The final chapter of our trip recap – thanks for stickin around to read all this nonsense!
Day 5 – Universal Studios Orlando
Friday was a hot, rain-free day as well. Poor lance had to carry around our ponchos in his cargo pockets because I was afraid it might randomly rain…oops
Because our [free] hotel shuttle only had one drop off time to Universal, we got to the park a good 30 min before it opened. Lucky for us they let us in early. We hit the big roller coaster right away - and thank goodness we did, it was shut down off and on most of the day too! Then we hit all of the other popular rides as we went around the park – I think its safe to say that we didn’t wait more than 5 min for a single ride!
The place where we stopped for lunch had the coolest soda machine I have ever seen – you can make any flavor of coke that your heart desires. We had souvenir cups so we got 79 cent refills for the day so I got a refill here every time we were anywhere close.
I tried grape sprite zero and raspberry vanilla coke zero – and Lance had a vanilla rootbeer. This thing was lots of fun (and I heard a rumor that there is one in AZ at the Five Guys Burgers on Val Vista and the 60..so I just might have to check it out)
After the rides we decided to hit some of the shows. There were some really fun ones like the Disaster movie and Fear Factor Live (Lance and Tim really liked this one!) and some neat 3-D shows. I dragged Lance to the Hollywood Horror Make-Up show and it ended up being really cool (and not really about make-up, random I know..).
Lance and I split off from the group to go have dinner at the Hard Rock Café.
We try to visit the Hard Rock Café when we travel and take photo’s in front of the sign – we started this on our honeymoon in New Orleans a few years ago and are starting to get a small collection :) This Hard Rock is actually the largest one in the world – it was huge inside.
We all called it an early night and got back to the hotel to pack up our stuff since we would be checking out on Saturday morning and going straight to the airport from Disney.
Day 6 (and our final day) was spent at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park.
After saying farewell to the hotel we headed out to our final theme park! We arrived before the park opened so once we got in we headed straight to the safari. This theme park is truly amazing – the tree canopy is absolutely gorgeous and its so lush and green. Disney does a wonderful job taking something natural and making it so grand. Some people say the park is just an expensive zoo with a few rides – but I think there is nothing wrong with that, Disney did it right (or at least they wow’d me!). This was my second favorite park, right after Epcot :)
Let me just start by saying that this may have been my favorite thing we did the whole trip. It was amazing – It was like going to the zoo, but so much more magical (sounds like Disney right?)
That picture was taken from my phone – with no zoom. While I was obsessing about getting a picture of this giraffe Lance tapped me on the shoulder to inform me that there was one right by my head… I was in awe
Isn't he cute?!? No cages or anything they were just roaming around! We came at the perfect time – they had just fed all of the animals so they were up and moving!
On our way to another ride we saw some monkeys climbing across some ropes. Yet again, no cages or anything, they were just hanging out up there way above our heads. I got a short video on my phone of them climbing across:
The whole trip we were joking about how we find it odd that Disney is obsessed with dinosaurs. They somehow manage to incorporate them in any way possible Animal Kingdom = dinosaurs, logical I guess? Every time we are at Disneyland I wonder who thought “Hey lets make a scene of the Grand Canyon, then show the canyon full of dinosaurs!!”. It bedazzles me every time I see it. Despite that weirdness, we all liked the dinosaur ride at Animal Kingdom, it was lots of fun (and plenty cheesy with one of the guys from CSI – although he isn't nearly as cool as Bill Nye the Science Guy with Ellen Degeneres talking about dinosaurs…).
This was a cool replica of the most complete T-Rex skeleton. It was humongous!
I got this super awesome t-shirt too – the “long neck” dinosaurs were always my favorite :) The tag on the shirt made me laugh:
“Printed with Love” and “100% Awesome”
When it came time for lunch we were swayed by one thing alone – air conditioning! That led us to Yak and Yeti restaurant. Since we were all really hot and sweaty we opted for a few chilled cocktails. They even had environmentally friendly straws!
We all thought our lunch was extremely delicious – we each had different chicken dishes.
I could not pass up dessert – so Lance and I split the pineapple cream cheese wontons. Believe me, they we just as delicious as they sound and such a unique dish I could not leave without trying it! Kevin ordered the Mango Pie – which he said was scrumptious as well.
After lunch we had an hour or so to check out a few more things at the park – then we headed to the airport and made our way back to Phoenix!
That was the last of our trip to Orlando! We made the most of our time there and had a blast! I am hoping I can convince Lance to go back with me next year so I can run the Disney Food and Wine half marathon ;)
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