Tuesday it was only 45 degrees outside but we headed to Animal Kingdom anyway! We hoped the "winter weather" would keep the crowds down. And boy, did it! The parking lot seemed almost empty - it wasn't, of course, but compared to a normal day it was.
Going in we got a temp check, then walked through full-body scanners instead of the old "put your bag on the table so we can look inside" routine (they have scanners at Epcot, too). This is a lot faster.
Our reservation as at 9 so we weren't the first people in, but after seeing the parking lot, we decided to head right to Avatar. And we got right in! The wait was only 15 minute - I've never seen it less than 2 hours before this. And all of that 15 minutes was spent walking through the maze to get to the ride. We've done this a couple of times before with Fast-Passes (thanks to Pete and Donna, and a lucky break one evening) so going through the regular line we saw some of the scenery created to keep guests happy during the long, long wait that used to be.
This was so fun that afterwards we went right back to the entrance and did it again!
By now it felt like lunch time, but that's turned out to be hard to accomplish. Most sit-down restaurants now only accept mobil-orders. You stand right by the restaurant and place your order. That's OK except that the part of the app that takes payment wouldn't work. We tried about 10 times at one restaurant before giving up and walking towards the dinosaur area, hoping for a snack we could order in person. We didn't find that but we did overhear a hostess say that yes, the payment was a problem but it could be entered manually. We did that and got chicken salads. They looked great . . . but they weren't. We won't get those again.
At least we weren't hungry anymore. We walked back toward the safari, over a bridge. In place of the parades that used to occur, Epcot takes their princesses through a carriage ride, and Animal Kingdom takes their Characters on a boat ride.
The safari was good today. The cooler weather brought out some animals that usually hide from the heat. Two big hippos were sunning themselves on the shore. That's a lot of hippo.
And a lioness was out, sunning herself on top of the huge rocks in her area. Usually when we visit in the afternoon the lions are napping in the cooler areas out of sight.
All that napping got us thinking it was time to go home, so we did.
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