A Morning at Animal Kingdom

Crowd-wise, it was a great morning to visit Animal Kingdom.  Weather wise, not as much.

It is already very hot and humid as we set off for our visit to Animal Kingdom.  Due to traffic in the area, we typically leave well before official park opening so stopped in Starbucks outside of Disney World property for coffee and a quick breakfast.

There is no line to get through security and no line to enter through one of many empty turnstiles.  Since we are not eligible for early entry, we head to the right.  It is about 10 minutes to official opening time but there are very few people waiting to enter the park.  We can see the rope drop area from where we are waiting for the last few minutes before the park opens.

Once we are allowed into the rest of the park we walk to Navi River which is literally a walk-on - no line at all.  I suppose this would have been a good day to wait on line for Avatar since that line was listed as 30 minutes when we entered the park and rose to around 45 when we got into the Avatar area but we skipped it.  Kilimanjaro Safari was also pretty much a walk on - I think it took us around 10 minutes to board a vehicle.  We walked through the gorilla trails and the crowds were sparse enough that we were easily able to walk right up to the glass in the family gorilla area.  One cute little guy rolled himself over and over from one side to the other - adorable!!

Since we were already getting sticky, we decided we'd do something that would allow us to cool off.  It was still a little early, so we grabbed a couple of waters and sat for 10 minutes or so in the Dawa Bar area before heading over to the first showing of The Lion King.  There was essentially no line and we were diverted into the Lion section of the theater.  By time the show started, the arena had pretty much filled up.

Although it was early for our lunch reservation at Yak & Yeti, we asked if it would be possible to be seated early and we were at our table within 10 minutes of arrival.  After sharing some pot stickers and calamari, we re-entered the park.

The clouds were already starting to build and we decided we would skip going to A Bugs Life as we wanted to beat the storms that were going to arrive.  We did make a bit of a detour as I suddenly remembered we had not yet gotten our Timon and Pumba annual pass magnets.  I hadn't seen any signs so asked someone at a Guest Services station where we needed to be.  He directed us to Chester & Hester's in Dinoland which seemed a rather out of the way spot for this but we walked over there and quickly received our magnets.  

There were now many more people in the park but the listed wait times still weren't as long as usual when we were leaving the park.  After finding our car, we made it home just about the same time the rains came.