Florida day 8: Epcot

For the first time since we arrived, the weather today was absolutely perfect. Not only did it not rain at all, but you didn't open the front door into a soup of humid air. Nor did I reach the bus stop already soaked in sweat. In fact, it was what we'd call a pleasant summer's day in the UK. There was even a light breeze to keep the air moving. More of this sort of thing please!

After a long lie-in (didn't wake up til 10am, much to Tom's obvious annoyance!) we headed over to Epcot for a more leisurely look around the park, particularly in the areas we hadn't previously done.

Due to it being a Saturday, and the Food & Wine festival being in full swing, the park felt a lot busier than when we visited last week. However, the crowds seemed concentrated around the World Showcase, and Future World was pretty quiet, other than a bit of a queue on Spaceship Earth (because it's the first thing you see as you walk through the gates) and on Soarin' (because there always is).

We began in The Sea pavilion, where we went on the Nemo ride, which was a vaguely pleasant omnimover type ride with Finding Nemo animations and a few windows into the giant aquariums. From there we went across to Turtle Talk with Crush, which was a similar idea to the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor we did in the Magic Kingdom on Thursday, only very much child-oriented. Once we'd done both of those we had a nice time watching the sharks, rays, turtles and manatees through the viewing windows.

Over to The Land pavilion where we grabbed lunch (a giant pork chop with cheesy mash and a caramel apple crunch for me) and popped into the Imagination pavilion to do Journey Into Imagination (with Eric Idle) and then the ultra-retro Captain Eo, featuring Michael Jackson!

It was then time for our first FastPass of the day, for Test Track, which otherwise had a queue time of about an hour. The instruction video lies when it tells you you can draw any shape you want - I drew a wedge shape and it bumped it into a round bulbous shape instead! Either way, we fiddled around with the selections and got into the vehicle to try it out. It's a good fun ride, but I'm not sure I'd want to queue an hour for it!

Straight after that we had a FastPass for Mission: SPACE, which is a sort of simulator-cum-centrifuge. You can pick whether to take the tame (green) or extreme (orange) version - of course we picked orange. You're each assigned a role on the mission: engineer, pilot, navigator and something else I forgot. I was the navigator, Tom was the pilot. At assigned moments during the ride you're told to press certain buttons, which can be easier said than done when you're spinning so much that you're pinned to the back of your seat!

Our next stop was Ellen's Energy Adventure. This was a very strange "ride" indeed. First you enter a pre-show area for a short video, after which the ride attendant warns you that the main show takes 37 minutes and you can't get off once it's started. This warning is repeated multiple times (evidently they've had some pretty stupid people on) as you take your seat in some massive wide "vehicles" - initially set out in three columns of two vehicles each. The whole floor is a turntable, which allows it to pivot you towards large video screens, and eventually the vehicles drive around into different parts of the building. It's quite odd (and rather slow), and the storyline is pretty America-specific in its references (Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Jeopardy make appearances). It's also a bit primary school science lesson in its level, but I think kids would find it rather boring, to be honest.

In another pavilion, there was part of the Food & Wine festival, with some sparsely-attended cooking demonstrations. However, what was interesting was the chocolate shop where different resort hotels had provided chocolate versions of Disney characters/attractions (see photos below).

We'd pretty much exhausted Future World by now, so headed over to the World Showcase to our third FastPass attraction. It was a good thing we'd reserved this one, as the main queue line was at 75 minutes. This is because tomorrow is the last day of operation for the ride (in its current state at least) so the locals and aficionados were out in force to give it a good send-off. Post-ride, the Norway film was showing in all its retro glory, so we stayed to watch it as well.

In the adjacent Mexico pavilion, what's usually a very quiet no-queue ride, the Gran Fiesta Tour, had suddenly sprouted a longish queue. We did it anyway as we weren't in a hurry and it was moving decently fast. The ride itself was another nondescript boat ride featuring the Three Caballeros (whoever they were - two birds and Donald Duck, if the video was anything to go by!) An even bigger queue, however, was for the Tequila stall!

Back in Future World we visited the Sum of all Thrills, which was a more high-tech version of the "design your own rollercoaster" attraction we did last night at Disney Quest. From a similar concept (select pre-defined elements, then enter a simulator to experience the result) you've a more sophisticated ride system of a robot arm, as opposed to the "spinning barrel" design of the older Disney Quest version.

Our dinner reservation wasn't til 8pm so we took a leisurely stroll anticlockwise around the World Showcase, looking in the various shops and laughing at the price tags in the UK pavilion ($8.95 for a packet of Tunnock's Wafers?!) We also watched a circlevision film about Canada, featuring a standup comedian neither of us had ever heard of, and got a photo or two of us in front of the lagoon, with Spaceship Earth (the big golfball thing) in the background.

Dinner was at the Biergarten in the German pavilion. An all-you-can-eat buffet, you're sat on tables with other people - to one side a nice American extended family - grandmother from Nevada, her daughter from San Francisco, and two others we didn't get to chat to. The grandmother was rather chatty and thrilled to find out we were from London, though when I expressed my liking of San Francisco she agreed and voted it her second favourite place. On the other side were a local couple from Florida. The waiter was German and rather cute. I was given Diet Coke in a beer mug, which amused me. Tom had 4 small glasses of beer all at once (there's a word for it but I've forgotten it). I went to the buffet, ignored the salad counter and filled the plate with sausages, schnitzel, potato, and beef roulade. Figuring that was enough, when I'd finished I filled another plate with one of everything from the dessert counter - strudel, bavarian cheesecake, cookies, black forest gateau, melon, berry coulis, and a pear sponge. All of which were delicious - if I know one thing, it's pudding!

Walking the food off around the rest of the World Showcase, we got as far as China before deciding to head back and find a decent viewing spot for IllumiNations. We chose the frontage of the Italian pavilion, where we had a decent view over the lagoon of all the boats. The fireworks went off from quite nearby so we had an excellent position for the show. Oddly, someone had timed IllumiNations for the same time as Wishes over at the Magic Kingdom, which from where we stood was in the background. Thus, as our show was going on, there were the occasional bangs and flashes from the other firework show in the distance!

The park closed immediately after IllumiNations had finished, so along with everybody else we made our way back out of the park. On reaching the bus station the queue for our resort bus was already rather long, and the bus that was there filled up pretty rapidly, so much so that by the time it was full there were still nearly a dozen people in front of us. Like a well-oiled machine (no pun intended) Disney had thought of this, and 2 minutes later another bus pulled up ready to drive us back to our resort in comfort!

Tomorrow: Hollywood Studios for the first time. Exciting, eh?