we thought it would be okay.  Anthony was pretty worried that Dinosaur was going to be super scary and he wasn’t going to trust anything we said.  Somehow we got him on the ride though, and at least 2 out of 3 of us enjoyed it!  The picture below should give an idea about who maybe didn’t enjoy it as much…


This ride drives through a track making while you look for dinosaurs.  Around the point of the photo above, I’m pretty sure there was a big dinosaur.  It was pretty noisy too, so Anthony kept his ears plugged most of the time through this one.  He clearly was not a fan of this ride either.  We struck out twice in one morning.  All within about an hour.

We decided it was time for a quick snack on our walk to see Finding Nemo.  This was a longer show than we had watched the day before, but it was cute!  The actors all had stuffed animal characters that they carried and they sang throughout most of the show.  I like musicals, and the movie Finding Nemo, so I thought this was cute.  I would go see it again.  If you have kids that like bubbles, sit up front.

After the show we decided to start walking towards Africa to try and use our expired FASTPASSes for the Kilimanjaro Safari.  We were also hungry (eating breakfast so early = eating an early lunch), so when a bench was open in the sun (did I mention it was cold on Tuesday too?) we snatched it up and sat down to eat our lunch.  We packed our lunch and snacks again (we did this every day of our trip ) – SO easy and cheap to have food ready when we want it.  No lines.  No major expense.  It was perfect!

On our walk to the safari we took a detour and did the walking tour in Asia.  This was an area that you could control your speed and walk through at your leisure.  We thought this was a good idea – no rush, just casual, and we hoped to enjoy it.

Unfortunately, our traveling and long hours at the Magic Kingdom had Anthony pretty tired out.  He started to get pretty grouchy and we made the decision that it was time to leave the park.

I have to admit, I was bummed.  There were so many unfinished things on my to-do list!  Here are some of the things I was really hoping to do/see:

     Tree of Life (we barely saw it from a distance)
     It’s Tough to be a Bug
     Lion King Show
     Camp Minnie Mickey (for character signatures)
     Another Safari ride
     Take pictures – I didn’t take nearly the amount of photos that I would have liked.  Had I known we would be leaving at 12:30, I would have taken TONS more throughout the morning.

Once we were on the Disney bus on the way back to the resort, Anthony’s eyes instantly started closing – he was TIRED!  He eventually curled up in my lap and just crashed. 


When we got back to the resort, hubby carried him through the resort to our room (of course it was the farthest building in the back) and we were able to lay him down without waking him up.  He slept about 3 hours!!  He definitely was tired, and the crazy schedule we were keeping wasn’t helping any.

After a long nap and a walk around the resort, Anthony enjoyed going for a quick swim.  I chose to stay bundled up in my jeans and long sleeves and relaxed in the sunshine.  It may have been chilly, but at least the sun was shining!

More posts about Disney World
     Countdown to Disney
     Downtown Disney
     Magic Kingdom

More posts yet to come:
     Hollywood Studios
     Universal Studios
     Universal’s Islands of Adventure

Downtown Disney {Disney World}

After driving all day Saturday (with the exception of our stop in St. Louis), we made it to Atlanta before stopping for the night. When I started calling for a hotel from the road, I found the hotels were all booked. In the end I called Hilton and let them find me a room. The good news is that they found us a room, the bad news is that it was downtown in Atlanta. Getting to the hotel, checking in, unloading the car, getting into the parking garage and getting an overtired 6-year-old to bed at 11pm eastern time was tricky, but we did it.

Yes, it was raining as we arrived, but the rain was done when we
unloaded the car and that was the only rain all week!

We decided to sleep in a little the next morning and hit the road about 9:30am for the approximately 7 hour drive to Orlando.  We checked into our resort (Disney’s All Star Music Resort) and made it to our room at about 4:30pm. Not bad!  Once again it was a little frustrating getting our things to our room – no luggage carts!  We definitely could have packed lighter, but since we drove and had entertainment for the road, clothes for bizarre weather (which was good – there were a few record low temp days in Florida), and food (breakfast and lunch for the entire week), we had a lot of things to carry in.  Total pain, but having all that stuff with us was worth it.



Once we knew we would be at Disney sometime Sunday afternoon we decided to make reservations at a restaurant in Downtown Disney. This was easier said than done! Having never been there before, we didn’t know what restaurants to try, but after some quick online searching, I attempted to make some reservations at a handful of different restaurants without success. Everything was busy!  In the end we made a reservation at Bongos Cuban Café.


 No trip to Bongo’s would be complete without playing the bongos!


The funniest thing happened when we arrived at Bongo’s… Hubby started laughing, leaned over and said, “I’ve been here before!”.  He was at Disney World for a work conference a few years ago and didn’t even remember going to Downtown Disney!  Once he walked into the restaurant, he recognized it though!  Funny stuff!


Dinner was…okay.  Would I go back? Honestly? I would try somewhere else.  It was not the best meal I had during the week.


After dinner we walked around and checked things out.


A man working at one of the kiosk’s thought Anthony needed a Mickey Mouse sticker. Somehow that turned into 6.5 stickers, because Anthony is 6.5 years old!


Anthony needed to run around a bit, so he raced up and down the sidewalks along the lake with hubby.  We checked out a few stores and we also ventured over to Lego Land for a little fun before heading back to the hotel. 


 I think it’s a requirement to build a few guys every time you go to Lego Land!


The Incredible Hulk was awesome! There was a line for pictures with him, and Anthony didn’t want to wait, so I just snapped a pic quick. As you can see, the little boy below thought Hulk was awesome too!






We were off to the Magic Kingdom the next day so we decided to head back to the hotel early to attempt to get some sleep.  Magic Hours at the Magic Kingdom were starting at 7am!!

A Quick Stop at the Arch {St. Louis}

If you follow me on Instagram (@MomsGonnaSnap) then you have had a chance to see snapshots taken throughout our vacation. Now that we’re home, I have started going through the 2200+ (!!!) photos that we took on two cameras and my phone.  Brace up, there will be lots of vacation posts coming!!!



I think it’s funny how much we look forward to going on vacation, and also how much we look forward to coming home when the vacation is done.  If you read my last post, you know that we were on vacation this past week – we drove from Minnesota to Orlando!  Just in case geography is not your thing, that means we drove through 8 states for a total of 1,440 miles EACH WAY.  This was no small venture!  When we left Orlando, I was wishing I was Dorothy and could just click my heels 3 times and be home!  We experienced incredibly heavy “spring break” traffic (so the digital road signs told us) throughout Florida and Georgia on the way home.  In fact, at one point, we drove about 10 miles in 1.5 hours!  It was awful.

Since Anthony attends a year-round school, following a 45/15 calendar, he has 3 weeks off for spring break.  Hubby had to take some mandatory vacation days and my work schedule is somewhat flexible these days so we made a decision to go for it!  We decided to leave early on a Saturday morning, the day after Anthony was done with school for 3 weeks to spend a week in Florida and planned to leave Florida sometime in the afternoon on the following Saturday to start the drive back to Minnesota.

As I said in my last post, we ended up leaving around 4 in the morning, which actually worked out pretty good.  Anthony was able to fall back asleep for awhile as we started trekking across the country.  That morning we drove from Minnesota, through Iowa and down through Missouri to St. Louis – our timing was perfect to stop for lunch at the arch!  Since I was a kid, I have always thought the arch was pretty cool, so I was ready to share my excitement with Anthony.  We all needed to stretch our legs, so taking some time to walk around the arch was perfect.



It was a nice day, and unfortunately we were not the only ones who thought visiting the arch was a good idea.  When we got inside (under the arch) we were all ready to purchase tickets to take a ride to the top.  Then we found we would have to wait about 3 hours for a turn.  Ugh!  Waiting three hours on a day when we were planning to drive approximately 1000 miles was not an option.  Anthony was thrilled though – he was nervous about riding in the tram to the top of the arch and he really didn’t want to.  I have to admit, I was pretty disappointed, but there was nothing we could do about it.  We took a handful of pictures, made some sandwiches for lunch and hit the road!  In total, we stopped for about an hour before jumping back in the van and heading down the road.

Here are a few more pics from our stop in St. Louis…

Anthony raced to the stop of the steps.  I kept asking him to stop so I could tell him something (I don’t remember what, but it was probably for a picture) and he just rushed to the top, not letting us catch him.



I think he was pretty excited to be out of the car – I had to hang on to him so hubby could take this photo!






Our mini photographer took this next one for us!  We stood on a bench and he sat on the ground below us – he did pretty good!  The weird thing coming out of my head is my hand – in the first round of photos I had hair standing straight up – this helped with the hair, but it looks like I have an arm coming out of the side of my head…



A stranger saw our photo attempts (see above picture) and took pity on us.  On trips like this, we love nice strangers so we can get some family shots!







Maybe next time we go through St. Louis we’ll be able to take a trip to the top – I sure hope so!

It feels good to be home, now I just wish the Minnesota snow had melted while we were in Florida!!