Gordo's Brain!

This is quite long, so I’m going to break it into a few pieces. :-0

November was a pretty strange month around here. The first time in more than 90 years that Toronto hasn’t had any snow. When we planned this family jaunt to Florida, we had no idea what to expect for weather here. Down there, it’s pretty unsettled this time of year, but we were hoping that we could at least have a bit of snow to gloat about. Mother Nature didn’t disappoint and gave us about 10cm the day before we left. This was the view on the morning of December 8 as we loaded into the van:

Nice, isn’t it? The problem for folks back here was another 15 or so that cam the day after we left. Two co-workers were kind enough to express their thoughts on my being in Florida while they stayed here and if I had checked my work email while I was away, this was waiting:

I’m getting ahead of myself. This was Cameron’s first flight, so he was quite excited. Phil had flown out to BC with Bridget a couple of years ago and was kind enough to give Cameron the window on the way down. First, he familiarized himself with the security information:

He was glued to the window for the first part, but three hours is a long time for a five-year-old to stay focused on much of anything. Each seat on Westjet planes has its own “entertainment centre”, so he was able to watch his shows while we cruised.

After landing, getting to the hotel was easy. We were staying on-site at a Disney resort, so we had a free bus waiting for us. Disney’s Pop Century is an incredible place. 9 buildings, 2880 rooms and the whole thing is a celebration of American pop culture. Each set of buildings are themed to a decade (50’s – 90’s) and there are all kinds of amazing bits about:

Roger’s in the 80’s area. We were in the 60’s wing: flower power all over, a flower shaped pool (the “Hippy Dippy Pool), yo-yo’s marked each building. It was great. One word of advice: if you’re staying at a Disney resort take the meal plan. It was $280 for the four of us for 8 days and worth every penny. We each had two meals and two snacks per day and the cards worked at various places throughout all of the parks, too. We wound up checking out with a bag of 9 leftover snacks. The food was very good and watching it being rung up, the meal plan costs about ¼ of what it would to pay cash.

Snow was the furthest from our minds as we were off to Disney’s Animal Kingdom Park on the first full day. There are four theme parks and two water parks in the Disney World pantheon of amusements. Animal Kingdom is something of an aberration in the zoo/animal park world: cost is almost no object when it comes to the animals. They’re extremely well taken care of and Disney had the forethought to purchase massive amounts of land when he started the whole thing up. The area that the safari drives through is quite literally big enough for all of the Magic Kingdom and the associated parking areas. The entire focus of the place is on animal conservation. A pair of white rhinos from the park (the female was born there) were reintroduced successfully to Uganda in 2006 and in 2009, they produced the first male rhino birth in the country in more than 25 years.

There are reticulated giraffes, African lions, silverback gorillas, white and black rhinos, antelopes of various types, hippos and vast number s of birds:

It was also the boys’ introduction to the world of real roller coasters. Expedition Everest is definitely not a kiddie coaster:

Cameron was definitely not a big fan. As we came tearing down that slope and into the curve, he yelled “I don’t like this!!!!” and i looked over to see his head over against the side of the car from the force of the coaster. I reached over and pulled him upright for the rest of the ride. It’s funny, but while he was not happy with it afterwards, it’s the ride that he talks about the most. Ask him about the Yeti and he’ll launch right into it.

Being our first day, we were bloody exhausted. Animal Kingdon is also the most spread out of the parks. They estimate that the average person can walk 15km per day at the Disney parks and we certainly weren’t used to that. We dropped kind of early. More in part 2.

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