Disneyworld 2009 - Part I

August 3-11 2009

This year we went on a trip to Disneyworld in Orlando Florida. As you can see from the date, this was 3 months ago. I had a lot of stuff I was going to write, and I guess it sort of intimidated me. So instead I'm just going to do a couple of short segments from our trip.

So as you know, we've been to Disneyland about 4 or 5 times in the last 3 years. A bit much, in my opinion. But we got such a good deal on the flight to Florida, that we just couldn't pass this up.

Day One

We stayed at the Caribbean Beach Resort on the Disney property. It was one of the mid-level hotels. The room was very nice and clean....not great, but not bad either.

The weather in Orlando was very hot and humid. Around 90+ degrees during the day with thunderstorms in the afternoon. We were very lucky during this trip. We were only caught in 1 thunderstorm during the entire trip and it only lasted 20 minutes or so.

We got settled into our room in the early afternoon, so we decided to head straight out to the Magic Kingdom.

The Magic Kingdom had a couple of different things from Disneyland. The most notable was Stitch's Great Escape, a totally redesigned Fantasyland, and a much smaller entrance to It's a Small World. But for the most part, it was exactly the same.

We rode a bunch of rides at the Magic Kingdom. It wasn't crowded at all and we managed to get in Stitch and some of the rides that we really like. We then decided to head on over to Epcot.

The best ride at the entire DisneyWorld parks was here at Epcot. Mission: Space.

Mission Space was created in collaboration with former NASA advisors, astronauts and scientists, along with the Walt Disney Imagineering team. The attraction uses new technology, which makes it the first ride system to take attraction visitors straight up in a simulated flight experience.

This was the best virtual ride ever. It really felt like you were going straight up during the launch. It was totally awesome.

We only rode this ride once, though. Some of us enjoyed it a bit less than the rest of us.

The one cool/fun thing about our ride was that it has a little bit of interaction built into it. During the simulated flight, each person has to fulfill their "mission assignment". Basically you need to press a set of buttons at the appropriate time during the flight. Michelle, sick as she was, was a true astronaut, pressing her buttons at the right time, allowing us to get to Mars safely.