Day 9 Disney - Animal Kingdom

This morning we headed to Animal Kingdom. This was the park Donovan and Aaron wanted to return to on our last day. Donovan's favorite ride (besides It's a Small World, which we must have ridden between 12 and 15 times during our times at Magic Kingdom), was the Kilimanjaro Safari Jeeps. He's been talking about it all week. Yesterday was "Extra Magic Hours" at Animal Kingdom (which means that people staying on site at Disney can get in early on certain days at certain parks, or stay later; we found this just ends up meaning the entire park is very crowded all day on those days, and so we avoided them). Since it was Extra Magic Hours at AK yesterday, today was predicted to be much less crowded. Given that the temperature was between 98 and 100 today, I suspect many people chose to do one of the Disney Water Parks (such as Blizzard Beach or Typhoon Lagoon) today.

We were there this morning about 45 minutes before the park opened. About 15 minutes before rope drop, Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto came out to greet us. Then, once the rope dropped, we raced for the Safari Jeeps and were on one of the first ones. It was an INCREDIBLE ride - we saw even more animals than the first time! Donovan was so happy!

On our walk to Dinoland, we stopped at Expedition Everest for Rupert to get a Fastpass to use later. The wait to ride was only 15 minutes, and they had a separate single rider line which was about a 5 minute wait. Rupert was able to get right on!


We then headed down to Dinoland and rode Triceratops Spin several times. There was not yet a line, so we were allowed to remain on the ride rather than getting off, back in line, and back on. After lunch the line for that ride was quite long, so we were so glad to have ridden it already.

We then went to see the Nemo Musical at 10:30. It was fanatastic. Of all the shows we saw during our time at Disney (Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Playhouse Disney, etc) the boys said the Nemo musical was the best/their favorite. It was really well done!

We then went to lunch at Pizzafari, did some souvenir shopping (Aaron had bought a Toy Story beach towel, and Donovan had been hoping for a Nemo one which we found.), and then headed to the Boneyard where the boys played and dug for dinosaur bones for about an hour before we headed back to the hotel to leave for the airport.



Last look at one of the views from our hotel room at the Dolphin.


A big thank you to Jennifer Newport for suggesting ordering the Photopass cd before we left for Disney (which we did). Besides the photos we took, we will have about 200 photos on that cd - and we were able to all be in the photos since the Disney photographers were taking the photos. Also, Donovan LOVED pin trading. LOVED it. I had ordered 25 pins off ebay (at Jennifer's suggestion), and we sorted them before we left for ones he wanted to keep (10) and ones he would trade (15). He was able to trade them for pins for his favorite characters. Aaron traded a few also, and we bought plenty of special ones for both boys. THANK YOU JENNIFER!