Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Day 4: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot!)

Wednesday September 14th was our 4th day, and last park to visit: Epcot! We were pretty excited for this because it just looked really neat. There are 2 parts of Epcot, Future World and the World Showcase. Most rides are in Future World, but there are all kids of good foods and shopping and videos and neat buildings in the World Showcase. 
The 11 parts of the World Showcase are: Mexico (where there is a ride), Norway (also a ride), China, Germany, Italy, American Experience, Japan, Morocco, France, UK, Canada. (I was singing Oh Canada a lot...) Lots of people warned me that World Showcase is perhaps more geared to adults and older kids. We thought our kids would love it. Especially since there is a fun little interactive way to experience it-through Kim Possible adventures through the different places. We chose to do Kim Possible missions. The first one we did was in the UK. For that one they gave us 2 transmitters and told us that we would do 2 different missions but end up in the same place. We decided to try out a boys versus girls game and see who followed the clues faster and got to the end first.

Not to brag, but we ladies won...in their defense though, Kindle and Solace shared well but Armour and Ender each wanted to hold and fight over the transmitter instead of work together. Also, the boys had to push a stroller through the stores and tight streets (Everest IS a boy after all!!)

After that first mission in the UK ares, we did 2 more together as a family-in France and in China. It was a lot of fun! A definite highlight of Epcot for our family!

We also spent time on some of the ride in the Future World section. I will write more about what we did and how we liked it in a later post. For now, below are some of the pictures I took in Epcot.
At the end of our first Kim Possible adventure, when the boys FINALLY arrived (he he), Winnie the Pooh and Tigger saw us and came over to get some pictures. It was SWEET!!! They had no line and just saw us and came to us! LOVE that! (Hate waiting in lines to see characters-I liked the good old days when you saw them and ran over and there were NO lines-just a crowd! Much more my style!) Here are a few pics of that (Note in one of them you can see a "cell phone" on the right side-that is actually one of the Kim Possible transmitters!




Here are a few pics from our Kim Possible adventure around China:






Here is Everest FINALLY out of the stroller...for a minute...

We saw a REAL lizard-no animatronics here baby!

And Everest, back in his seat. (poor guy). I had to include the Kindle pic-note how HUGE his eye is-he's like "Oh no, here she comes..."


But don't worry too much about Everest, He was pretty happy when he met Sleeping Beauty (excuse me...Princess Aurora). She was smitten by him. (Watch out Prince Philip):

Oh and in spite of my dislike of lines to see characters, Epcot has a "Character Spot" attraction which is just a line to see the main Disney characters (Mickey et al). It was the only Epcot attraction ALL Johnson kids wanted to make SURE we did before we left Epcot, so we did it at the end of the night:
















We did get some great pictures out of it, so that was nice! And the kiddos got their books signed a lot (did I mention I made them all books for our adventure? I did see:

Here is a close up of Solace's:

(So, we avoided buying autograph books for $12 by making them special unique books before we left-sweet right?!)


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Day 3: Downtown Disney: Characters, Legos and Crowds, Oh My!

After my expensive birthday dinner we decided to go check out Downtown Disney...we went to the biggest character store where we let the kids all try on their favorite Disney ears/hats (non of which we bought BTW...yeah, we went to WDW and did not buy the ears-they were from $15-$30 each PULS like $3-$8 to write their names on them...we will have to do that another time when I am not is price shock I guess).








We stopped to take a picture in front of the T Rex restaurant (which we did not eat in):

AND most of our time was spent hanging out making Lego cars at the Lego store! Here are a few pictures and a video of Armour's Lego car.












The boys (yes I am including Wes in that) were particularly enthralled by the Lego's and so we spent a long time there...long time...



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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Day 3: Beckee's Birthday dinner at Benihana

I love Benihana. It is my favorite place to eat, but seriously, this must be the most expensive Benihana in existance...seriously! But, cost aside, we did have a great time and it was exactly the birthday dinner I wanted, so it was still a success overall. We got LOTS of pics, so enjoy:














Lots of expensive fun here!! :)

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