Epcot

In case you haven’t already figured it out, Dave and I vacation with a purpose.  Our vacations are more exhausting than our real life.  We wake up incredibly early and go to bed extremely late.  We drink copious amounts of caffeine.   We want the most bang for our buck.

Dave:  With the amount of money we are paying for this vacation, I want to experience everything!  I want to be there when the park opens and I want to shut it down.  Every day and every night! Imagine Disneyworld was a wet towel.  By day 5 I want to have already have wrung it dry and then be sucking on the ends.  I want no penny wasted!  Now let’s go have fun!

We spent more time deciding on the order we’d visit the parks than any other part of the planning stages.  We chose to visit Epcot first because it wasn’t open late and we needed to ease into a vacation of amusement parks.  Also, it doesn’t have much to boast in the way of rides, so we figured the vacation could only go up from there.

Really, I’ve lost faith in people taking pictures.  I think from now on I’m going to start carrying around a tripod with me.  This is the best picture that we have in front of the epcot sphere.  Why?  because every time (5 times) we asked someone to take a picture with us and the ball they either cropped us out or cut off the ball. We tried lots of people.  Old people, young people, middle-aged people, girls, boys, teens.   It wasn’t like we threw our camera at an unsuspecting bystander and yelled cheese either!  This was after carefully finding a decent distance away, setting up the camera, explaining our purpose “Can you please take our picture with the giant silver sphere?”.   Alas, this was the best.  Christmas card material it is not.

Our first stop was the giant sphere where we visited Gutenberg and Steve Jobs.  Then we were off to Nemo.  After the Nemo ride we meandered around the aquarium.  We took pictures with a shark.

and then we lost Jacob.   There was a line to get into the shark, a line to get out of the shark.  We met the kids after the shark and looked at all of the shark exhibits.  We weren’t looking long when I noticed that Jacob wasn’t with us.  We frantically started calling for him.  He normally isn’t my wanderer so his disappearance was even more frightening for me.  I’m not going to pretend that I wasn’t close to tears.  He wasn’t in the immediate vicinity.  He was wandering around the large lobby area, crying.  Crying really isn’t an adequate adjective.  He was sobbing, like he’d just lost his entire family.  Yes, we lost two kids in two days.

Me:  We should buy leashes or something.

Dave:  We didn’t bring dogs with us.  We brought boys.

After this I did start insisting that if they were out of the stroller they had to be holding someones’ hand.  And Mike did not count.  That would be like the blind leading the blind.  Or the lost looking for the lost.

After lots of hugs and kisses we made our way out of the Nemo aquarium and explored the rest of the park.

The kids really enjoyed Captain EO.

Marshall:  Why does Michael Jackson talk like that?

Me:  I don’t know that’s his voice.

Marshall:  Is he a girl?

After the fun of Nemo and Captain EO we traveled into the part of Epcot that it is most well-known for.  The countries. Epcot is really for people who want to travel but don’t want to leave the United States.  You can visit the whole world in a day.  Everywhere you wanted to go, or at least every country that has a good tourist bureau is there.

And at each stop along the way, hidden in the back of a gift shop they post a native of the country.  They dress them in silly “traditional” dress and arm them with an ink stamp.   They also have a sharpie coloring station at each stamp post.  Yes, I said Sharpie coloring station.

Dave:  Coloring isn’t helping me maximize the fun of today.

It is really rather ingenious of Disney.  They force you to visit every store in the whole park in search of a stamp.  It’s on par with all of their rides ending at a gift shop.

We visited Canada where we watched a tourism video narrated by Martin Short.  He’s Canadian or don’t you know?   We walked by America because we live here.  The kids got to see miniature terracotta warriors in China, Japanese art in Japan, another movie in France.  We saw a miniature village in Germany, took a boat ride in Mexico, and explored Morocco.

Italy didn’t have anything but a fountain.

This is how the kids looked during most of the day:

Imagine these looks complete with “I’m bored. Aren’t there any more rides.  It’s hot.  I’m hungry.  My feet hurt.  Can’t we go back to the hotel.  I’m bored!”

As you can tell the kids were not huge fans of Epcot.  The most exciting part of the whole tour of the world was probably visiting Norway where there was an amazing 3 minute ride. It of course let us out into a gift shop complete with shields, swords and funny hats.  All of which Michael had to have.  As a consolation prize, we took a picture with a crazy troll.

We also took pictures with Mulan in Japan, Pooh in England and Snow White in Germany.

My favorite country was probably the outpost which represented Africa as a whole.  It was a small rolling gift cart.  I guess Africa doesn’t have much money for tourism.  Dave’s favorite was England, where he helped them heckle the Irish and their dinky beer cart.  We should have left the kids at the hotel and did a beer of the world tour.  We could have drunk our way around the globe, one $12 beer at a time.