The current stay-at-home order has the whole country on lock down for almost a month now, and I’m sure many people are reaching the point of getting stir-crazy. We’ve honestly be doing pretty well at our house; taking walks & staying active with at home workouts has helped break up the monotony of being at home. But it hasn’t stopped us from dreaming about our next vacation! I was looking back on the trips we took last year and realized that now would be a perfect time to actually do a write up on all of them. If I can’t travel now, I’ll travel vicariously through pictures of my old trips!
Lately I’ve been reflecting on the impromptu trip we took to Disney World in November of last year. Right after we got done with our job in Puerto Rico, we decided to fly to Disney World for some fun before heading home right away. We did 5 days at the parks, experiencing all of them once and returning to Animal Kingdom twice.
If you’re like me, then this quarantine has you feeling the urge to start planning your next vacation. I thought I would share some of the coolest pictures, a few high-lights, as well as low-lights, from our trip for anyone who is thinking about a Disney Vacation when all of this hullabaloo has passed.
Must-Sees (and a Must-Skip) at Animal Kingdom
Must-See: Pandora & Avatar Flight of Passage
Added to the park in 2017, the Pandora are of the park is one of the newer areas of Animal Kingdom and is, for sure, one of the coolest areas of the entire park. The land as a whole is really scenic and great for taking pictures. If you’re looking to boost your insta-clout, this is the place to do it!
It’s one of the most “transportive” areas of the park, and by that I mean it’s one of the areas that really make you feel like you’ve gone to another land. That being said, the area is really quite small. It’s well done, but small. The coolest parts of the land are in the queue for Flight of Passage, but the paths throughout the tiny land are all really well themed and immersive.
The land also comes totally alive at night. Everything glows with the “bioluminece” of Pandora, including the ground you walk on. Pictures really don’t do it justice. If you’re visiting Animal Kingdom, make sure you plan to stay after dark. The park really comes alive in a new way when the sun goes down!
While you’re visiting Pandora don’t skip Flight of Passage! The wait times for this 3D flying simulator are steep – the shortest line we waited in was about 2 and a half hours. But it is easily one of the coolest, if not the coolest, ride in the entire park.
The ride itself is pretty cool and offers decent thrills. The premise of the ride is simple: you find yourself on the back on an “Ikran” as you soar through the various landscapes of Pandora. They make great use of the motor-cycle like seats: they are pretty rad looking, they’re smooth and have really cool motion details that simulate the Ikran’s flying patterns and breathing. The screen is huge and immersive and they use scents to bring Pandora to life.
I will say, the closer to the middle you are, the better this ride is going to be. I got stuck on the end in one of my rides and it was kind of hard to get into it when you can see where the screen ends.
While the ride is cool, the queue is definitely the standout. You’ll be taken through some of the coolest parts of the Pandora landscape, through a cave, into a bio-luminescent forrest and then finally through one of the coolest parts of any line queue I’ve seen to date: the ACE Lab. The full-size “Avatar” animatronic is so cool and life-like it’s almost scary. They really killed it with the queue design. It’s almost more memorable than the ride itself.
Must Skip: Na’vi River Journey
The Na’vi River Journey is a dark ride, boat-tour, type attraction that often boasts long wait times ranging from 45 minutes to up to 2 hours. We waited about an hour an a half to get on the ride, and let me tell you: it. was. not. worth. it!
As a whole, the ride is super boring. Unlike the Flight of Passage ride, the queue is also a snooze. There is nothing inspiring while you wait. When you finally get to the ride, you’ll find it to be a sing-song attraction that is meant, probably, for families with young kids. The “bioluminescence” sometimes felt like a cheap LED light show, and the scenes are very dull until the reveal of the “Shaman” animatronic.
BUT, that animatronic is friggin’ wild. It looks so super real & it is really breath-takingly weird. It’s super impressive. That being said, waiting close to two hours to see a cool robot is not worth it in my book. If you’re short on time and you’re not a super huge Avatar fan, I say 100% don’t think twice about skipping this ride.
Must-See: Expedition Everest & Nepal
I’m a big fan of high-thrill rollercoasters, and this is probably the highest “thrill” ride you’re going to find at Disney. That being said, it’s still a very tame rollercoaster. The drop is only a mere 80 ft and the speeds only reach up to 50 MPH. The park knows their demographic and they’re definetly keeping in mind families at every turn. Because of that, a lot of the rides tend to be…well, really boring. Expedition Everest is fun, but it’s not exactly knock-you-pants off fun for thrill lovers like me.
However, Expedition Everest has a lot of great elements. At 2 minutes and 50 seconds, it’s on the longer end of coasters. That means a lot to me, especially if I’m going to be waiting at least 45 minutes to ride. The ride is memorable for the climb into the mountain, where you find the track has ended and you plummet backwards and end up face-to-face with a large Yeti.
Despite being relatively low on thrills (I’d put this one just slightly above “Big Thunder Railroad”) Expedition Everest manages to deliver a memorable experience due to the theming of the ride. Even if it’s only 8- feet, the climb to the top through the mountain gives a great view of the park and the split track at the top paired with a backwards drop makes for a really fun experience.
If you go into the ride expecting blow-your-pants off thrills, you’re going to be slightly disappointed. But if you go into it expecting a really fun ride with great theming, you will get exactly that. It’s a great ride for families with older kids and one of the few rides at Disney that thrill-seeking adults could enjoy as well.
Another highlight of this ride is the qeue. It provides lots of photo ops along the way. You’ll go through a small Nepalese shop stocked with mountain climbing gear and into a kind of “yeti museum” that has all sorts of cool memorabilia where you can learn about this illusive yeti you’re about to hunt for. Disney does a great job using the queue to tell the story on this ride, which is something I definitely appreciated.
You’ll have to journey through the Nepal-themed area to get to this ride, and if you’re like me, you’ll love every step of the way. The theming in this area really resonated with me; I found all the old artifacts and the view of the pond super soothing. If the park wasn’t so jam-packed, I could have spent all day lounging in this peaceful area!
Just like the Pandora area, this place totally comes alive at night. You 100% should make sure you schedule in some nighttime hours while you’re here. The majority of the kids go home after 5, the park dies down a bit, and it completely light up in the evening. This is when I really felt the “magic” in this park.
Must-See: Kilimanjaro Safaris
To get the real “Animal Kingdom” experience, your trip will not be complete without at least one go on the Kilimanjaro Safaris. Like every ride we experienced at Disney, the wait time was pretty long. I think we waited about 45 minutes and I saw wait-times fluctuating on the app from about 30 minutes to 1 hour. The queue on this one isn’t anything super special, but they do have monitors with facts about some of the animals on the safari, which helped the time go by a little quicker.
The nice thing about this ride is the length. It’s about 22 minutes in length, and it is extremely immersive. It legitimately feels like a real safari; I’m not exactly sure how they sectioned off the animals in a way that they don’t interact with the cars. They’re so close you can almost touch them!
Funny story, this chubby Rhino started straight running, almost charging, right after this picture was taken. Have you ever seen a rhino run in real life? It’s intense! My husband & I really enjoyed this chill exploration into the animal kingdom. They have all sorts of animals and each tour will be a different experience. This is a great ride if you want to just kick back and chill after walking around the park all day.
Overall Thoughts
All in all, we had a good time at Animal Kingdom. It was fun to walk around the park and take in all of the landscaping and the theming of each area. Out of all of the parks, I felt this one to be the most immersive with the most seamless theming from area to area. You can see from the pictures, we saw some cool stuff, had a fun time, and got a lot of pictures to show for it.
That being said, the park had a lot of negatives. After we burned out Pandora, Everest, and the Safari there really wasn’t much else to do. For two young adults, without kids, we found the park as a whole kind of…boring. After we burned out the rides, we saw some shows like “A Bugs Life” and “The Lion King”, which were pretty good. But for the huge price point, we couldn’t help but question, “Was this really worth it?”.
The answer was, unfortunately, no. After we had exhausted the areas I mentioned in this article, we were left walking around the park and taking in scenery like we could do at a zoo or at the botanical gardens back home.
Even though we won’t be rushing back to Animal Kingdom anytime soon, we made some nice memories there and enjoyed our time, for the most part. We were expecting to really feel the magic here, like we do when we enter Universal. But unfortunately, we didn’t get that feeling from Disney. Aside from a few cool attractions, Disney comes out feeling overhyped and overpriced.
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