DISNEY: DAK-Cot

This weekend was the Muddy Buddy race over at Disney's Wide World of Sports. The race was early Saturday morning, but we headed over Friday morning to hit the parks!

First up, Disney's Animal Kingdom -- here's a picture of the front parking gates and where we parked:

We were there right in time for rope drop, and it was a the start of a beautiful day.

We went to do Kilimanjaro Safaris first since the wait gets long quickly. All of the animals were out and on the move, which was energizing.

Next, we then went to ride Expedition Everest. It was Chuck's first time.
We went around again, as 'single-riders', then it was his second time. Next we headed over to Dinosaur (a.k.a. Countdown to Extinction (CTX)) to fit in a quick ride before the 11:30am showing of Finding Nemo:The Musical.
The ride was jarring, but somehow, I just have to keep going back.

We made it it to the 11:30am show of Finding Nemo: The Musical, which we both still enjoyed a lot.

After that, we grabbed some lunch at the Flaming Flame Tree BBQ and sat by the peaceful meditation pool/fountain there.

The ducks there had personality and were pretty active; and they entertained the adorable children there (so cute!).

The rack of ribs were good and filled us up along with the side of beans and the big corn muffin. Food pic:

And we realized that we weren't going to make the 1:00pm Festival of the Lion King. Instead, we decided to take our time then just head over to our next park, Epcot.

Parking pic:

By now, we're both tired and decided to just take it real easy here. First, I took him to see the latest iteration of Spaceship Earth.

He didn't have audio behind his seat but still enjoyed the little tweaks and all, and he thought that the new descent was fun. Here's our "future" video:

After that, we went to Club Cool to grab some refreshments, visited the Epcot 25th Anniversary exhibit, then rode Journey into Immigration Imagination which happened to be a common guilty pleasure there. Then we made a counter-clockwise stroll around the world: we watched Off Kilter perform at Canada, then went over to see Impressions of France, then over to Japan to grab some incense and snacks. We then finished off the World Showcase and made our way out of the park.

It was around 4:00pm, so we drove over to Disney's Wide World of Sports to pick up our race packet. Unlike the Disney Marathon, packet pick-up was held outside by the parking lot, and we could see a lot of the race start/finish already set up and ready for Saturday morning. And we were excited... tired, but excited. So we checked into our hotel on 192, and basically called it a night.

Anyways, so that was our pre-race Friday. Woo!