WDW07 – Sunday – Epcot

Our Walt Disney World travelogue continues (some more) …

1. Again, with the sleeping in (and my waking early).  Annoying.  Combo of humidity plus a smallish bed.
2. Headed by bus, after breakfast, to Epcot.  With the entire entrance plaza wide open and welcoming, it was again annoying to be shunted into a narrow chokepoint for the bag check.  Bad show.
3. Went and found our Legacy plaque inside the entrance (West-4-C-1-1-2, for the record) … and then decide, what the heck, and had Katherine down for a sitting for one.  We’ll find out in several weeks what the coordinates are for her, and then she’ll have something she can show her kids and grandkids someday.  Neat.
4. Two big rides at Epcot we wanted to be sure to hit — Test Track and Soarin’.  Made the executive call to hit the latter for the FastPass, and bet it correctly — there was already a 90 minute wait for Soarin’ on stand-by, and at 10:40a, the FP was for 2-3p.  Meanwhile, when we went over to Test Track, it only showed a 50 minute wait (and was more like 30).  Test Track was, as always, fun, for both Kitten and us.
5. We decided to focus more on Epcot’s Future World than we have in the past.  We hit up the Energy ride with Ellen DeGeneris and Bill Nye (moderately educational, equal parts annoying and dated), then went into Innoventions and spent a good chunk of time there.  Afterward, I ran over and FPed Test Track (for 7p), then we hopped to the Communicore (the big golf ball), which Katherine had a yen for.  It was the same boring Communicore that AT&T had run before Siemens, but it was a chance to sit down (I was finding myself getting progressively creakier over the course of the weekend as I carried Katherine on my shoulders at night … I know I used to carry around an extra 50 lbs. of my own at one point, but having it concentrated on my shoulders was either excellent exercise or a great way to get back, hip, and knee problems).
6. Back over to Innoventions West — Katherine was busy doing all the KidCot coloring bits at each station — then an amusing Fire Hazards game/exhibit. 
7. That made it time for Soarin’.  The stand-by queue was showing 120 minutes, but it didn’t seem the FP line (which took us about 20 minutes all told) was that much shorter — though it was a bit narrower, and the line monitor presumably favored the FP half of the line.  The ride was, as usual, really cool.  The screen and camera could do with a little cleaning, but it is still a marvelously immersive ride.
8. It was early afternoon by this point, and we were seriously starving.  Since we were in The Land, we went to the Sunshine Seasons food court.  Rather than the traditional “five lines, all of them selling hamburgers and fries,” there were multiple stations around the court to get entrees and sides from of different sorts (sandwiches, soups, Asian, etc.), with impulse items between them, and then a single checkout area to exit.  It makes it less convenient in that you many need to go to multiple stations if you (or your family) want different things, but it also means that the variety is greater and that not everyone is funneled into a single line.  The food quality was pretty darned good, too.  Recommended. 
9. I daresay Epcot, in general, has some of the best food at WDW, if you include the World Showcase area.
10. From the Land to The Sea, and a queue for the Finding Nemo ride/attraction.  A large, minimalistic, but effectively immersive (literally) queue, simulating a beach resort and then being underwater by the pier (Disney has the “rusting metal rails” technology down pat).  The ride itself is in the standard little pods, taking you past various video tableaux with real set pieces to give a combination of animation of 3-D texture.  It’s pretty effective, better than audioanimatronics that would have been used instead a decade ago, but the ride itself (a sort of generic search for Nemo, the story stripped down to the barest essential of the search) is a huge waste of time and space and tech.  Even the last bit — where the animations are marvelously against the backdrop of real fish in one of the large tanks — only serves to point the great materials that were (literally) watered down to no great end.
11. We wandered around The Sea a bit after that, looking in the tanks, pondering the manatee, posing with sharks, and seeing fun dolphin “demo” in the big tank.  (Margie and I had an interesting discussion on the issue of dolphin training and tricks which I’ll blog about sometime.)
12. Then we scooted back over to ride on the Imagination ride with Figment.  I wish someone would come up with something a heck of a lot better for this space and this character, because the ride itself is pretty disappointing (unless you’re 6).  The technology section at the end, including the host of digital camera stations, is also getting pretty long in the tooth (though always popular).
13. We’d been promising Katherine ice cream all day, but between meals, rides, and long lines at the ice cream stands, it hadn’t happened.  Since we were an hour and a half from dinner at this point, we had to disappoint her again.  My being grumpy didn’t help things, alas.  Instead, we wandered over to Mouse Gear to do some shopping.  Not particular fond of much in the way of this year’s line of t-shirts or coffee mugs, and I refused to spend $50 for a WDW Hawaiian shirt.  Kitten did get a Mr Potato Head out of the deal, and I did find a shirt I was willing to buy (“You say GRUMPY like it’s a BAD thing!”).  Yes, I can poke fun at myself.
14. We’d spent basically the full day (daylight hours) at the Future World side of the park, something we’d never really done before, and it’s worth doing.  There were still plenty of other rides and exhibits that we didn’t get to.  If you wanted to be thorough, you could do an entire day at Future World and devote at least a half-day to World Showcase.  We came close to that, and we might do so again next time around.
15. We headed counter-clockwise (opposite our usual direction), since we had 6:30 reservations at the Rose & Crown in England.  Not our top pick of Places to Go, but we didn’t order 180 days in advance for the Spring Break season.  We checked in at the counter, got pagers, and wandered around the England shops (well, partway, since the pager was unhappy if I went all the way back).  Katherine, who had (nearly?) finished her Future World KidCot passport/dongle-thingy, started up a KidCot mask, which was what they use over on the World Showcase side.
16. Dinner was okay — the Rose & Crown does your basic for-American-tastes (i.e., no Blood Pudding) Best of British food, which is, of course, not the world’s most exciting.  I ended up with, as usual, the Fish & Chips, and it was, in fact, very good, while still being, well, “just” fish and chips.  I solaced myself with a couple of pints of Boddington.  And a hot apple crumb crisp with ice cream for dessert. Katherine, after convincing us that she should have mac and cheese, had a chocola
    te sundae, too.  Yum.
17. After dinner, I took Margie over to France and treated her to a couple of kir royals for … um … more dessert (more Kir recipes here).  Kitten did her mask stuff there, and over in Morocco.
18. That having been done, we started heading out, for two reasons.  First, we had FPs for Test Track at 8-9.  Second, we weren’t planning on watching the Epcot fireworks, and, honestly, we’ve done the Forging Our Way Through Assembled Humanity Back To The Bus Stop After Fireworks thing.  So we rode on Test Track again (alas, the car-based sound and visual display was on the fritz, which Margie dutifully informed one of the cast members of afterward).
19. And we were back to the bus before the fireworks completed, and on our way back to the resort.