Walt Disney World ~ Animal Kingdom and Animal Kingdom Lodge

I finally got done downloading all my pictures today. There are ALOT of them. I’m going to break up the vacation posts so that I don’t get freaked out & not blog about it at all. 🙂

We started off our holiday at Walt Disney World. We traveled with another family (Chris, Jenn, Shayla & Ronan). Dewey & I work with Chris. The kids really hit it off & it was much more fun traveling with another family. Jenn planned out itineraries for our first 3 days. It really helped us see the “must see” sights before the lines got ridiculous.

We decided to stay on property for this trip which none of us had done before. We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge in a family room.

The hotel was very nice & beautiful. We stayed in a savanna view room which gave us a wonderful view of giraffes, zebra & antelope every morning.

Our room had a queen size bed & a set of bunk beds. It worked out pretty well though the room was pretty small. Had we had Evan, I’m not sure where we would have put him….maybe in the bathroom or the closet???? Next time, I might give up the wonderful animal views & stay in a cheaper resort so that we could get two rooms or a suite. After 10 days, everyone sleeping in the same room (and snoring, complaining, etc) gets kinda old!

We decided to go to Animal Kingdom on the first day. We had breakfast at Tusker House with Donald Duck, Daisy, Goofy & Mickey. It was a great way to kick off the trip! Breakfast was yummy, the coffee was great & we got to see the characters up close and get autographs. I would definitely recommend doing this.


After breakfast we headed off to Expedition Everest, Animal Kingdom’s premier roller coaster. All the roller coaster riders (everyone but me) gave it a huge thumbs up. Dewey, Will & Nicole ended up riding it 4 times before we went home! After that we went on the raft ride & I got SOAKED. I don’t mean a little damp….I mean soaked. My pants were still wet 4 hours later! We also went on the safari. It was awesome! We saw tons of animals & got great pictures of many of them. There were even baby elephants and I really love baby elephants!

The highlight of the day was the parade. Animal Kingdom closes early (5pm) so the parade is when it is still light. Definitely a “can’t miss it” sight. After leaving the park, we headed back to the hotel for dinner & the pool.

If you want to see all the pictures from our trip (and there are alot of them) click here. I will post more of the pictures in my posts over the next few days but I can’t/won’t post all of them b/c there are just too many!