Orlando Magic

My mom and I took a trip down to Orlando last Wednesday to play some golf and visit Disney World. The two of us visited about 10 years ago, so it was great to make a return trip with my mom! We managed to plan our flights from Boston and Hartford, so we'd arrive early Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, we sat by the pool for a bit and took some bikes around some trails that ran throughout our hotel's property and that evening we headed off to the Magic Kingdom.

We were the only 2 people over 4 ft waiting to have our photo taken with Goofy

Thursday morning we woke up bright and early to play some golf, and later in the afternoon we headed over to EPCOT. EPCOT is my favorite Disney theme park, and we ended up spending about 8 hours exploring Future World and World Showcase. There was no line for Spaceship Earth (really no lines in any of the parks), so we hopped on that ride first.

There have been a lot of changes to this ride since I was last on it; most notably, Walter Cronkite has been replaced by Dame Judi Dench as the narrator. I missed Walter Cronkite, but otherwise the ride was great. They take your picture at the beginning of the ride, only to insert your photos in a short cartoon that's played on the screen in your cart at the end of the ride.

The future looks like a scene from the Jetson's

Friday morning we headed over to Animal Kingdom. I had never been there before, and really enjoyed all the attractions. Aside from Expedition Everest, my favorite activity was the Kilimanjaro Safari tour.

We saw baby elephants

I thought this rhino was going to hop in the car with us...

That evening we went to dinner in Downtown Disney and browsed in the shops afterwards. LEGO's were my favorite toy growing up and there's a store dedicated to all things LEGO there.

A history of LEGO people since the beginning. This was really awesome & I wanted to play with all of them.

Over the next 2 days, we played golf a couple more times and made a return visit to EPCOT. On our final golf outing on Sunday, we learned that Tiger Woods shoots some commercials for Nike on a short par 3 that features an island green.

Hopefully Tiger didn't lose as many balls here as we did...

We had a great trip, and it was so much fun to spend time with my mom and get out of the city for a few days!