Putaansuu Post: November 2010

Well, we hemmed and hawed on where to go for vacation. We were planning on going to Okinawa which should have been a close but fun vacation. As Caroline looked at the airline ticket prices, though, it was looking like $600 to $800 per person. Okinawa has some cool things, but perhaps not that cool. As Caroline was looking at other options, she noticed a good deal on tickets from Narita, Japan to Orlando, Florida. So, for a bit more money, we decided to head to Disney World for our vacation!

You might note in this picture that William has a gap in his smile. You might also note that the tooth isn't missing, it is just pushed over to the side. The new tooth is coming in and has pushed the old one to the side. William was fiddling with it the entire trip trying to get it out.

Awesome!!! It was a 26 hour journey from door to door and we inflicted 13 time zones worth of jet lag on ourselves, but we were in Disney World!

We stayed on the Disney World property at Port Orleans. We spent most of the time at Riverside which emulates the riverside mansions of New Orleans...

Complete with a swampy river with ferry service to the French Quarter (where we spent the other part of our stay) and Downtown Disney.

Our hotel! OK, it looks like a stately riverside mansion, but it is a hotel of many rooms. We hadn't spent much on the room since we weren't going to be there much, but Disney sure knows how to make it look nice.

They had several pools amongst the various "mansions", but in the center (far removed from the mansions for the peace and quiet of the residents) was Old Man Island with a bigger pool with a water slide and other fun features (including a bar serving micro brew...) William has a good water slide body luge form.

We had arrived at around midnight at the hotel. We decided that the first day should be lazy, so we toured around the hotel and William and I hit the pool before heading to Epcot for dinner.

The Disney transportation system is impressive. You sit at the bus stop in front of your hotel and the bus going to your destination (EPCOT, Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon, or Downtown Disney) would be by within 20 minutes (more often during peek people moving times). Then at the end of the day, same thing, the bus going to your hotel would be by within 20 minutes.

Ahhh, EPCOT! Where you can drink beers from around the world... while you walk around the world! Caroline is using a cane since she had torn her meniscus (knee cartilage) while training for Disney World ("They" say that you will average 13 miles of walking per day.) We were very worried that the injury would impact our vacation, but with some intense physical therapy by one of our friends and a very Japanese folding cane (that caught many a ride attendant by surprise as Caroline folded it up rather than giving it to the attendant) we did quite well.

We ate dinner at the Bier Garten in "Germany". It was a blast back to the year I spent back in Germany as a foreign exchange student. The food was spot on to how I remember it, and they had a great selection of beer. "They" say that the Epcot ride lines get shorter through the evening as all the guests burn out from all the beer drinking. We arrived late and our internal clocks were telling us it was 9:00 AM. We had a blast!

The Norwegian tower. No good story to tell here, it just looked really cool in the evening light.

William fiddling with his loose tooth while we wait to enter the Magic Kingdom...

Considering the time zone difference, we did pretty good. There were a few times, though, that the jet lag really showed through.

Hollywood Studios! Basically, Disney does Universal Studios. They do a movie theme to the entire park. It's a lot of fun with back lot tours, live action adventure shows, and actors doing skits all over the park. Good fun.

Caroline's favorite ride at the park (and William and I enjoyed it as well) was Toy Story. It's a ride where you ride around in a cart with 3D glasses shooting at a bunch of arcade style shooting games. It is done really well and is a real blast. It had the longest lines we saw at Hollywood Studios, but the line took you through the Toy Story world of larger than life toys. Disney is the best at both hiding the line, and making it interesting.

Caroline with Mr. Potato Head. Mr. Potato Head would sing and tell jokes. At one point he pointed to someone in the audience and said, "I'll guess your weight!... Uhm... 25 to 35 minutes!" Sorry that should have been "wait", but "weight" was the impression you got from the carnival look of it all.

William's favorite ride was Rockin' Roller Coaster. The ride takes you in through a record studio where you meet up with Aerosmith. They are rushed off to their concert across town, but they convince their manager to give us all back stage passes and arrange a limo for us all. She says it's a VERY fast limo. You walk out into what looks like a back alley where you get in a roller coaster that looks like a 50s caddy. It pulls up to a tunnel, gives you some warning signs, and then accelerates you to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds and then you are going through a roller coaster ride in the dark except for lit up representations of driving through LA in a wild ride before finally pulling up in front of the concert stadium. William and I loved it and probably rode it a dozen or more times.

Hollywood Tower of Terror. We've ridden the tower of terror ride at California Disney, Disney Sea in Tokyo, and now in Disney World. This is the best of the ones we've seen. It is different in that your elevator goes up a bit, but then moves out of your elevator and through a spooky twilight zone area before loading up in the possessed elevator where it whips you up then down. It does different stuff each time and Caroline was really startled when she expected the first move to be going rapidly up, but it dropped. At the point where it takes a picture, I went to raise my hands up (the international sign for "This doesn't scare me!") and I couldn't get my one hand up. I look down to see that Caroline had a firm grip on it... :-) It was a really fun ride.

The Movie Ride was a fun group ride through a bunch of classic movie scenes. It was well done and had some fun twists to it. Here is Indiana Jones removing the Ark.

We went to several action adventure live action shows. One was Indiana Jones. Caroline used her high energy to get selected from the back of the crowd to be an extra in the show. You can see her premier showing in the video at the bottom of this post.

We ate dinner at the Brown Derby which is a replica of the real one in Hollywood. It was a very nice meal. A 5 oz. glass of wine was $14. That's how nice it was. It was great having a 3.5 star meal at Disney.

We scheduled 10 days at Disney World to give us time to relax a bit. We'd worked very had to get William swimming well enough that he could do water slides, so it seemed natural that William and I should hit the water parks. There are two in Disney World: Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon. All these pictures are from Blizzard Beach since my real camera is not water resistant. I bought a disposable water proof camera for the last of the three days we did water parks to record the great time we had there.

Here, William and I are floating along the Lazy River that goes around the park. Blizzard Beach's theme is that they had a freak snow storm in Florida and they decided to make a ski area. But the snow quickly started melting making a water park heaven. Once again, Disney always does it better...

William showing his approval of the water slides.

Self portrait of William and me heading down a water slide on a double tube.

William showing awesome coordination getting across the "icebergs." He was one of the few that made it across without falling in. He may be a future contestant on "Wipe Out"...

"Oh yeah!, this is a water proof camera, we should take a picture under water..."

The Summit Plummet: Before we went to the first water park, William poured over the maps of both water parks to decide which to go to first. This slide was the reason he wanted to do Blizzard Beach first. It is shaped like a ski jump, but rather than going over the jump, you just keep going straight down. It is the highest water slide in America. It is 120 feet high and you can reach up to 55 miles per hour on the way down. I was not considering doing this slide, but it was William's primary goal. He was tall enough and I didn't see anyone die on it while I was watching, so after we'd warmed up on some of the smaller slides we headed up to the top. William normally insists on wearing swim goggles when swimming since he doesn't like water in his eyes. I'd almost call it a crutch. I'd warned him that they may not allow goggles on this slide (perhaps hoping he'd decide not to try...) When we got up to the top, he saw the attendant tell a rider to remove his sunglasses before riding. William ripped off his goggles and handed them to me to carry in my pocket. When it was his turn, he stepped into the starting area, crossed his arms and legs as required, and set off without a second thought. I tentatively peered over the edge to see him crawling out unharmed. Then, there I was at the top of the slide with intense peer pressure to do the slide too. I'm not sure I did it as confidently as William, but I headed down the slide. It was quite a rush. We considered it our major accomplishment for the day!

Back to EPCOT to hit all the attractions. Test Drive Track was pretty fun, they put you through a bunch of automobile tests ending with a high speed track run.

One of the old EPCOT undersea adventure rides has been updated for Finding Nemo. I think this little guy is looking for some fish sticks... Disney food is pretty good, but it is the same Everywhere in Disney. I can understand where he might be looking for some variety... :-)

We visited EPCOT on Friday. Friday is the day we normally go out for Sushi in Japan. There is a restaurant down the street that does really good Sushi and, although not cheap, is pretty reasonable. Well, it's Friday and there is a Japan area of EPCOT, so we decided to keep true to our Friday tradition and headed over to get some Sushi. The servers were all Japanese and they acted so impressed with our limited Japanese language and mannerisms. They really got a kick out of William's bow and few Japanese words. It was quite a bit more spendy and not quite as good, but it was a lot of fun.

Animal Kingdom is an interesting turn for Disney. Most of it is a lot more natural looking than other parts and certainly animal centric. The Living Tree at the center of the park looks like just an impressive tree from afar, but once you get close, you see all the animal shapes in the bark.

We hit the Safari first since animals are typically more active in the morning. Disney magic does many things, but I doubt they have that much influence on whether an animal is doing something interesting or not.

Disney uses a lot of textured concrete in all of their parks. I think they went a little too far. . . you will notice the 'ruts' in the concrete representing ruts in a muddy road. It makes for a pretty bumpy ride, even if it helps simulate being out on safari.

Funky trees on the safari...

William still fiddling with his tooth...

These guys must have some "beefy" neck muscles to hold those racks up.

Giraffes have a hard time hiding...

Only Disney could figure out how to use a curling iron on antlers!

Flamingoes.

Both Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom have cool themed play areas. Animal Kingdom's play area was a Dinosaur Fossil Dig area.

The ground was padded and they had lots of nooks and crannies to explore as well as slides and climbing areas.

Caroline thought this bird posing with one of it's ancestors was kinda funny...

The Kali River Ride: The warning signs was pretty honest. It said, "You will get wet. You may get soaked." The designers of this ride were pretty brutal about making sure that water got into the raft and it was all a matter of which way the round boat was pointing at the time as to how wet you'd get. They took an interesting twist in the story by having illegal logging taking place on the river causing erosion and a rougher than expected ride. See the video for a few more details.

Expedition Everest was William's other favorite ride. It is a big roller coaster ride that takes you up to the top where the tracks appear to have been ripped apart by the Yeti, the tracks get switched and you then you fall backwards through the mountain where you see the shadow of the Yeti ripping up more track before you go forward on the really fast portion of the track before meeting the Yeti in person in the mountain. Once again, see the video for more detail.

Luckily, I keep my sunglasses in a metal case which I kept in one my pockets. It obviously was taking a beating on the roller coasters. The glasses, however, made it through the entire vacation unharmed. They just need to make these cases out of the same "Memory Metal" as they make the glasses out of...

Another of William's favorites: Space Mountain! This one is different than the ones in California and Tokyo. The cars are only one person wide like the Matterhorn toboggans and there are two independent rides in the mountain. I'd say this one is better than the other two.

I thought this was pretty ingenious. When they are working on a part of Disney, they put up this camouflaged scaffold covering that helps it blend in.