Disney World - Day 4

Animal Kingdom day. 


Before we left for the trip...when we were planning our dining, I asked everyone where they wanted to eat.  Taylor wanted to eat at Cinderella's Castle, Michael thought 50s Prime Time Cafe sounded good, I wanted to eat at 1900 Park Fare and Zachary asked for Donald's Safari Breakfast at Animal Kingdom.  So, we were up and off to the Animal Kingdom extra early to eat breakfast at Donald's before the park opened.  

We headed to Tusker House for our breakfast.  Donald's breakfast is one of my favorite buffet breakfasts.  I could stay there all day just to drink the Jungle Juice...YUM!  We met Donald outside and then went in to be seated and ate breakfast and waited for Mickey, Daisy and Goofy to come see us.  Unfortunately, the photo of the kids with Goofy didn't turn out very well.  My camera was messing up again and without the flash, they were really blurry.

 

After breakfast, we went to the Safari and got our Fast Passes.  To pass the time, we decided to go through the Pangani Forest Trail.  It was a good morning to see the animals...it was a little cool and they were all out and about (both at Pangani and on the Safari).  We came up to this cute Hippo swimming around in his pool.  He was coming right up to the glass, so we got a really good look at him...to be honest, we got to know him better than I think any of us wanted to.  He turned around while he was at the glass and pooped right in front of our faces.  It was the most disgusting thing and probably something none of us will forget.  Then, like hippos do, he started swishing his tail.  So much for being cute!

One of the next areas we came to was the Gorilla habitat.  This guy (who is 30-years old...I asked), was just sitting on the grass happily eating the leaves from his stick.  We stood and looked at him.  He seemed fine.  Then, the next thing we knew he was charging down the hill straight to the glass in front of us. 

The picture above shows him when he started to get up.  I didn't get any pictures of what happened next because I was a little startled...everyone was at what he did.  He ran to the glass and basically chest butted it and then started pounding on it with his fists.  The man who works in this part of the trail, said that he hadn't ever seen the gorilla do that and didn't know what had happened that would have made him show this sign of aggression.  No one was waiving at him...which the man said is a sign of aggression to gorillas.  Not sure what he got upset about, but it scared all of us for a second.  But, I did get one of my favorite pictures of the trip and definitely my favorite picture of this day.  I love that all 3 of them are looking at the camera. 

So, after seeing the hippo go to the bathroom and the gorilla tried to charge at us, we decided to go ahead and go back to the safari area. 

The animals were all out...I have a lot of photos of antelope, giraffes, alligators, elephants and more.  But, the white rhinos were the next set of animals that did something a little unexpected.  The jeep stopped so we could all look at them walking down the trail.  The next thing we knew, they picked up the pace and started coming towards the jeep.  The driving told all of us that we were going to go on now because they had been known to ram the side of the jeeps.  Of course, if this would have happened, it would have been on my side of the jeep. 

 

We were done with the Safari and the kids wanted to stop and beat the drums. 

We decided to head over to Dinoland and on the way, we ran into Flick from "Bugs Life."  He loved Taylor's small ponytail and mimed to us that he thought it was her antennae.  It's so funny the way some of the characters communicate when they can't talk.

We made it to Dinoland and rode a few rides and played in the Bone Yard.

Micheal and Zachary on the dino ride that is like Dumbo.

Taylor and me on the same ride.

Zachary wanted to ride Dinosaur, so we all walked that way...trying to convince Taylor to ride it too, but she wouldn't. 

So, her and I made our way to the Bone Yard and she climbed around the play area and slid down all the slides.

We headed back to the Beach Club early in the afternoon so that we could swim in the pool.  The Beach Club has a really awesome sand-bottom pool and a mini water park that is shared between the Beach and Yacht Club.  


After swimming, we then headed to Downtown Disney for dinner and a little shopping.  Later, we went to Epcot to watch Illuminations.  
When we came home at one point, we found this cute little elephant that our room service person had left for us!