
On July 7th, we left Marco Island, Florida at 3:55am and headed towards Disney World. We were so close, only 3 hours away, why would we NOT pass by and spend a day at a Disney Park before going home from our vacation?
We mentioned this situation in a previous blog post and we accomplished everything! Two weeks before we left, I did online check in so all we had to do was show up at the resort after we were done. We actually arrived at Pop Century around 7:30am. We knew that we wouldn’t be there to Rope Drop Animal Kingdom, and we were okay with that.
Once at Pop, we all went inside the Classic Hall to use the restroom. While the family went to the restroom, I stopped and ask a concierge if I was okay to leave my car in the check in parking until we got back from the park. The kind lady (I can’t remember her name off hand) said I could certainly do that, but that my room was actually ready and all we had to do was move our car to the 50’s parking lot if we wanted to. Thinking about things, I decided to leave the car because we were close to the busses and then we would move the car when we got back from the park that evening.
Once we were ready, we hopped on the bus to Animal Kingdom! We made it to the park around 7:45 or so. We were in the park around 8:15am and, surprisingly, it wasn’t crowded at all. Maybe it is that we missed the Rope Drop crowd and everyone had already rushed over to Pandora, but it was sparsely populated all the way to Everest!

Speaking of Everest, we literally walked right on! It was my first time riding it and it won’t be my last! It will, however, be my wife and our 7 year olds last time riding it! I’ll post a video soon. Needless to say, the screaming you hear is theirs. I thought the ride was amazing. Once you start going backwards, your sense of direction gets a bit off kilter and the sensations are different. Some people have a sensation of being inverted in the pitch black, both going forward and backwards, but I didn’t experience that. The one thing I wish is that they would fix the animatronic Yeti.

After Everest, we headed to Creature Comforts for Breakfast. Kim and I split the bacon, egg and gouda breakfast sandwich while the kids split a colossal cinnamon roll. Sadly, the cinnamon roll was not colossal.
We originally planned on getting a lightning lane for meeting Mickey and Minnie at the Adventure Outpost, but with a 45-minute wait, in air conditioning, we decided to just walk in. the wait, ended up being closer to 20 to 25 minutes. I have to tell you, it was magical getting to shake Mickey’s hand and hug Minnie. Character encounters are priceless and I am thrilled they are back!

One thing I kept hearing about, and every time I have been in Animal Kingdom, I’ve never taken the time to go actually try them, are Mr. Kamal’s Seasoned Fries. So, after we met Mickey and Minnie, we passed by Mr. Kamal’s and let me tell you, those fries are AMAZING. At least for us, they fried them fresh for each order. They come with 2 dipping sauces. One was Curried Honey Mustard, which was sort of a sweet, looser liquid sauce that would have paired well with any type of baked/roasted/grilled protein. The other sauce was the Korean Chili Ketchup, it was a thicker based sauce that was really good.

After our quick snack, we strolled over to Pandora for our Lightening Lane for Na’vi River Journey. I love Na’vi River Journey. It’s dark, quiet, relaxing and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The only problem is that videos don’t come out well! After Na’vi, we stopped by the Flight of Passage gift shop for a beverage.
We weren’t hungry so we just got a couple of waters and a Pandora Sunrise drink, which was amazing! Our daughter wasn’t feeling great (She chugged a pretty strong coffee earlier after Everest so her stomach was hurting) so we sat at Satu’li Canteen for about 20 minutes to cool off with our cooling towels. That was the beauty of this trip, we weren’t in a rush to do everything. We had a plan and we were checking off things.

After the cool, down, my wife and daughter rode Flight of Passage with an individual Lightening Lane. I stayed back with our youngest son and we hung out at the gift shop and just outside and people watched. It was nice to have some one on one time with my youngest.
They were on and off FOP fairly quickly and we’d moved closer to lunch so we decided to head over to Flame Tree. Actually, my wife and I had Flame Tree and our kids had Pizzafari. We had the baked mac and cheese, my daughter had a pepperoni Pizza and our son had some mac and cheese with mandarin oranges. We sat for a bit by the water and ate and watched Kite Tails. We had two additional things we wanted to do on our plan/list; Kilimanjaro Safaris and Finding Nemo: The Big Blue and Beyond.

My wife grabbed a Lightening Lane for the Safari at 2:30pm I believe. Nemo started at 2:30 and lasted for about 20 minutes. We had an hour to get to the safari so we were able to take in Nemo, which was absolutely fantastic. It’s been redone over the last year or so and I didn’t see the original, but this new version as really good.
After Nemo was done, we headed to Kilimanjaro Safari. No matter what time, or season, or whatever is going on, we have to go on the Safari. You learn something different each time! Kilimanjaro Safari is a must do for us.

Overall, the plan we had was good. With us having just been in February, we felt like we didn’t have to rush to do everything. We were able to take our time and do everything we wanted to do. We skipped Dinosaur because our son was freaked out by Everest. We will catch that next time.
The food we had, and I touched on a couple of things above, was amazing. The Colossal Cinnamon Roll we got from Creature Comforts wasn’t colossal and it wasn’t heated up. I would compare it to a pastry you’d get at a Hilton Hotel free breakfast. Not terrible, just not what we were expecting.
The only other things we had were the Macaw drink and Tiger Tail from Isle of Java. The Macaw is amazing, always. The Tiger Tail, meh, it was okay. Honestly, the Tiger Tail from the Cheshire Café in Magic Kingdom is the same thing and it’s significantly better.
I can’t leave Animal Kingdom without having a grilled corn on the cob and a Mickey Pretzel. The corn is and always will be amazing. I got some Pixie dust and was given another corn for free because I had told them how I tried to recreate it and actually did it successfully! The pretzel wasn’t that great, and it may be because I recently made some homemade pretzels and they were fantastic. They were just off with a couple of items this trip.
We left the park around 4:30 or so to head back to Pop Century. I will have a blog post about that coming up so check back soon! Also, the two food items I talked about recreating here (the grilled corn and the pretzels), I will have recipes up soon on the recipe page!