The Animal Kingdom
Well, we did the Animal Kingdom today. My camera croaked, and my media card was corrupt so I thought I lost all of my pictures, but I was able to recover them. I may need a new camera for tomorrow.

Animal Kingdom was not as good as MGM in my opinion, but I think Mandy loved it. She's so into dinosaurs, and they had a whole dino area of the park. The only "theme" ride I did this time (other than the Safari, which was really a live ride) was Dinosaur, where you go back in time in a land rover, and ride through the rough terrain in the dark while meteors shower down and carnivorous dinos jump out to scare you. Mandy wavered off and on about wanting to do it (it was all she planned on doing before we went to DW), and ended up not doing it. That's probably best, as it was a little too intense for her.

Other than that, we checked out the animals at the park, took the wildlife safari ride, and watched the parade. The Wildlife Safari was fun and the kids liked it. A guide drove a safari vehicle around the "savanah" to view the wildlife -- Lions, Elephants, Giraffes, Cheetah, etc. -- and at one point we encountered poachers who shot at us with their machine guns, but we ended up helping to foil their plans at stealing elephant tusks and a baby elephant.

We also did an "A Bugs Life" 3-D movie, which was really more like 4-D. In addition to the 3-D screen there were animatronic characters, and special effects. An acid termite spit acid on us (and we were hit with splats of water), spiders dropped from the ceiling to scare us, you could feel bugs crawling under your seat, and a stinkbug threw a cloud of foul smelling gas into the air. It really stunk :)

For the finale, we saw the Lion King live dance / song routine, which I really didn't care for, but everyone else seemed to like it. At one point the guy on the trampoline missed his trapeze and landed on the non-bouncy part of the trampoline on his back. He looked like he was in real pain, but he continued on (with a lesser part) and someone else on the team stepped in to fill his role. It was a pretty good recovery. A bit unexciting otherwise -- nothing like the Indiana Jones show at MGM, or the Phantasmic light show.

Some of the recovered pics follow this post.
- posted by Tim Stewart @ 10:21 PM