| Friday 21 September | |
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Day 7 – Friday 21st September 2007 – Epcot
What a park – we think we saved the best for last, or certainly the one that most surprised us with how much we all enjoyed it. Had another late night last night, our plan is to leave each morning at 8.15, ends up being 8.30-8.40 by the time we’re getting in the car. Well this morning I opened my eyes at 8.12am……eeek. Super quick shower, roused kids and we were in the car a bit after 9am, which is not too bad. EPCOT stands for ‘Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow’, they have lots of future type displays. The park is divided into 2, first half has most of the rides – our favourite was Soarin’, where you hop in what’s like a giant hang-glider and Soar over California – from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, through forests, waterfalls, coastline, ski slopes, hot air balloons, it’s awesome, we all loved that one. Other highlights were ‘Mission Space’ which is like being on a rocket launch, we all had different roles (Commander, Engineer etc) and had different buttons to push through the launch – Lauren took it very seriously! Also enjoyed ‘test track’ where you go on a car test track at high speeds, through bumps, turns, all weather conditions. The other half of the park is ‘world showcase’, with about 10 countries represented round this huge lake. So you can go to France, walk round the Eiffel tower, buy patisseries (& it should go without saying, copious quantities of expensive Disney merchandise…that’s a given everywhere). We did Mayan ruins in Mexico, saw fabulous acrobats in China, enjoyed beer & gerwurtztraminer (white wine) in Germany, saw pantomime of ‘Romeo & Edna’ in Italy……and on and on, we all just loved it. So much more to see at that park still, so looking forward to returning there. Haven’t done Canada yet, thought we’d save that to do with our very own authentic Canadians the week after next!! In a brilliant stroke of ingenuity, there are ‘Kidcot’ stations all round this park, which the girls adored. You make a mask in any of the countries, then get a little cardboard cutout in each country to colour in (they have tables and textas set up in each country), you also collect a stamp from each country. Once you have them all you get a poster (we haven’t finished yet, will complete next time). The girls had so much fun with this, they’d settle in start colouring and the rest of us would wander round looking at the exhibits. Then they just wanted to go to the next one ‘can we go to Morocco now’…. We booked in to a restaurant in Norway for lunch with the Disney princesses. We’d managed to get lots of shots with other characters, but not many princesses, and the girls were longing to see them. Even though it costs a bit for the lunch, it is SOOO much easier than queuing for hours to see characters individually, and nice to sit down and have some decent food. Although Epcot was definitely the best food park (because there’s plenty of other countries food to try – not American burgers and fries which is about the best on offer in most of the other parks). Our lunch booking was 2.50pm (all that was available!), they were late so we didn’t get in till 3.30pm, but it was great. Almost all princesses were there, got some good photos (some loaded), just missing Snow White & Jasmine. We had fish & chips from England for dinner sitting round the lake (Michael was excited to chat to a guy from Leeds who was next to him in the fish shop queue). The evening finishes with ‘Illuminations’, beautiful sound, light and firework show on the huge lake. They have a big world globe that gets lit up (you should be able to make it out in one of the photos, was very hard to capture with the camera). |