Sleep Deprivation Part 3

Day five!!! This is actually the day we went to Hurricane Harbor for their early extra hours. It's all a blur now, but I'm sure of this in retrospect. Take everything I said about that on the Something Completely Different post and put it here. Don't know what we did in the morning of the fourth day, maybe we just played in the pool at the resort??? I know we did a lot of that.

This was the last day we were going to have the rental car, I was scheduled to turn it in at noon that day. We left early enough from there that we could make it back and go out for a last meal with the rental before we were back to having to take the Disney shuttle buses. After dining and leaving the restaurant, my oldest boy starts looking around for the admission card and room key card that he'd had in a Ziploc bag in his swim trunks. He can't find it anywhere, and we head back to the restaurant, because his mom is sure he had it there. Yea, like it's still gonna be there half an hour later. Damit. Ends up being so late I know I won't get the rental back, so I call them up and tell them to add one day. Had to go to the concierge desk at the resort to get them replaced.


After that, it was off to Epcot Center!!! This was the night that it had the extra evening hours, which was a good thing, since it was mid afternoon before we made it there. My wife had been especially looking forward to this, because the guy she had sat next to on the flight out had told her that they have wines from all over the world there. I think she had pictured in her mind something like vats with coffee urn spigots on them where you can drink all you like for free or something.

At the security check going in, the security guard Dave was singing "Drift Away". When we got closer, I broke out my video camera and asked him to sing it again. Probably I'll post that at some point. Pretty amusing.

First stop was the Mission: Space ride. Outside of it, they have a very cool model of the moon, with marks everywhere something has been landed. Red for the first landing, blue for the subsequent manned landings, and white for unmanned probes. There are two different intensities to the ride, so we got our tickets fast passed to come back later that day. However, the line for the less intense version was really quite short, so the older and I rode it. It featured Gary Sinise in the video leading up to it. It was hard for me to recognize him out of the Detective Mac Taylor or Lieutenant Dan roles. Pretty cool ride, but the less intense ride wasn't very intense.

After that we went on the GM Test Track ride. These are the two thrill rides at Epcot Center. This one wasn't much of a thrill, either, but it does go pretty fast and has some nice, high banked curves.

One of the coolest things there was this soda pops of the world pavilion. They have all these different sodas on tap from several countries. Amazing what some people will drink, guess it depends on what you're used to. We attempted to go on the iconic Spaceship Earth ride (the giant golf ball), but discovered that it is closed for renovation. It has apparently had several of these in the course of it's life. Last time I saw it, it didn't have all those stars on the top of it. The structure next to it I had taken to be a crane, but it turns out it used to be a magic wand with Mickey's hand holding it.

We were making our way around the World Pavilion, where they have different countries represented in the buildings, food and attractions. The workers in the various lands are from the represented countries, I understand that they are housed by Disney and are college students. How cool would that be??? That was one of the things I had wanted to do was have some food that I had never tried before. We got to the France land and were on the search for some wine for my wife. The wine shop there had a sampler package of three different wines for $15, so I went to buy one for both of us. Hahahaha, my wife forgot to bring her ID!!! It took a little bit of doing, but finally the clerk let her have her wine.

There was a movie of the French countryside that we watched. It was pretty cool, the screen is a full 180° and we were in the front row, so it was all around us. Did you know that Walt Disney's original concept for Epcot was to have a dome over the whole place and have it air conditioned??? That would have been real nice, that was a lot of the reason we went into the theatre, to sit in the air conditioned building for a while.

Around this time, it was getting towards the time that our fast passes were in effect for the Mission: Space ride. Went back and rode the intense version, first mom and the older, then myself and the older. WOW, what a difference from the less intense one!!! You can actually feel it pulling your face back when it does the launch sequence!!! I had thought it was a standard motion simulator type thing before I had rode it, but after the second trip I figured out that it uses centrifuge effect for the G-forces. Very cool. I was back from our vacation before I found out that there have been a few deaths from this ride!!!

Starved after that, so we ended up going the other way around the World Showcase (we'd only gone about halfway around when we had to head back for the fast passes) and ended up in the China land. I've had Chinese food a lot before, but I wasn't seeing much that looked any better, and they had a real nice sit down restaurant, Nine Dragons. We got a bottle of a strange plum wine to drink with dinner. We were some of the last people to get a seat, as they were closing down for the evening. I believe that it was after the time when the park was closed to all but resort guests. After that we went to the Norway area to attempt to go on a ride called Maelstrom that is a viking boat ride. It was closed. OK, we headed back to a ride called Soaring, which is very similar to the one at California Adventure called Soaring over California. It was closed, too. I was noticing a trend. The Seas with Nemo & Friends ride was still open, so we rode that. It goes through one of the world's largest salt water aquariums, riding in a clam mobile. Nice, but not too exciting. That is the general consensus of most visitors to Epcot altogether, I think, nice, but not too exciting.