Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth!

 Disney World was a total blast.  We spent six days in sunny Orlando, Florida.  Every body makes Orlando seem like this premier vacation spot with perfect weather and tons to do.  For the most part they are absolutely right.  However they forget to mention the humidity.  Any Arizonan knows very little about high humidity.  I was damp for the full six days we were there.  Once our plane landed back in DRY Arizona I was one happy camper!  Other than the muggy, humid, scorching weather Disney World was an absolute BLAST!

We started the vacation at Animal Kingdom.  It is pretty much a zoo turned into a theme park.  We had a blast on Expedition Everest where we encountered the yetti.  It took a little convincing but I did get Seth on a roller coaster.  We also ventured through dino land.  We took an African Safari and rode the rapids of Asia.  There were native animals from several continents mostly featuring Africa and Asia.   We saw Flik and several interesting bugs in the tree of life and watched an acrobatic show of  The Lion King.  One of the best features of Animal kingdom was the short lines.  We walked on to every ride there.  No waiting for us.  This is one of the less popular parks in Disney World so we went on a Saturday when all of the other parks would have been crawling with people.

In the afternoon that day we ventured over to Epcot.  We didn't last long there.  We arrived in Orlando around 11:30 pm.  By the time we got out of baggage claim and to the hotel it was nearly 2 am which is 6am in Arizona.  We woke up around 6am (4 hours of sleep) and went to the parks.  Needless to say that in the early afternoon we were dragging our feet.  We made it back to the hotel around seven grabbed a quick shower and dinner and were sleeping pretty early. 

Epcot was one of our favorite parks.  This is the park where they have the world showcase.  In a short walking distance you meander through several countries including Morocco, Norway, Canada, China, Japan, Germany, England, as well as several others.  The park is set up as an exact replica of those countries.  The builidings look identical and some of the countries have rides that go with them.  Mexico had a boat ride that took us to Chitzen Itza, and Norway took us on a viking ship through the history of Norway.  All of it was very intersting.  While in Epcot we went to Future World.  Our favorite ride there was Spaceship Earth.  They made this awesome video of us and took us through the evolution of intelligence starting with early cavemen.  It went all the way through the rise and collapse of Rome, the first library, papyrus in Egypt and the first schools.  It was all pretty awesome.

 After Epcot we went to Hollywood Studios.  This was the park that was for teenagers and young adults.  Lots of fast fun rides.  This park focused on the special effects of movies. This park wasn't just for disney movies either.  They had  a really neat show for villans and the star wars ride was fantastic!  We wantched Fantasmic at their outdoor theater.  They had fountains of water that played videos like projection screens.  It followed Fantasia for the most part then they brought boats out over the water with the princesses and some other famous characters.  We rode Rockin Roller Coaster.  This ride stared Aerosmith.  Seth actually wanted to ride this one first.  He changed his mind about 15 minutes into our 30 minute wait but he toughed it out and wanted to ride it again the next day!  This was probably our favorite ride out of Disney World.  It was fast and tons of fun for the whole 90 seconds of it!  Hollywood Studios had a lot of rides and shows that were interesting for us.  We rode the toystory ride where we get to shoot little toy cannons, we watched Beauty and the Beast and The Little mermaid.  There was also an Action car show where they did car stunts and we even got to see Herbie. 

The last park we visited was Magic Kingdom.  This is the park that is most like Disney Land in California.  We first went to the park in the late afternoon.  We stayed to watch the fireworks and Castle light show.  They do this awesome show every night using lights projected on Cinderella's castle using photos that were taken throughout the day.  It's awesome how much a couple of lights change the appearance of the castle.  It looks like a cartoon at times.  We watched the light parade.  It was super cute and tons of fun.  We felt kind of bad for the kids who were sitting around us.  Some jerks thought it would be awesome to stand up right in front of a ton of kids who wanted to watch the parade.  As far as rides go we drove race cars, flew over London and Neverland with Peter Pan, we rode a runaway train, and went on Space Mountain.  One of our favorites was the Monster's Inc. Laugh Floor.  It's basically stand up comedy.   They used actual people from the audience to create their jokes.  It was hilarious.  

We had tons and tons of fun on our vacation this year.  Everything s

eemed to go smoothly.  We went to the Airport and had transfers to our hotel waiting for us, as well as our way back to the airport.  We definitely enjoyed our time in Florida but were ready to come back to dry Arizona.  We even got to see one of my best friends after she had her baby while we were away!   What a great vacation to get us through the summer.