Sunday, May 5: Cinco de Mayo!

Let’s get the boring details out of the way – Sunday began much like Saturday. Get up. Get dressed. Get breakfast at Whole Foods (today, from the hot bar. Hot bar!). Drive to Disney property. Commence fun.

Originally, my obsessive trip plan called for us to start with rope drop at the Studios, followed by an afternoon at the Magic Kingdom and evening dinner/margaritas at Epcot. If you’ve read any of my trip reports before, you can probably guess this is far from what happened.

Somewhere between Sand Lake Road and SR535, we decided to go to Animal Kingdom. Which is weird for us, because typically Animal Kingdom is a park we hit once a year on a long trip where we don’t mind sacrificing a morning. (I think that sums up our feelings on Animal Kingdom quite succinctly.)  Yet we also ended up at Animal Kingdom on our quick trip in February, making it doubly weird that we’d be back so soon and on another short trip to boot. But we went with it – if nothing else, we figured, we could pin trade with Cast Members who wouldn’t see us coming. (Let’s just say that you know you have a pin trading problem when a Magic Kingdom Cast Member – deployed to the Flower and Garden Festival – remembers pin trading with you a few weeks earlier. Yes, we have a problem.)

Something weird happened on Cinco de Mayo, though…I discovered that I actually really like Animal Kingdom. It’s a flawed park, and for some reason it’s always hotter than Hades, and if they actually build Avatarland I’m going to start flipping over tables, but in spite of all this…I had an Animal Kingdom conversion. It was weird. We went with it.

Since I wasn’t planning on visiting Animal Kingdom, I only had my 35mm prime lens with me. Not ideal, but it got the job done. I won’t give you a play-by-play of our morning at AK, because in essence we just walked around. It was fabulous. A few sights from our morning (spoiler alert – as in past trip reports, there are birds. Lots of birds.):

As on past trips, birds.

More birds.

And some bats.

And tigers. (This one was far more interesting than the real one that was passed out against a wall.)

And a pretty wall. (Not the one that featured a passed out tiger.)

More tigers. (Still more interesting than the live one.)

And some prayer flags.

Oh hai.

Oh, and more birds.

And some pretty plants. (I think I’m framing this one.)

Flora. (Flora? I should have paid more attention in bio class.)

Even the Animal Kingdom bathrooms are nice to look at.

And a flower. This one is emo. Sad flower is sad!

There’s a part of me that hates myself for spending so much money on an Annual Pass for the privilege of just walking around a park, but in keeping with this post’s theme, we’re going with it. This morning at Animal Kingdom is a case in point – sometimes, you have the most fun by not doing things.

But now it was time to do something. Next up on this three-park day was a trip to Epcot. Not for dinner and evening margaritas as originally planned, but for lunch and afternoon margaritas, as not planned. (We’re going with it!)

Up first: lunch. After a really pleasing meal there in March, I was eager to get back to Sunshine Seasons, especially since CP hadn’t yet dined there. In retrospect, I should’ve headed straight for the margaritas. Oh, wait…we did do that.

LET ME IN. (Actually, the line wasn’t that long.)

Waiting has its rewards.

And maybe it was having that passionfruit margarita on an empty stomach that soured the experience (no pun intended), but the food at Sunshine Seasons just…wasn’t very good. Greasy, bland, lukewarm…not good. And in spite of the fact that CP and I had  eaten a Mickey premium bar and a margarita (respectively) just before lunch, we for some reason decided it would be wise to split a strawberry shortcake. Not good.Maybe it was all the sugar, maybe it was the acute claustrophobia brought on by the many Latin American tour groups all returning to use their Soarin’ FastPasses at the same time…but it was a forgettable experience. Blech. NOT GOOD.

But at least we were no longer hungry, and so we soldiered on and back into the midday heat for a walk around the World Showcase.

CP kept referring to him as Swampy, which I found pretty endearing.

How long has he been up there? Didn’t notice him in March.

Pretty(tm).

It’s artistic because it’s black and white.

Luckily I only had to wait about twelve minutes for this shot.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it – this is what we did. We walked around the World Showcase. Exciting, I know. And then we left.

Adios, Epcot. (See what I did there?) It’s Cinco de Mayo!

Honestly, we were pretty exhausted – sleeping in hadn’t happened yet on either day, we were tired from a long workweek, and our iPhone pedometer app told us we had already walked about 12 miles (literally), and it was only about 3pm. I was also quite sunburned, and the official foot blister count was quickly turning over from two to three. So, speaking of 12 miles, that’s what we drove back to our offsite hotel – it was naptime.

For some reason, after napping I didn’t take a single picture the rest of the day. That doesn’t make for exciting trip reporting, so let’s just wrap this one right up – CP and I spent nearly an hour debating what to do for dinner, realizing too late that it was hunger that was prolonging our indecisiveness. Ultimately elect to grab a sandwich at Earl of Sandwich. Browse Downtown Disney stores and realize all of the merchandise is the same as last time; leave. Head to Magic Kingdom, where we might have spent as much time parking, tramming it in to the TTC, and taking the monorail (and the reverse on the way out) as we did in the park. Drive another twelve miles back to the offsite prison hotel, all the while complaining that we had made a huge mistake in staying offsite.

Up next: departure day already?