Disneyworld

Disneyworld is really something that you have to see to believe. This place is gigantic! We stayed in Port Orleans, which is just one of the many resorts on the premises, and some of the parks took us a good half hour to get to by bus.

We visited four theme parks while here and I'll go through each one in turn.

Animal Kingdom
This was the first park we visited and parts of it reminded us of the San Diego Zoo. We saw a few shows here, like the Festival of the Lion King (which was fanstastic) and Pocahontas (which was clearly aimed at a three year old audience). We also went on an African Safari that not only gave us a chance to look at some animals, but it also tried to teach us about poaching. That's one thing that I have to say about Disney, all of the messages are really positive and often aim to either teach something to make us think about something. I really liked that. We only spent a few hours here before moving on.

Disney MGM
This park was one of our favourites and we even went back there the next day to do all of the things we ran out of time for. We arrived just in time for the motorcade of Disney characters up Main Street. It was actually really nice to see these characters and remember watching them as a kid. In terms of attractions, we did things like the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, Sounds Dangerous, Lights Motors Action and Muppets 3D.

On our second day at Disney MGM, we decided to have lunch at the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater. It was in our price range and we wanted something that wasn't just burgers for a chance. Well, we got a whole lot more than we were expecting. Yes, there was more than just burgers on the menu, but the entire restaurant was set up like a drive-in movie theatre. We were seated in 60s style cars that had been outfitted with tables and in front of us was a huge drive-in screen that kept playing old candy bar ads (including the one featured in the film Grease) and science fiction previews. It was so cool!

At night at Disney MGM, they do a huge fireworks show that features Sourcerer Mickey (our favourite Mickey), so we hung around for that. We got great seats, right up the front and we were ready for a great show... and it was a great show except for one thing. They create these fan shaped water things in the lake between the stage and the audience and then they project images onto these "screens". It looks fantastic, but when the wind is blowing towards the audience... yep, we got drenched! It was worth it though.

Epcot
We arrived at Epcot pretty late in the day, and it had started to rain, so we didn't really spend all that much time here. It's a fascinating idea with all the innoventions and the different representative countries. We think that they need to incorporate Australia though! We wandered around and checked stuff out, but it was odd when we went to the pavillions for the different countries because we'd see something we liked and then we turn to each to say, "Maybe we should wait until we go there."

Epcot also has a fireworks show. This one is called Illuminations and again it was really quite fantastic... and we didn't get wet! They have a huge lake in the middle of this park and half way through the fireworks, they float out this giant world globe that has all these different images from the different countries projected onto it. It was beautiful.

We did go back to Epcot the next day because two friends (Chip and Dale) were there at the same time and we wanted to catch up. So, we went to China in Epcot for lunch. It was really nice to see someone from home. We'll also be able to catch up with them in New York and Toronto.

Magic Kingdom
The final park we visited was Magic Kingdom, this is a replica of Disneyland in California so we're glad we didn't go when we were on the west coast. This was my other favourite park. We did quite a lot of rides when we were here. All pretty tame though, like Stitch's Great Escape (that used smell to get the audience in the mood), the Carousel of Progress, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mickey's Philharmagic 3D, It's a Small World, Indycar Speedway and The Haunted Mansion. Magic Kingdom is full of good, wholesome, smile generating fun. We really enjoyed it.

The fireworks show here is called Wishes and it proved to be just as good as any of the others we've seen, but now that we've pretty much done a lot of it, we're quite tired. My advice... give yourself at least a week with a park hopper ticket if you decide to return to your childhood and have some innocent fun here in Disneyworld.