Trip Report 6/1/17-6/9/17

Also, I plan to have the next installment of the trip report up at some point tomorrow. Sorry it’s been so long, with work and work and 2018 packages becoming available AND this podcast, I’ve been loaded, but I promise it’ll be here tomorrow!

I’m listening to your podcast right now!

I’ve recently tried a few Disney-themed podcasts and pretty much immediately deleted all but one of them. The one I kept was WDW Prep To Go.

What annoyed me about the other ones was that they don’t get on with it! Too much opening music, commercials and – most annoyingly of all – “banter” between the hosts. You can waste five minutes before they actually get on to the subject.

So thus far I’m liking your podcast! It cut straight to the chase. And it’s like a couple of real guys talking about Disney. Perfect! (But I’m only 10 minutes in!)

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Ooo, fun trip report!

I subscribed so it downloaded both episodes!

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Thank you so much!! I really appreciate it! Let me know what you think!

Thanks a ton!!

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Thanks a lot man! I really appreciate it! Let me know what you thought of the whole thing, and Episode 2! We really love recording them, so it’s nice to hear that someone else likes them.

Day 2: Disney’s Animal Kingdom and the World Beyond Belief!

We had gone to bed pretty late the night before, but I still thought we’d be able to be up by 7:15 for our 8:00 EMH at AK, and I mean, it was for Pandora so we would be motivated. So we got up, grabbed our muffins to eat on the way, and headed over there thinking that we would be one of the first in line; I mean, we would be arriving around 30 minutes before the park opened to resort guests! We pulled up to the parking lot and saw a good amount of crowds, but my thoughts were “it’s all good, the park doesn’t open until 8, we still have 30 minutes”. (Still way too confident in myself). We walked on in, and went through security rather quickly. I kept thinking to myself “maybe it’s like yesterday and they’ll stop us at the Tree of Life or the bridge to Pandora” but as we got closer to the bridge, I got more and more worried until it dawned upon me…the park opened at 7!!! At this point, we were 45 minutes late!!! I could not believe it. We always keep the resort tv on the channel with the times on it, but somehow I still missed it…I was heartbroken. But we pressed on with the hope that maybe, just maybe, the lines wouldn’t be too crazy…

Thankfully, we only had to wait 20 minutes for Navi River Journey. And I’ll go into my opinions on that along with Flight of Passage and Pandora as a whole later on (or you can listen to my podcast, The Disney Dudes Podcast, on iTunes where we discuss Pandora). After the ride (I literally will not say anything about the rides or Pandora until the end), we hustled over to our 8-9am Kilimanjaro Safaris FP. I was feeling better because I know the Safaris gets crowded early since the animals are still very active. But, we got there and what was the wait time posted? A whopping 10 minutes. I was heated. AK doesn’t have many FP options, but I swore that Safaris would’ve been a great one. Nonetheless, we got one rather quickly and before we knew it were off to the savanna. We got some great shots of some close rhinos and zebras and even caught the King of the Jungle atop his rock (I know there’s a moat between him and the people, but if you don’t think that Simba could jump from that rock across, you’re fooling yourself, and underestimating Simba smh…). We got off the ride and hustled to Everest (being late to Pandora had us hustling to reach our FP’s before the end time all day). But we made it and for the first time actually saw the Yeti…it’s terrifying and adds a total different dynamic to the ride, it’s a shame it’s broken :confused: .

Next was a trip to Dinosaur but first Syd needed coffee and I needed alcohol…yes at 10 in the morning, it was hot and I needed a little pick me up. So we stopped at Isle of Java and I got the Coke and Rum and man oh man, talk about refreshing! I know why Mr Sparrow always finishes the rum now. So we rode Dinosaur and then headed back to Pandora for our FP of FoP and lunch at Satuli (once again, not talking about it until later).

After lunch, we met some characters (Flik, Tarzan, Pocahontas, Russell, and the Fab 5 in their AK outifits). Then we did It’s Tough To Be A Bug which brings to a very important topic of mine: A Bug’s Life needs some more attractions in the World. It was a GREAT movie (top 3 Pixar all time for me) and all it has it a little 10 minute show. Give me an actual ride, more meets, heck, give me a Bug’s Life land!

Okay, I’m off my soapbox; we headed to dinner next, but before dinner, we caught a showing of the Festival of the Lion King because there’s no way you can go to AK and NOT see the greatest show Disney has ever made. I might have cried a couple times but this is where it actually hit me that I was home, and it always does at this point. I just love the movie so much and seeing a play about it just makes my heart so happy. I wiped away my tears and we headed to our dinner reservation at Tusker House.

Now, I will say I’ve heard the bad things about TH but wanted to go because it had RoL seating so we went…and everyone was right. The food was AWFUL. This is the only negative thing I will say about this trip, but my goodness, it was disgusting. I literally ate tortillas and hummus the whole time because everything else was almost uneatable, even the corn dog nuggets were nasty! So that was a mistake and we’ll probably never be eating there again, but afterwards it was time for Syd’s nap (who would’ve thought we’d still be having nap time?) So we headed to Movies for a nap thinking we’d be back around 8:30 for the 9 RoL showing and then see Pandora at night…we fell asleep at 6:30 and didn’t wake up until 6:45 the next morning, so there’s that :joy:. It was nice to have an early night though and yeah, we missed RoL but we still had plenty of opportunities to catch it!

Now, for all of you who kept reading, thanks! And finally, here is my review on Pandora: I will say we did literally everything you can do in Pandora from River Journey to FoP to Satuli to Pongu Pongu to Windtraders to Drum Circle to literally laying on the ground to get shots of the floating mountains, we did it all. And spent around 4-5 hours there too; but it was SO worth it. I’ll start with walking in, that was absolutely mindblowing hearing the music and then suddenly hearing animal noises was crazy! The land itself was rather small, but it was so immersive that you wouldn’t know the size was small. We couldn’t really tell what was real plant life and what was artificial, that’s how in depth it is. So I’ll go into River Journey now. It’s crazy. My mouth was open the whole time because literally everywhere you look something is going on, from the leaves above you to the water below you, something is always going on. Then you get to the Shaman and the only word to describe that ending scene is peaceful. She was amazing and soooo fluid, you really couldn’t tell it was an AA until you got right next to her, WDI did an AMAZING job with her. Our next stop was Windtraders and I was fortunate enough to get one of the last pet banshees before they sold out. It was a quick experience but the store itself was immersive to the max. It looked to be hand woven entirely, and they sole basically everything you could think of…even down to rocks from Pandora…but hey, you do you Disney, you do you. Now I want to skip FoP and save it for the end because I wanna save the best for last, so let’s discuss Satuli and Pongu Pongu (PP for short). We had the chesseburger pods with the veggies, boba balls, and home made chips and all I can say is WOW. The pods were identical to a McDonald’s cheeseburger and were sooo good, The veggies and boba balls were delicious as well but what stole the show for me was the chips! They were spicy, but not to the point you couldn’t eat them, and super tasty. Overall, this jumped Casey’s Corner as my favorite QS in the parks. PP was good too, but we really didn’t spend a lot of time there. We just got our drink (Mo’ara Margarita, which was delicious and strong at the same time) and went on with our day. Now for FoP, I was a bit skeptical before because I get very bad motion sickness on Star Tours; however, this was BY FAR the best ride Disney has ever cam out with. It jumped instantly to my number 1 ride and I don’t really love Avatar that much. It was PHENOMENAL. The queue was breathtaking, you get gorgeous views of Pandora, the cave was crazy!!,
and the lab was the icing on the cake (I still think that’s a person or a projection inside that water tube). As far as the ride itself, this was the first ride I’ve ever cried on because of how beautiful and breathtaking and amazing it was. Both times we rode it, I ended up in tears, and aside from when I’m at the World, I’m not a very emotional person. But this just hit the feels for me, I’m not sure what it was, but it was very moving. The smells were amazing, the experience was amazing and thrilling!, the views were amazing, the whole set up was amazing, the only word I can think of is amazing. So, there’s that. If you’ve never been to AK, go strictly for this ride. It literally makes AK so much better than it was before!

So there you have it, our 2nd park day was pretty solid, even if we made some mistakes :joy:. On the next installment I’ll tell you all about our trip to Studios including meeting King Kylo, a stormtrooper interaction for the ages, MidWay Mania beatdowns, and watching the Star Wars fireworks for the first time! Thanks again for reading y’all!

Plug alert! Plug alert! You can catch me along with my co host Mickey Orlando on “The Disney Dudes Podcast” on iTunes and SoundCloud and starting this Wednesday we’ll be live streaming on YouTube Live around 7-730pm EST where we’ll discuss the news from this week including some rumors surrounding Epcot, and rank our top 5 resorts!

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