Walt Disney World: Day Two, Our First Day at Epcot

I need to back up a bit. Yesterday when I posted about Raglan Road, I forgot to mention the music. There was a group named Creel playing Irish music and they were really good. We tried to purchase a CD but their CD is not available yet.

Yesterday we spent the entire day at Epcot.

We spent the morning in the Future World section of the park. We headed straight to Test Track at the boys' request but we found Club Cool along the way and stopped there first. Club Cool is a Coca-Cola sponsored location where guests can taste, for free, sodas from around the world. For some reason I had visions of walls of different flavors of soda. Maybe that is what Club Cool used to be? Now there are only about eight sodas to sample, in total. The most notorious of these sodas is a bitter soda called "Beverly" from Italy. Beverly is notorious. Many people are tricked into tasting Beverly by friends and family. Our elder two sons were no exception. (Captain Stubborn was already in a foul mood, we had no reason to make it worse.)

In the end, Mr. Genius and Sweet But Sneaky both liked SmartWatermelon, a soda from China? Captain Stubborn liked Manzana, an apple soda from Mexico.

When we found Test Track, the stand-by line was 50 minutes long, so we grabbed Fast Passes and headed over to the Nemo attraction. At the end of the Nemo ride we walked through the small aquarium where we watched two rescued manatees eat their lunch of romaine lettuce and a couple of dolphins swimming in their tank, too. Oh, and the boys crawled inside of a shark.

Next we met our first characters of our trip. To keep up with heat, humidity and thunderstorms, Walt Disney World offers several character locations for meet and greets. At Epcot's Future World, the location has five character spots. Guests wait in one line and then meet each of the characters. Each character also has his/her own Photo Pass photographer. We present our PhotoPass card to the photographer and all of those pictures get put on our own account so that we can purchase a CD with every picture they have taken during our trip.

While I love this option, not all PhotoPass photographers are created equal. Some are photographers. They like to pose our family carefully and take lots of pictures. They will try to charm the kids to get the best smiles they can. They are wonderful. The photographer at Mickey was one such photographer. While the boys were talking to Mickey and getting his autograph, the photographer clicked away in the background, capturing several candid moments.

The photographer with Goofy had a job, not a vocation. He took, at most, one picture. A posed shot with Goofy.

Bleh.

These pictures are not pre-printed. Taking a lot of pictures does not cost the company more money. In fact, I am more likely to be satisfied with pictures like the Mickey photographer took than the lazy photographer. There would be more to choose from and more incentive for me to purchase pictures and/or CDs.

At this location we met Mickey, Pluto, Minnie, Donald and Goofy. They were all nice but Donald was the best. He has so much personality! The photographer teased him a bit, too, telling him that Mickey's better than Donald is. I'm sure that helped!

Having met up with the swanies, we quickly went on the Mission to Mars ride. The boys have been historically reluctant to ride this because, as they remind us, "People die on that ride!" Doc and Mr. Swanie went on the harsh/orange version of the ride. Mrs. Swanie and I took the children on the tame/green version. I have to say, the green version is really really tame. Really. Doc reports that his iphone said that they "only" pulled 1 1/2 to 2 Gs on the orange version.

Next we headed to the World Showcase area of Epcot and started to eat our way around the world and the swanie's left us for lunch ADRs at Marrekesh. FlatJoe, fortunately, did not complain when we made him ride in the stroller.

After our lunch of fish and chips (see yesterday's post if you missed it,) we went back to the French pavillion so that the boys could begin their Kidcot masks. Kidcot, sponsored by Sharpie, is an interactive series throughout Epcot. Each pavillion has a special table where children can get a mask. At that pavillion, a Cast Member from that country puts a special tag representing that country on the mask. They also stamp the mask's stick with a special stamp. The children can decorate their masks and tags with, you guessed it, a variety of Sharpie markers.

At the Moroccan, Japanese and Chinese pavillions, the Cast Members write the children's names in the CM's native languages. At the Chinese Pavillion they also stamped the child's animal. For example, Captain Stubborn was born in the year of the Monkey. Appropriate, no?

After collecting several stamps and tags, and our Sam Adams beer class, we headed back to Future World to use our Test Track fast passes. Everyone enjoyed that ride. In fact, CS said at the end "I enjoyed that!"

Typically, when the boys want to make a purchase I tell them "Ok, we will think about this item and if you still want it, we will come back later and buy it." The boys are pretty good at knowing when they want something badly enough that they bug me until they have it, or realizing later that the item was not as special as they originally thought. That said, we have really worked to sell CS on his Halloween costume. We really wanted CS to use this wonderful Sorcerer Mickey costume we already own. We originally bought this costume for Mr. Genius with the intention of handing it down to his siblings. It cost a decent amount of money and is a good quality costume. But no one ever re-used the costume. This may be our last year with a child small enough to wear the costume.

Last week when CS saw the light-up Sorcerer hat at Disneyland, he started to become more excited about the costume. He even purchased the Sorcerer Mickey doll on Tuesday. Well, following our ride on Test Track, he found a Sorcerer Mickey toy car in the gift shop! Can you believe it? Naturally, when CS said he wanted to buy it with his own money, I pulled out his wallet right away. Hey, it was an inexpensive car. Really. Since that time, Captain Stubborn's car has spent most of its time in his hand. He even slept with that car clutched to him.

CS is buying into Sorcerer Mickey.

We enjoyed our wonderful dinner at Biergarten and called the swanies to see where they had camped out for Illuminations. They saved seats for us near the Rose & Crown restaurant. I pulled out my tube of glowsticks from the Le Tarjay Departmente Dollar. One of the sticks cracked when I started to activate it and the glow liquid flew all over the ground and the kids. Oops. Each kid got two glow sticks (I broke open a second tube to get a 12th glow stick.) Much cheaper than official Disney glow.

Illuminations.

Well. It's a show in a lake with music, fountains, fire, fireworks and lights and a big globe that turns around in the middle of it all with various scenes projected onto the continents on the globe.

It was... interesting. The long period while the globe floated into place was just weird. And the long segment of pictures on the continents that were sort of small considering how big the lake and viewing area were, was a bit odd. It was a nice enough show but it was not as moving or entertaining as a show like Fantasmic is. It seemed a bit short, too.

After Illuminations we returned to Future World to try to take advantage of the evening's Extra Magic Hours. With Extra Magic Hours, guests staying in official Disney resorts can come into parks early or stay late. Unfortunately, there are several resorts here at Walt Disney World so EMHs can be rather crowded. The line for Test Track, during EMH, was the longest we had seen all day. It was getting pretty late for our kids so we decided to call it a day and return to our hotel.