Epcot Flower & Garden 2017, first visit

We tried to “beat the rush” and visited Epcot today rather than this weekend, with this years Flower & Garden festival just started:

 

There’s a lot of Butterfly theming this year:

Including some “chalk art” on the ground which had people standing / posing on it for photographs. Amazing to look at the side image and the “proper” front image – no doubt those people would seem to be flying!

 

It’s getting harder every year to tell the difference between the Flower & Garden Festival, and the Food & Wine event – there were food / drink stalls all around World Showcase, and long queues at a few of them.

Our First Disney, twenty years ago

Twenty years ago (!) we’d arrived in USA, and just completed our purchase of our first USA home; almost immediately we left and headed south to Walt Disney World (little did we know that we’d eventually live nearby!)

Here are pictures from that trip – all this of course was astonishing for us that, growing up, only knew that Disney was some wonderful place that was so far away, we’d never go there …

 

Safari plans

Living near to Walt Disney World we can visit Animal Kingdom and ride their Kilimanjaro Safari ride when we wish – but of course it’s not like a real Africa Safari. Margaret has always wanted to go to Africa and do a real safari, and we’ve now made plans to do exactly that, later this year!

Meanwhile, we headed to Animal Kingdom today to do “safari practice”, giving me a chance to check out my new camera on hard to photograph distant animals, while riding a bumpy vehicle! Here’s the results (the lion was REALLY HARD to get – I was sitting on the wrong side of the vehicle, too):


We also posed in our safari hats, and met Mickey & Minnie in their “matching” hats: