October 2018 D-Cot Meet 10/12-10/21/18 – day 8

Friday 10/19/18

We are now on the seconds, second Friday, second Saturday, etc. I love longer trips!

We had FP’s for Flight of Passage and intentions of riding it again late on Saturday so we decided to ride Navi River at rope drop. It’s a nice, fun ride but not something we’d wait a long time for. So we got to Animal Kingdom and let the elbows fly in the Banshee Stampede while we strolled to Navi. 99.7% of people head for FoP first so we were one of the very first few people on the ride, getting a front row of our boat. It is a visually stunning ride for sure! We enjoyed looking around at everything and the shaman can’t be beat! We were actually on and off the ride by 8:35! We strolled our way over to Africa and got there by 8:45 for Safaris. We actually had to wait a bit for it to open! We had a great first Safari, getting row 1 right behind the driver all to ourselves! We had a great driver too, at the bridge that rocks like it’s going to collapse, he played it up and “panicked” saying “that never happened before!” There were so many animals so active, probably since it was early in the day! Bongos were right up next to the truck and some decided to cross right in front of us, and you know animals always have the right of way! There were lots of close by giraffes too and the lions were awake and moving around as was a cheetah. Toward the end were ostrich in with the rhino and something spooked one of them because it ran almost into us and then right in the middle of the road and stopped and stared at the truck! It showed no interest in moving for a bit before moving on. It was a nice long safari! We then walked over to Asia where one of the gibbons looked like he had been hung out to dry on the line. Seriously, he was just hanging there like it was a clothesline and he was drying! I was able to ride Expedition Everest twice with zero wait by using the single rider line!

The new meet and greets in Dinoland were just starting up for the day. We saw Goofy come out and followed him to his spot where we were one of the first people to meet him. We had a fun interaction with trying to ring the carnival bell! We popped over and saw Daisy with a very small wait. We were really enjoying the music playing in the area too, I like this set up a lot. Chip and Dale were just going to be coming out near Daisy so we were lucky to be the first people seeing them. Oh my gosh, their dinosaur costumes are just the cutest things ever! The chipmunks are so great and we had fun with them! Scrooge McDuck was our longest wait but not too horrible. We just happened to catch him at a time he had to count his money for a minute so it took a little bit for him to come back out. We could really feel it getting warm and humid already though! We lastly met Launchpad McQuack who was a lot of fun! He had Kathy give him a kiss on his cheek while he turned my head away! This was so much fun to do all while our Dinosaur FP held our virtual place in that line! Since we were getting near the end of our window we went and rode Dinosaur with no wait, bypassing about a 25 minute standby line. We were feeling hungry after that and as much as we love Flame Tree and sitting by the water, the humidity was just oppressive that day so we opted for an early lunch in the a/c at Restaurantosaurus. It felt so good! And it had been a while since we had eaten there. I had a delicious chicken and bacon sandwich while Kathy got the first repeat meal of the trip with chicken nuggets. Not bad, we had been there an entire week and not repeated any foods! We had some good time before our FP for the 1:00 FotLK show so we decided to walk the Maharajah Jungle Trek. We were very pleasantly surprised to see all the tigers awake! It was now the middle of the day and quite hot, the high today would reach 88* and it was so humid, what do cats usually do at that time? Sleep. So we were happy to see activity. The cubs even went and played in the water while we were there! One would even jump on the other! I had a tough time leaving them, they were so fun to watch! But it was time to work our way over to Africa for FotLK. It was another great show as always! We got to choose seats in the top row with the semi-backs, that was so nice to lean up against for a bit. After a browse through the shop in Africa it was time to head to Pandora for FoP. We took the back path from Africa and we could hear the gibbons hollering from there! I can only imagine how much they must carry in the wild! I’d love to experience that! We got to see the utility suit in Pandora a bit before using our FP for FoP. I swear that ride just gets better each time! We’re seeing more details every ride. We made our way out after that and caught an AoA bus right at the stop. It was so convenient taking whichever bus was first! It sprinkled lightly as we were walking back to Pop. Not really enough to wet the ground much yet. Once back in the room we fell into bed for a nap. The heat and humidity was just physically draining.

All trip we had purposely held Friday evening as an “open” time. A time to do whatever we wanted, maybe a park, maybe not. When we were at the official meet on Saturday we had discussed with Steve and Michelle them meeting up with us at Pop and possibly enjoying a drink or two at Petals Pool Bar, and just having some nice adult time with them. Unfortunately the kids had fallen ill so those plans didn’t work out. We were sad to not be able to see them again. Well, with that not happening, we had heard that the World of Disney was opened back up after a lengthy refurb so we decided to go back to Downtown Disney Springs to check it out. After our nice nap we freshened up and left for the buses. Well we noticed the railings were wet and the exterior hallways, and then we saw puddles on the ground! Apparently it had rained quite a bit while we were sleeping! We actually slept through the only rain the entire trip! Couldn’t have timed that out better! There were people still in ponchos too. We got to Disney Springs pretty easily and went to our haunt that we like to go to with Heather and Ryan, Pizza Ponte. It was so good as always, but we definitely were missing them a lot. It’s just not the same without them, this is sort of “our place.” We headed over to World of Disney and I took a bunch of pictures and showed them to Heather. They just had one small section left behind curtains that they were apparently finishing up but all the rest was open from one end to the other. It flows from section to section really nice now! We browsed and looked around well and found some shirts that were 2 for $20 each which made them $16 each for us with the AP discount. So Steve and Michelle’s sick kids wound up costing us more money! I’m kidding! We finished up in there and stopped in the temporary store they had set up while WoD was under refurb as that was still open, then headed back for a fairly early night after a very fun, full day!

Steps: 23,063
Miles: 10.40
Wheel Spin: 5