Florida 2008 Part 5

And now, the final installment of our 2008 Florida vacation.  I'm not sure how I was able to consolidate almost 500 pictures into 5 posts, but it has been done!  

Friday night Magic Kingdom was open late so I decided to leave Chad with Jordan in the room and head out on my own.  It was weird to be there by myself.  I was looking around and, seriously, no one goes to Magic Kingdom by themselves.  Oh well, I did.  I watched the fireworks and did one show.  Here is the finale of the Wishes fireworks show that they have every night.  

Saturday morning we were taking advantage of the early-in again, this time at Animal Kingdom.  Animal Kingdom is one of our favorite parks.  It's absolutely beautiful.  Again, we didn't really do so great because there aren't too many Jordan-aged-things open so early, but we did get Fast Passes for the Kilomanjaro Safari and Expedition Everest.  Usually, you can only get one Fast Pass at a time, but the machine was down and they were just handing out the Fast Passes so when we went to Everest we used our card.  Love it!  

Here is Chad with Jordan in Asia looking at monkeys...well, trying to look at monkeys, you couldn't really see them very well.  

After we got our Expedition Everest Fast Passes we made our way back to Africa to go on the Safari ride.  Luckily, it was early in the day so it wasn't soooo hot.  It was hot though.  Jordan did pretty good sitting in the truck, he wanted to walk around and stand on the seat but we were able to keep him occupied looking at all the animals. 

Chad thinks I have a tendency to forget/overlook all the stresses we had on our trip.  For example, I really believe Jordan is screaming in delight in this picture with Chad...but Chad probably remembers Jordan screaming because he was being held down and wasn't able to move around.  I'm an optimist, what can I say?

  
Here are some animals we saw on the safari:  Elephants,

flamingos, 
and an ostrich that was in the road right in front of our truck and then walked right by us!

After the safari we went to have breakfast at the Tusker House where we met Daisy, Donald, Goofy, and Mickey.  Jordan seemed to like Daisy.  

He was kind of freaked out by Goofy.  I think because he was so tall, and because of his huge whiskers!

He loved Mickey, of course!  

Here he is dancing with Donald.  This was a fun buffet and the food was great!  

After breakfast, we were off to ride Expedition Everest.  We rode this as much as we could on our last trip and it was one of our favorite rides.  This time, because we had Jordan, Chad and I took turns going on the ride.  While Chad was on the ride I did loops around the gift shop and Jordan fell asleep.  This was one of the last times Jordan cuddled with this blanket...we left it on the bus on the way back to the hotel from Animal Kingdom!  (This was "travelling" eehee so at least we still had the "real" eehee back at the hotel.)

On the way out of the park we saw Chip and Dale!  How cute are they?!?!  I LOVE getting to meet the characters and made Chad wait with us to meet them.  Jordan liked them, they tickled him and made him laugh, look at that smile!

Friday night was Chad's turn to go out!  He went to Typhoon Lagoon because it was open late.  He did pretty much everything there, including swimming with sharks and sting rays!  

Sunday...our last day at Disney!  :(  We found our way to the Polynesian resort to have breakfast with Lilo and Stitch.  I love Lilo and Stitch, they are just so cute.  The Hawaiian theme was fun.  Jordan thought Stitch was cool.  

He liked Lilo and even gave her a kiss!

Gotta love the Mouse himself!

Pluto was cool...but you can tell the whiskers kind of freaked him out again!

After breakfast, which was, again, awesome, by the way, we hopped on the monorail to go to Magic Kingdom.  This was a much nicer morning at the Magic Kingdom than the last time.  Here are Chad and Jordan on Main Street with Cinderella's castle in the background. 

And here I am in front of Cinderella's castle.  I still had my lei on!!!  

We didn't do too many rides before so we were back to ride the rides!  Here we are in line for Dumbo!!!

And here we are riding Dumbo!!!  Jordan loved it!  Our Dumbo has a blue hat so watch for us!

After Dumbo, we went to play in Ariel's grotto where Jordan got to splash around.  I waited in line to meet Ariel.  I told you, I'm a sucker for meeting the characters.  Ariel is very tiny!  She was very sweet!

Next, we rode the Peter Pan ride, which was way darker than I remembered.  Jordan did okay though.  His shirt was glowing in the dark!  We didn't even know it glowed in the dark!  After that, we decided to try It's a Small World.  Everyone said to do it but we were nervous about Jordan being able to sit still for the whole ride.  It's a pretty long ride.  It ended up being the best ride of all!!!  Jordan sat so nicely for the entire ride.  He just looked around at everything and pointed and took it all in.  Chad and I were able to really relax and enjoy the air conditioning!  We almost went on again, but decided not to push our luck!

And then, it was back to the bus stop.  We didn't do too much waiting for buses (you might have to ask Chad for his opinion on that, though).  Jordan was sleeping so we took advantage of taking our picture.  

After relaxing at the hotel for a bit, we headed out to the Boardwalk.  Chad had seen that Disney has the ESPN Club but we didn't know where to find it.  When he asked they said it was at the Boardwalk, so, of course, we had to go to the Boardwalk!  This is a neat hotel right on a lake.

We had a great view of the sunset from here!

Jordan likes to climb on things at this point in his life so he was climbing and jumping off and climbing on this bench!

Here we are getting ready to order in the ESPN Club.  It was a restaurant with TVs everywhere and lots of signed sports memorabilia.  Chad had fun shopping in the store afterwards!

And that concludes our Disney World 2008 vacation!  Here's Jordan with his Mickey Mouse ears!  We got his name embroidered on the back.  He really was a trooper and we had a great time.  I'm ready to go back any time.  It really is the best place for kids and there is always something fun to do!  Thanks, Mickey!  We miss you already!  We hope to see you real soon!