Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Vacation 2012: I can show you the world...

Day 7: Epcot


We began our time at Walt Disney World by visiting Epcot. As we had done at Disneyland six years ago, we relied on Ridemax to get us through the park in the most efficient way.

Each evening I would generate the next day's plan by entering the attractions we wanted to visit and our planned breaks. Then I would take a photo of the screen so I could have the plan on my phone. (Yes, I could've accessed the Ridemax website from my phone, but since I couldn't always get online in the parks, I used this method.)
True to the plan, we started with the big draw, Soarin', before going to Living with the Land and Spaceship Earth.





Out of all the representations of human history,
Gutenberg's printing press got my attention, of course.

Future me

Casa Dub circa 2030

Underwater explorers
After Spaceship Earth, we walked over to the Seas with Nemo and Friends.


From the comfort of our clamobile, we saw some old friends.

Wandering around the aquarium, we met some new friends.



Turtle Talk with Crush! We had missed this at California
Adventure, so we were glad we finally got to visit Crush.
Astounding technology on display here.

More souvenir pennies!
As we left Future World for World Showcase, we noticed the gathering clouds.


When the rain came, we abandoned our touring plan and boarded a boat to cross over to Germany.

We were tempted to just stay on the boat, but we couldn't stand just sitting there, wasting good Epcot time. Katie and I opted to get wet, giving Brett and Ryan the rain ponchos I had stuffed in my bag. Still, we were pretty uncomfortable in this storm, the heaviest rain we had been in since arriving in Orlando.

Hoping to ride out the deluge, we found the Biergarten German buffet. We had planned to find a quick-service restaurant for lunch, but this place gave us a nice, long respite from the storm AND excellent food!

We stuck around long enough to watch the show.


(Click for bigger panorama.)

What could get us on the dance floor?
Only the chicken dance!

Katie's desserts
We loved the Biergarten! Great food and a fun show. Thank goodness for the rain that led us there!
Outside the Biergarten

Japanese cranes

Anime exhibit

Sunshine!




Italy

France


As we made our way around the world, we watched the American Adventure show and listened to the Voices of Liberty acapella group. (Serious chills there!) Later, we saw O Canada! and rode Maelstrom in Norway. 



In the UK section, I found a Flake!

(That's the candy bar, not the blonde!) I remembered
this candy from my trip to Europe in 1985. 
While in the England section we also found some old friends, like Alice:

Brett with Alice
and POOH and PIGLET! Ryan and Katie's nurseries and even our kids' bathroom were decorated with Pooh in our old house.




Piglet was hilarious! He kept trying to steal our girl!



After "circling the globe," we experienced Captain EO (What a flashback!) and Mission: Space (What a trip! With those G-forces, I felt like I was getting a facelift!). We also checked out Club Cool:


Sponsored by Coca-Cola, Club Cool offers free samples of soft drinks from around the world.

Cheers!
Some were disgusting, but it was fun to try them out. (I really liked the watermelon flavor!)

Before leaving, we did Spaceship Earth one more time. Then we were ready for some R&R.

The whole park was just so interesting to see. We hope to get back someday to revisit some attractions and hit the ones we missed this time around, such as Test Track that is being renovated and all the countries we didn't have time to explore.

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