Day 2 of our Orlando Adventure…
We woke up this morning to rain. Bummer. The front that passed through Austin 3 days ago made it to Florida. What are we gonna do? Stay in the hotel? I think not. It’s just water. Today we are headed to the Magic Kingdom and maybe Epcot for dinner later.
We decided to eat breakfast at the hotel restaurant. They had wonderful sweet potato pancakes. Very filling and not too expensive. Time to head to the park for some rides and pin trading for Dakota.
Arrived at the park around 10AM. It seems to be quite dead because of the rain. That’s a good thing. Most of their rides are inside things and the rain looks to break up in a couple hours. I’ve been looking forward riding the ExtraTERRORestrial Encounter so we headed that way first. Damnit. It’s closed for renovation. Okay, let’s hit Dakota’s favorite, Buzz Lightyear’s Space Spin. It’s a giant video game you ride through and shoot at the bad guys with laser guns. The rain broke up around noon and it turned into a nice day. We of course hit the scariest ride in all DisneyWorld, It’s a Small World. Then on to what is probably my favorite here, the Haunted Mansion. Dakota just loves looking for the ‘Hidden Mickeys’. Once we got off this we had to hit the attached gift shop. My wife was in heaven. She collects Nightmare Before Christmas stuff and the shop was packed to the gills. I think I got out for under $200. Nice thing about staying on-site is we can have the purchases delivered straight to our room and not carry them around all day.
Sadly a few rides we wanted to hit were closed. Thunder Mountain was one of the biggies. I guess when you kill off a few guests on this ride in California they shut it down to take a good look at it.
One of the things Dakota loves to do is trade pins with the ‘Cast Members’. Many of the park employees wear lanyards with pins on them. These pins are for trading with guests. All you have to do is approach them and ask to trade. You pick out one of theirs you like and give them one in return. If you are vigilant you can get ‘Cast Exclusives’ which are pins that you can’t buy. You can only get them by trading with Cast. These are more rare and sometimes quite collectable. Some Cast Members wear green lanyards. These are for trading only with kids under 12. Dakota loves trading just to trade. He’ll pick the first pin he fancies. Doesn’t matter to him that he’s giving up a collectable pin to get a cheapy. We try to discourage giving away the rare ones but the final decision is his. On this note yesterday, the day we arrived, was Mickey’s 75th B-day. they released a few limited edition pins that we picked up. We have had several of the ‘Pin Hounds’ as we call them(professional pin traders that are in it for a profit) offer to trade for them for anything the had showing. We always refused.
We left MK around 3PM to head over to Epcot for a few more rides and dinner. We ate at my favorite place in Epcot, Akershus, in Norway. They have an awesome menu served semi buffet like. Their venison stew was to die for. I think I had 3 bowls. We hit a couple more rides and then it was time for Illuminations, the big firework show. Impressive as always.
We dropped Dakota and my mother off at the hotel and my wife, sister, and I headed to Downtown for some shopping. I’m always in heaven at the Lego store. We managed to find a couple more of the limited edition pins at the pin trader store and snapped them up. Whe pin trading you are best picking a theme as there are too many to try to collect them all. My sister is doing Mickey, my wife of course is doing Nightmare stuff, and I’m trying to complete a set of ‘Safety’ related ones featuring a warthog that are Cast Member pins. I’ve managed to score 3 out of 12 in the set. I’ll keep trying.
Big day tomorrow. Got to get some sleep as it’s now almost midnight again.
Went to go upload today’s entry to the blog and the iBook kacked. Had to switch to an old school notepad and pen for my entries. Had to recreate yesterday and today’s entries for lack of ability to use the iBook. Shit.