Friday February 16th 2024

Today started cloudy similar to yesterday, but the sky cleared more rapidly. By late morning the sun was shining bright. The high temperature for the day was a little higher than Thursday peaking near eighty.

I took my last trip to Disney for six to eight weeks today. My plan was to start at Disney’s Animal Kingdom then hop to Magic Kingdom later in the day. The heavy crowds I found at Animal Kingdom changed my plans. There seemed to be more people there than I’ve seen before. Wait times for the rides were all long, but more indicative of the high crowds were the various animal trails. Usually it is a rather leisurely walk along the trails with only a couple of people at the animal viewing areas. Today there was a line of people on the walkways and the people stood two or three deep at the viewing areas. The bottom line is it took much longer to see the things I wanted to see. I didn’t have the energy to park hop to Magic Kingdom. The My Disney Experience App showed wait times there were even longer than Animal Kingdom.

Despite the crowds I managed to see many animals. I walked all of the animal trails and all of the main park walkways. Overall I made two loops of the park as I waited for the wait time for the Kilimanjaro Safari ride to get reasonable. Standing in a slow moving congested line for a long time is something I try to avoid. I can only play with my phone for entertain so long, before I get board. The wait time was ninety minutes for most of the afternoon. Just before the ride closed at 5:30, the wait time went down to forty minutes. It turned out to be about half an hour.

I managed to get on the ride without a long wait. The late ride time made some of the species of animals more visible, but others like the giraffes and zebras were already behind the scenes. I hoped to see the new baby elephant. Disney let her and her mother out from the behind the scenes area for the first time yesterday. I’ll have to be happy with the local media coverage. She was not out during my safari.

One of the things I did while waiting for the Safari wait times to come down was the bird show. I watched it for the first tine in a long time. I only remembered tiny parts of the show. Similar to other animal shows the hosts try to be comedians and ecology preachers at the same time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The birds were great.

A little after 6PM I called it a day. Instead of heading for Magic Kingdom, I pointed my car in the direction of my RV home. Traffic wasn’t kind to me. For the first couple of miles I spent more time stopped than moving.