Day 3 – Animal Kingdom & Disney Springs

Are you excited for one of the best rides at Disney?

Today, we are trying to rope drop Animal Kingdom so that we can ride the Flight of Passage ride in Pandora! Rope dropping is when you get there a half an hour to an hour before the official park opening time because usually, they will start letting people in early, and you want to be in that early crowd when they figuratively drop the rope and people can start going in.

Flight of Passage in Pandora, the Avatar land, is one of our favorite rides in all the parks. It’s kinda like Soarin’, but 10x better, and we love Soarin’ too. You sit on these motorcycle like cars, which have realistic 4D effects simulating a banchee, and fly through Pandora in 3D. The imagery is gorgeous, and you really do feel like you’re flying through this immersive land. It’s really amazing! I love it so much!

So, we got to the Animal Kingdom bus stop bright n early, but it turns that lots of other people had the same idea. Bummer! We estimated that we probably wouldn’t even get on til the second or third bus that comes by. There is no way we would make rope drop.

Time for plan B! We decided to do Lyft instead. Lucky for us, as soon as I placed the Lyft request, a car was on its way within a minute. It turns out that a driver had just dropped off someone else and was still by the resort entrance, so he just turned around and came for us. What timing!! Off we went to Animal Kingdom!

As soon as we got there, we did a very fast walk (no running!) to the Flight of Passage ride. The line was already pretty far back, though still within the land. During peak times, the line could go way outside the land and reach 2+ hour long waits. Lucky for us, we still got there relatively early and only waited a few minutes before it started moving.

All in all, it only took us about half an hour before we got to the point where we were riding. The queue itself was a pretty long walk, but amazingly themed. That’s actually really good for this ride. The ride was amazing, as always! I couldn’t film any of it, but there are videos out on YouTube if you want to see, and don’t mind spoilers, though it’s hard to capture well since you have to wear 3D glasses. The experience is so beautiful though! Definitely try to do this ride when you go!

Afterwards, we decided to do the Safari ride before lines for that get long as well. That’s another one that could have pretty long lines during the day. Plus, they say it’s better to do it early when it’s still cooler. Otherwise, when it gets hotter in the middle of the day, the animals tend to go hiding in shade and you won’t get as many good views of them. This is, of course, the quintessential ride in Animal Kingdom, and a good way to get really close up views of some animals, so definitely do this one as well.

Right near the Safari Is the theater for the Festival of the Lion King show. The show finally just reopened recently and is one of the best shows at the parks, so of course, we had to catch this. It’s another one of our favorites. If you saw it before the Covid closure, there are a few slight changes now for social distancing, but the essence of the show is still the same and the entire performance is incredible!

Wow! We got three key things done right away this morning. Lucky timing! By now, it was almost time for our early lunch reservation at the Yak & Yeti restaurant, so we made our way over to the Asia section. This is another good restaurant at this park, serving Asian inspired items. There are actually many good food places at this park.

The menu is still reduced post-Covid opening, but there are still many good choices. We ordered the wonton soup, fried potstickers, chicken salad (it had a fancier name), Korean fried chicken, and fried pineapple cream cheese wontons to share. Everything was really delicious! The Korean fried chicken was the stand out though. It was so incredibly crispy and tender. How do you even get chicken breast this moist n tender?? I need to know, so I can recreate this at home! It was like biting into a marshmallow, but you can see that it was a real chicken piece, not like processed nugget meat or something. And, even though it had a chili glazed sauce on it, it’s not really spicy if you’re afraid of that, so I definitely recommend this on your next trip. We already want to go back just for this. Yum!!

After this, my husband and son attempted to ride Everest, but unfortunately, the dreaded afternoon storm started to roll in, and they had to shut down the ride due to lightning in the area while they were still in line. So, they went off to ride Dinosaur instead.

My daughter and I had gone exploring along one of the animal trails in search of monkeys. However, they soon had to evacuate that trail as well. Luckily, we had just seen the monkey section by then. So, we just made our way towards the front of the park and took some pictures by the Tree of Life, before ducking into the nearby stores for some window shopping, while we waited for them to get done with Dinosaur.

Once we met up again, we figured that we should just head out now before the rain really got heavy, so we made our way to the bus stop for Animal Kingdom Lodge. We had a reservation at Sanaa there in a little while anyways, so we figured we would just go over there earlier and explore the lodge beforehand. Another lucky timing, because it did downpour while we were on the bus ride over there.

Sanaa is another one of our favorite restaurants. Well, really, the naan bread appetizer there is one of our favorite food items. So, really, we’re just going over there for that. Lol! It’s a really fun appetizer where you get nine different dipping sauces that are Indian or African inspired flavors, along with three different flavored naan breads. It’s fun to just sample all the different flavors with the tasty naan. The restaurant itself is pretty neat too because it’s right next to the safari that’s at the lodge, so you can ask for a window table and be able to see animals right outside as you eat!

Afterwards, we walked around the lodge a little bit. We even found zebra domes in their little market store in the lobby! If you don’t know, zebra domes are famous at Boma, the buffet restaurant at Animal Kingdom Lodge. They haven’t reopened yet, but hopefully soon, and these zebra domes have become so famous that they started selling them at some stores around the lodge. They’re little Oreo mini dome cakes, with an Oreo cookie on the bottom and a delicious chocolate coffee flavored mousse on top that’s lightly infused with Amarula liquor and glazed n drizzled with more chocolate. How can you go wrong, right?!?

Since it was still drizzling on and off, and we saw that Everest was still closed, we decided that it wasn’t worth going back to Animal Kingdom park. We decided to go to Disney Springs instead. Disney Springs is a shopping and entertainment area run by Disney, though there are many non-Disney stores there. There are always new stores and restaurants, so we like to go check it out every trip to see what’s new.

Tip: you can book any of the restaurants there on the MDE app just like you would the Disney restaurants, but since a lot of them are non-Disney restaurants, you should also check OpenTable for reservations. Sometimes, there would be availability there when there isn’t on the MDE app, and reservations open a lot sooner there than the 60-day mark on MDE for you.

There are Disney buses that go between resorts and Disney Springs, just like the ones that go to the parks, so we just hopped on the bus in front of the lodge here. We love exploring the huge World of Disney Store, Uniqlo, and a slew of other places here. It’s good for window shopping or ducking out of the rain. There are also kiosks with good poutine, Dole Whip, and all sorts of other snacks. If you need a longer rainy day activity, there’s also an AMC theater and the Splitsville bowling place here. We were too full to eat at any of the big restaurants, so we just got gelato and walked around mostly.

By early evening, we decided to head out and go to the Riviera resort. We have a dinner reservation at Topolino’s, the new restaurant at the top of the resort there. This is another new to us place that we wanted to check out, as well as to explore that resort since it just opened a year or two ago. Again, since Disney offers the buses between Disney Springs and Disney resorts, we were able to just hop on the Riviera bus from here.

Note: you don’t have to stay at the resort to go there to eat or explore it. Though sometimes, if you’re driving, the security person at the gate at each resort may require you to have a dining reservation or mobile order at a restaurant there to get in. However, if you’re taking the Disney buses, they don’t check.

The Riviera is one of Disney’s newest resorts, and is decorated in a very modern elegant French/Italian style. Topolino’s is pretty upscale, but again not very stuffy. We didn’t have to dress up, but again, just look decent – no beach wear or cutoffs – and you should be fine. They have a good character breakfast here in the mornings and an elegant dinner service in the evenings.

There’s an amazing terrace attached to the restaurant that you can go out to to get a cool view of Hollywood Studios, Epcot, and Animal Kingdom in the distance. I bet it would be cool to see all the fireworks from up here when they start up again. We got lucky with our timing again today and caught a beautiful sunset!

For dinner, we shared the house-made ricotta spread, escargot, tomato soup, rigatoni chicken-mushroom pasta, tomahawk veal chop, and pistachio mousse. All very delicious!! The veal chop was a perfectly cooked, tender steak, with a huge bone. Do your best Fred Flintstone impression! Ha!

The standout was, surprisingly, the rigatoni pasta! We saw many vloggers recommend this, so we figured we would give it a try. We weren’t going to at first, thinking it was just pasta, and we like to get some unique things that we can’t easily get elsewhere back home when we’re on trips, but we’re so glad we did! The rigatoni pasta is house-made, and oh so soft! Not even sure if that’s the right word to describe it, but it was just so delicious. You know how you can tell that pasta is fresh n handmade because it has a different, softer texture to it? It was like that. The sauce was a chicken and wild mushroom sauce with huge, tender pieces in it that were so decadent and savory. My description doesn’t even do it justice. I would come back just for this! Soooo good!

We all agreed that this is one of our new favorite places. We may not necessarily go all the time, but for a special treat every so often, this is definitely a high recommend!

Note: reservations for this place go very quickly, so if you want to eat here, definitely book this right at your 60-day mark as one of the first places you grab.

Afterwards, we explored the resort a bit more before going to the Skyliner stop for our trip back to Pop. This is one of the resorts with a Skyliner stop, which we love to take, so this is super handy. The entrance to the Skyliner has two gorgeous mosaic scenes from Tangled and Peter Pan that you have to go see, even if you’re not going to take the Skyliner.

All in all, we had a great day. We still did a lot despite the longer than usual afternoon rains. It was more chill and less parks, but that’s okay too. Great eating today! LoL!