Day 4 - Christmas Eve at Epcot

I had originally planned for Wednesday to be a day to slow down a bit and just visit a few of the resorts on the Disney World property. Some of the resorts are nearly themeparks in themselves! That plan obviously got axed. So here we are at Epcot:

Bianca, Grandma Carmen, Rudy
Dominic (in stroller) Devin and Papa Gertie.
Anyone know where Donovan was?

My parents (aka Grandma and Papa Gertie)

Rudy and Bianca immediately ran off to get FastPasses for Soarin', with a return time of 2:15 pm or so in the afternoon. We slowly wandered about trying to figure out what we'd do before then. After observing Innoventions, the crew found the Character Spot - the one stop spot for collecting autographs and photo opportunities with favorite Disney characters. Standing in line for over an hour, Bianca and Dominic had their moment with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto. Score! Wait... They didn't get Pluto's autograph "because they already had him." Boy, how do you think that made Pluto feel being dissed like that? I'm sure it's a long wait for little ones (and big ones too), but also so worth it in the end!

Craving a taco (or something greasy?), we headed to Mexico in the World Showcase area of the park. Thankfully, it was the first country represented at the leftmost side of the park. It took a while to get there, with frozen lemonade and pizza for the kids purchased along the way. We sat down and had lunch amongst the seagulls and stored up enough energy to head back to Future World and catch our slotted time to ride Soarin'. I'm so glad my dad got to experience this ride with us! What a blast! Since we were in the area, we also hopped aboard Living with the Land, a boat voyage. It was a relaxing little cruise through greenhouses and a fish farm.

We're exhausted! It was getting dark at this point and we had one last thrill ride to go on before calling it a day: Test Track. This is where we got to experience being a Test Crash Dummy. The noise of this ride was haunting. Add the darkness factor and we were in for one wild ride.

We came out alive, but sore. Sore from all the walking we had done these past few days. We had come to the end of our Epcot visit with the entire World Showcase still left to see! Once again, we vowed to return to the park at a later time to finish seeing all there is to see. Thank goodness we got the 7-day park hopper passes!

We return to our hotel in hopes that Santa would certainly see us sleeping for his Christmas Day visit. Our Christmas Day was nothing but magical... at the Magic Kingdom of course!

Stay tuned!