Disney Trip - Day 5

Wow, two months since the last post. Work has been insane, and I've been spending a lot of my free time working on the house. Honestly, by the time I sit down I'm usually beat.

I decided to skip posting most of the pictures in-line with the post. It takes way too long, and I'm having trouble keeping up with posting new entries as it is (evidenced by the lack of posts since April). It might be because I uploaded the pictures to my other google account, and the big G seems to have trouble swapping accounts in certain applications (blogger and picasa are two I've noticed), so the whole process becomes much more onerous. I will post the links to albums once I've finished the trip notes.

Anyway, here's the skinny on day 5 of our trip to Disney (Epcot).

Epcot, for me, was kind of like Thundercats. What I remembered from going there as a kid seemed a lot more awesome than it was as an adult. There were also significantly fewer asian tourists than I remembered when I was a kid. At Epcot, that is, not on Thundercats. The Thundercats were mostly some indeterminate European ethnicity, except Panthro of course.

We actually went during a food and wine festival that is held every year at Epcot, so there was a lot of fat, drunk people staggering around. It wasn't like a scene from Bourbon Street or anything, but there was definitely a higher ratio of adults to kids than any of the other parks.
We ran into Sleeping Beauty shortly after we entered the park. She was ok, I guess.

After, I dragged everyone to the Captain Eo movie. Isobel is a huge Michael Jackson fan, and I didn't tell her that he was in the movie so she was not impressed at first. She got excited when Michael Jackson pranced across the screen and was all,"HEE HEE." I remember going to see it shortly after its release when I was a kid, so it was fun sharing that experience with the kids.
We wandered around for a while before lunch. There was a large atrium near the front of the park that had several places to eat, so I started steering the family that way. Talen was not into stopping for food, though, and started having a meltdown, so I had to convince him that we were going to get on a ride.

"This isn't a ride!" Talen yelled when we got to the front of the atrium.

"Yes it is." I replied.

"What's it called?"

"Talen's Butt."

He wasn't sure if I was serious, so he asked Lisa who confirmed that the ride was indeed called Talen's Butt. It made for a funny scene when he realized we weren't going on a ride and started yelling, "I don't want to eat in Talen's Butt!"

I can't remember the name of the place we ate, so it's going to be referred to as Talen's Butt from here on.

After lunch we hopped on a boat ride, inside Talen's Butt (getting a lot of mileage out of that joke), that was intended to educate riders about the evolution of agriculture in the United States. *I* found it interesting. The kids definitely weren't digging it. The ride went through areas that the parks used to produce food (vegetables and fish) for the restaurants in the park. They had aquaponic tanks set up to route fish waste through gravel media to grow lettuce and other leafy greens. There was a walking tour that we could sign up for after the boat ride ended, but despite whining for a half hour, the kids wouldn't let me go.

We made our way through the rest of the park. Other than the kids running into Chip and Dale and Lisa threatening to destroy some rude Mediterranean tourists, it was kind of meh. We did go on a scavenger hunt through the foreign countries, which seemed like fun until we realized the other 300 people doing the same thing were ruining the surprise by lining up at the things we were supposed to find.

I thought dinner would be exciting. I had reserved a seat in the Coral Reef, which is beneath the big aquarium at Epcot. The food was really just kind of ok, though, and the kids were grouchy, so it was not the best time. I had heard the food at Epcot was "the bomb" so it turned out to be a disappointment, but maybe we just picked the wrong restaurant. Had I known better, we might have just banked some money to eat at the food and wine festival, but hindsight...

That wrapped up our Epcot visit. We left the park after closing time, and all of the drunks had vacated leaving scattered Disney staff floating around like ghosts to clean debris of various types. Hopped on the bus back to the room and crashed into bed.