Today was our third day at Disney. We are having such a great time! Today started with another meal at Ohana at the Polynesian. I have to say I am totally thrilled to have such a fun, delicious restaurant at our resort- it's nice to not have to go anywhere to eat! Emily enjoyed seeing all the characters again:
After breakfast we headed to the bus stop at our resort and caught the bus to Animal Kingdom.
Emily really enjoyed seeing the animals here and meeting more characters! We filled her autograph book this day and had to buy a new one!
This is the Tree Of Life in Animal Kingdom. It's 14 stories high and absolutely HUGE! I was in awe of it. It has 300 something animals carved into it and looks so neat. I took far too many pictures of it!
The first show we saw in the Animal Kingdom was the Festival of the Lion King. It was SO cool- lots of singing and dancing and acrobatics. Paul and I enjoyed it a lot (Emily said it was too loud).
We headed out after the show and met up with Thumper and Miss Bunny.
And Minnie.
And Goofy.
And Donald.
And Chip and Dale.
After meeting all those characters (they were in Greeting Areas outside the exit from the Lion King and there were hardly any lines- we waited maybe 10 minutes for some of them but most of them were "walk right up"...so great!) we went under the Tree of Life and saw a show called It's Tough to be a Bug. It was interesting but a little scary to little kids.
Then we headed over to Dinoland where Emily played on a huge playground for a while. After that, it was lunch time! We went to Yak and Yeti, where Paul tried a Kobe beef burger. It had a little bite- it was delicious! I had a baked Mahi Mahi that was incredible.
Then we continued through the park and visited with some of the animals.
Giant fruit bats- they were bigger than footballs!
Some kind of deer or antelope.
Tigers!
This one came right up to our glass.
Across the exhibit, this tiger kept standing up in the window! I wish I had been on the other side for those pictures!!
Yet another photo of the Tree of Life. I guess it was my favorite, lol!
Then we headed back to the resort so Emily could swim again. After swimming (it was totally not warm enough to do so but we did it anyway!) we cleaned ourselves up. Emily headed over to the Neverland Club, a Disney-operated daycare site at Polynesian. We were very impressed by it- they had loads of art supplies, dress up clothes, movies, games, etc. Another guest told us that they had used the Neverland Club and the lady's husband had asked if he could go inside and check it out (beyond the lobby area). The staff member explained that he could NOT go inside- apparently, any employee of Disney's who is working directly with children (like in a daycare center) has to undergo rigorous fingerprinting and background checking... so, she wouldn't be able to let the dad go in because they couldn't verify all of that for him. It made us feel very good to know they took everything so seriously there!
After dropping Emily off Paul and I boarded the monorail and headed to our destination for the night- the California Grill at Contemporary Resort. It is an amazing restaurant- on the 14th floor of the building with incredible views of the Magic Kingdom and other Disney property. Paul had bison for dinner (I did not care for it) and I had an amazing scallop dish. Then our desserts came- I had bananas with caramel and Paul had a cranberry and apple and almond cobbler. Everything was heavenly!
After dinner we walked out on the roof of the Contemporary to view the Wishes fireworks show from up above-- simply beautiful!
We picked Emmy girl up from Neverland Club around 9pm and went back to the room, where we all crashed. It had been such a fun, exciting day!
