Day 4
This is Day 4, and there are 4 parks at Disney World, so this was the final park. I will admit that I did not have the highest expectations for this park, but I may have been wrong. This park had an interesting design, just like the previous park, Animal Kingdom. But for this park, instead of putting an island in the dead center of the park, they just put a massive lake there. The perfectly circular lake did allow a amazing fireworks show, but it also made walking from one side of the park to the other a hassle. They did have a boat that went across the lake, which was nice, just it was quite inconvenient to go all the way around the lake instead of across it. The boat was also not the fastest, so if we needed to get somewhere in the park soon, the boat was not the first option. Speaking of boats, we once again took a boat to get to the park. Once at the park we walked in a random direction until we reached Frozen Ever After in Norway. This ride was pretty cool, and this ride also marked the first Disney ride where they tried out using projectors for the faces of animatronics.
When we were exiting the ride Gavin decided to buy a penny that got pressed into the shape of one of the Frozen characters. We went to our reservation at Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind. This was for sure the best ride in the park, and it was a rollercoaster with three cool features: the first cool feature was how in Guardians of the Galaxy fashion, 80’s and 90’s music played through speakers next to your seats as the ride went on. There are apparently many different songs that play, but we only heard two: Conga (add link) and One Way Or Another (add link). There is also a playlist of all the possible songs that can play when you are on the ride. (add link) The second feature of the ride was massive screens that surrounded the coaster, which took place in a large dark room. The screens displayed what was happening in the plot of the ride, which was basically that this really really large guy used some portals to try to destroy Earth, and the Guardians had to protect it. There were also props of various things on the ride, like a Milky Way, an Earth, and a Moon. The third, and best unique feature of this ride was that the individual carts could pivots 360 degrees during the ride. This allowed the ride to turn the carts around so that riders could be shot backwards at high speeds for the start of the ride. The twisting also allowed the ride to get riders to focus on certain aspects, like the props or screens. If you want to see what this ride looked like, click this link.
After that ride we went to the Connections Cafe, and on our way we saw some statues of Disney characters made from flowers and other vegetation. These flower sculptures were made for the Disney 50th anniversary. In the cafe they had traditions teapots and cups from around the world, which I found interesting. I ordered a Frappuccino from Starbucks in the cafe. We started heading to Paris to do the Ratatouille ride, and on our way there we took a bridge over a quite large pond, and the pond had a faint, but not ideal scent. We took the boat across the lake, and walked towards Ratatouille. On our way there we stopped by a restaurant called Monsieur Paul. Then we took the Ratatouille ride, and the cool thing about that ride was that you could smell the foods on the ride, like baguette and cheese. I believe that this was the first ride that Disney implemented smell into their rides, and it worked out well. Afterwards we stopped by a theatre where they were showing a Beauty and the Beast show, but when we went to enter we changed our minds and left, because if we had decided to stay, we would have been the only ones who were watching the show, and that would have been a little awkward.
We went to Japan where we watched a different show that was outdoors. We got to see Japanese drummers on traditional Japanese drums, and it was pretty cool to see and also impressive. After that we walked through the rest of the word pavilion and we got to eat a 50th anniversary cake with real gold flakes on it. The cake was really good, but it was almost $20 American. Once the cake was finished we went to Test Track, which was one of the older rides in this park, and I got to sit in the middle of the car on the ride, which meant that I only got a lap belt. This was not my favourite ride as I thought it wasn’t that thrilling, and we got shaken around a lot, which was slightly painful. Although we did get to make our own digital cars and create an ad for them, which was fun.
Next we went back to Connections again, but this time instead of just getting Starbucks we had actual lunch. Then we went to Spaceship Earth, which was a slow, chill ride through the big dome-like structure at the entrance of the park. This was a pretty cool ride with some outdated equipment, but that didn’t take too much off of the overall experience of the ride. They also had some stuff you could do after the ride, and all of it was related to how we could do activities differently in the future. We roamed the world pavilion for a bit after this ride until it was time for Mission: Space. This ride puts riders into a capsule that spins fast enough to create 2.5 g forces pushing the rider into the back of their seat. This is not a surprisingly impressive number, as Space Mountain goes up to 3.5 g’s and rock’n rollercoaster goes all the way to 5 g’s, but Mission: Space has you under high g forces for nearly half a minute. This equates to way more effects on the body than any other Disney World ride, and this is also why this is the only ride at Disney World to have barf bags on the seats. The ride is structured like a less intense version of the astronaut training simulators, and the ride was made in collaboration with NASA. This ride takes you on a simulation of a trip from Earth to Mars, but if you take the easier version of the ride, which has no g forces, then you go on a trip to the Moon. The ride is pretty intense, and you are given a lot of warnings before boarding the ride. I would not recommend doing this right after lunch, as your lunch might just come back up. Just like the other space themed ride, Spaceship Earth, after doing the ride there are stations where you can play games themed off of space.
Now it was time for the final ride of the day, and considering that we just did a very intense ride and we all felt like throwing up, we went to the world nature building and rode Living with the Land. Living with the Land was a slow river cruise ride where we went through a series of various artificial environments with animatronic animals for the first half, and for the second half we got to see the farming systems they had for the park. We started out by looking at the fish and shrimp farming, then we moved on to the plants. There were loads of different varieties of plants, including coca beans for the chocolate that they made in the park. They also even had exotic plants, like dragonfruit. Then we moved on to the experimental farming sections, which had art made from different lettuce varieties, a system where the water from the fish tanks were also used for growing the plants. They even had a strange mechanism that allowed underground plants to be grown aboveground. Once this ride was done, we headed to find a nice spot to watch the special 4th of July 50th anniversary fireworks.
The fireworks were extremely impressive, and split into two parts: part one was mainly water and a screen inside the big semicircle in the middle of the park, but we had sadly chosen a spot where we could not see the screen that well. There was also lots of music from different Disney movies with songs in different languages. The second part had a lot of “patriotic” music and huge fireworks that shot super high up into the sky, with colours including red, white, and blue. This was the most expensive, the largest, and the brightest fireworks show I had ever been to. At the end of the fireworks, they shot one massive firework that shot at least 50 meters up into the skyline, and just as soon as it started to fall it let of a huge explosion and split into hundreds on smaller fireworks. The explosion was so high up that it took a second to hear the explosion after seeing it. The sound of the explosion sounded like a cannon being fired, and as I was thinking to myself, wow, that was loud, the smaller fireworks all simultaneously exploded again, making a sound with twice the strength of the previous explosion. And when I thought it was surely over, those thousands of tiny fireworks exploded once again, shattering my eardrums. As loud as it was, it was definitely a once in a lifetime experience, with the fireworks the colour of gold, to create the illusion of stars falling from the sky. Once the show was over, we learned that we had placed ourselves downwind from the fireworks show, which also meant that this became the most smoky fireworks show I had been to also.
To avoid the smoke, we walked back and used our reservation for Cosmic Rewind, then we browsed the Guardians of the Galaxy themed store before taking the last boat ride home.
Well, that concludes Day 4 of this vacation, and there should be a like right here to the blog post for next day of this trip. If there is no link and no media in this post, the blog posts are not yet completed, and will be completed soon.