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 …
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):
Over the last few years the Downtown Disney shopping area has been massively rebuilt; for most of that time we refused to go there because it was so chaotic – early Disney activities removed many parking areas and created nothing except traffic jams! But finally now there is some finishing – there are now two multi-level parking garages, although still today the entrance we used to the new “lime” garage was poorly designed, leading us to only three of five possible levels with those three being almost full while the last two remain empty!
Still, from the top level of the garage, it’s possible now to get a good overview, including the nice landscaping near the new bus transfer station area and of all the new shopping – back view, at least! There’s loads of newly opened stores there, none of them are Disney related and none of them hold any interest for us (I can’t imagine many Disney tourists have any interest either!):
We also went up to the top floor “bar” of the new Coca Cola store, via it’s very strange multi floor ramp walk that goes around the outside of the building – another great view there, though the transparent walls make it scary!
We’ll surely be back, but I think we’ll still need to be careful to avoid busy times since the new area still needs more improvement to traffic flow …
M&I / GBMINI 