Florida Day 1

Well, we went to Florida to meet my parents and my sister and her husband and their three kids.  They got there on a Friday and we showed up late the next day.  When we got there, we basically had a snack, chatted for a bit, and then went to bed.

The next day it was time for Animal Kingdom at Disney World.  We didn’t take a lot of pictures on this trip, but Mom and Kari took a bunch. They were kind enough to share some of their pictures with me. If you mouse over or click a picture and you see that part of the web address is “mompics” that means it was taken by my mom.  I did take one myself before going into the park.

Here we all are getting psyched up.

And here’s the tree of life. It’s a really cool looking tree. I’m pretty sure it’s fake. Mostly because it looks way too cool and it has tons of carvings in it. I don’t think a tree reacts very well when you carve most of the surface of its trunk.

Animal Kingdom is a bit like a zoo.  There are animals and such and some rides and shows you can see.  We saw Finding Nemo: The Musical, where they acted out the plot to Finding Nemo using gigantic puppets.  They had bubble machines on the ceiling that they activated at the end.  I got way more excited about the bubbles than I should have.

There’s this cool little sandbox type thing where you can dig and find dinosaur bones. I got right in there because I’m a kid at heart. You can see that I found a foot bone. They’re not actually bones, of course.

Here’s Kari’s youngest boy, Emmett, and his grandpa.

The boys were always being told to hold someone’s hand. This totally counts, right?

At different little stations around the park you can earn Wilderness Explorer “badges,” which are really just stickers, by answering questions or completing some tasks.  Wilderness Explorers are the Boy Scout type thing Russel belonged to from the movie Up.  They also taught us the Wilderness Explorer “thing.”  It’s not really a handshake; Will and I can’t figure out what to call it.

So there’s me being a dork. Here’s a pretty bird.

We went on a “safari” to see a bunch of animals.  It was nice to be carted around to see the animals.  It would be nice if every zoo had that option.

We also rode a train that was pretty cool. You can clearly see how excited we all are. There’s Dad and Emmett, me, Kari’s husband Jesse, Will, Eddie, Kari, and Evan, who got cut off in this picture.

We were pretty tired after our big day in Animal Kingdom so we thought about going back to the house, but we decided to go for it and see one more show, The Festival of the Lion King. It was pretty neat. Mostly because of more giant puppets, people on stilts, acrobats, aerialists, and songs from The Lion King. Also there were characters from The Lion King.

After that show was over, it was dark and we were tired so we went back to the house and ordered pizza. Dominoes actually had gluten free pizza. I was very excited. But there was even more excitement yet to come.

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