Disney World, Day 3, February 6th – Epcot

We’re up bright and early again, this time arriving at the bus stop about 8:15 after a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese (thanks Wegoshop!) and that stuff Disney likes to pass off as coffee.

Although I miss the interaction with Mickey and pals at the opening ceremony, entering the park and simply strolling through to Soarin’ is really nice.

After grabbing FP’s for Soarin’ we wander around a bit – I know this is very anti-planner, but I have a hubby with Motion Sickness who is able to ride only 2 rides in Future World (Living with the Land and Spaceship Earth) so our mornings are sometimes strange. If I’m really jonesing for some thrills, I’ll do Mission Space Orange, Test Track, or Soarin, but usually I like to spend a few hours with Mike before leaving him to his park bench nap sessions.

So, we head to Captain Eo. Yea. Really. We are the only two people in the theater until another couple sneaks in at the last second. Was it worth bringing back? Snore. Oh well, at least we can now cross it off our list of things we need to see once.

The bear appreciated his own 3-D glasses. We usually make him watch without.

Every year we visit DW, and every year I find myself taking fewer and fewer photos of Epcot. I mean, there’s only so many angles you can shoot from to get a different perspective of a giant golf ball and a monorail, right? So, today I decided to become a duck photographer. That’s right. Ducks.

Even some baby ducks. Oh, come on, you know you’d say awwwwww if you saw them walking down the sidewalk.

This is my “where’s Waldo” duck photo. Find the two ducks. Okay, I admit, not very difficult.

This one is tougher, what the heck is growing from this tree? Pickles?

We head in to World Showcase and the Norway pavilion around noon, since Mike has this Lefse addiction he really should get help for. We check out clothing in Italy (they have some cool Ducati shirts), some of which seems to be poking fun at America’s need to put warning labels and instructions on everything:

We have a fun time wandering around, and I try my hand at the dancing waters bowl in China:

Which I can usually do with no trouble whatsoever, but this time I’m hit and miss – don’t know if it’s the new location or just my hands are more wrinkly that last year or what – anyway, I can only get a nice hum and a few little fountains towards the edges. Later in the week, I can’t even get that much out of it. Grrr.

“Give me some candy, I’ll tell you the secret of the dancing water bowl”

We watch the new (to us) acrobats at the China Pavilion, and agree they’re much better than the kids they had here before. The gal with the table is pretty amazing.

I don’t know why, but their outfits really bother me – the tights fit like “looses” and make the women look like they’ve got elephant ankles.

Heading back to the room about 5pm, we grab some dinner (Progresso soup, cottage cheese, yep we live high on the hog during vacation), then hop a bus back to Epcot for Illuminations which we watch in front of the Canadian Pavilion. I have yet to figure our favorite spot for this show – all of them seem just okay, and I keep thinking there’s some holy grail of viewpoints that I’m missing out on??

Cool totem action at the Canadian Pavilion.

Our return trip included some bad bus karma – two women using scooters had to be loaded first, and one of them just could not grasp the concept of controlling her vehicle, seeming more intent on chatting with the bus driver than with getting in position so the rest of us could load. In the meantime, another bus arrived so we hopped that one – unfortunately the driver must have been in some sort of competition to be the “World’s Slowest Driver”. We were going 25 mph on World Drive (45mph speed limit), and she was slowing down for green lights so she’d miss them. It was insane.Arriving back at Pop, the first bus (with the two scooters) was parked and unloading, and we expected our bus driver to use the extra space that other drivers have used when their regular spot is filled, only to find that, for some reason only known to herself, she would rather pull up behind the first bus and WAIT until they had unloaded before slowly pulling to a stop and letting us OUT. Gah.This actually is just the beginning of our bad bus karma for the week – we also had an evening when 5 Epcot buses arrived at Pop without a single bus for MK. Really. I guess this is what I get for saying I really like the Disney bus service and rarely have problems!

Total purchases today, $2.70 for Lefse.