Disney Trip-Day 3 (September 21, 2008)

Today's Destination: Animal Kingdom

Breakfast-Tusker House (AK) 8:15am
Lunch-Rainforest Cafe (AK) 12:00pm
Dinner-Kona Cafe (Polynesian) 5:00pm

Today was one of hardest days of the trip. Animal Kingdom is always such a difficult one to see in the hot and extremely humid Florida weather. I don't know why but it always feels like that park is the hottest.

We started off the day by getting there before the park opened at 9am. Our character breakfast ressies gave us a chance to get inside the park before opening so we had a bit of an advantage afterward. The food here was really good and the character interaction was fabulous. They also had that wonderful juice like 'Ohana had so that made breakfast even better in my opinion.

We did a few rides in the blazing hot sun and then decided to get out early so that we could go sit inside the wonderfully air conditioned Rainforest Cafe. We weren't really hungry and I knew that would happen when I made the ressie. We just had some cold drinks and a few appetizers while cooling down before our DVC tour.

Clayton and I were really interested in buying into the Disney Vacation Club before we left home so we decided to take a tour and ask some questions. They picked us up from AK and transported us over to the Saratoga Springs DVC Resort so that we could get more info. Our guide Paul answered alot of questions that we had and showed us sample accomodations for DVC members. Wow, we were really impressed. You wouldn't believe how nice the 1 bedroom units are. We thought that the AK Kidani Village Villas were nice but the Bay Lake Tower rooms were exactly what we wanted. BLT is being built right outside of the Contemporary Resort (you know, the one that the monorail goes right through) and would be perfect for our needs. Unfortunately, we came to the conclusion that joining the DVC would be a burden to use in the future though because we would have to pay alot of money every year for maintenance fees regardless if we went on vacation or not. We're talking 50 years of around $1000 fees each and every year on top of the $17,000 we had to pay upfront. That puts close to $70,000 in Mickey Mouse's pocket if we signed the dotted line. Yes, this could be a value if we vacationed multiple times a year but we don't. We were sad to not do it but we know that we will be staying DVC in the future by renting a member's points from them. That allows us to stay where we want without the lifetime obligation of paying hefty fees. I guess we can have our cake and eat it too. :)

For dinner, we returned to our resort for Kona Cafe. It was so good last year and this year was great too. I really liked the fact that I could order sushi this time (they didn't have that option last year). Emerson slept straight through dinner as I held him. He was pretty much pooped out and I can't blame him. It was hard to hold him as I ate but I cherished it at the same time because I miss having a little baby boy. They grow up so fast.