PREMiERdrum

EPCOT

Animal Kingdom Rafiki's Planet Watch / Affection Section Kilimanjaro Safari

SeaWorld Breakfast! Seeing the Stingrays: Feeding the Dolphins: Riding the Carousel of the Sea and Swishy Fishy Park randoms:

Magic Kingdom First Haircut! Mainstreet Evening Randoms, MSEP

Disney's Hollywood Studios

After months of planning, we packed up the family truckster for a week in sunny Florida; Our first big vacation since our daughter was born last April. We drove overnight, leaving late Friday night and headed straight to Daytona Beach. We couldn't check in to our resort until 4pm but we wanted to drive overnight so Avery would sleep. After a long night of driving we pulled right onto the beach and had some fun! We checked into our resort Saturday afternoon and spent Sunday around the pool. For this trip, we stayed at Vacation Village at Parkway, an RCI affiliated resort that we were able to trade into from our home timeshare at Massanutten in Virginia. Monday was our first park day, starting out with a brief stop at Disney's Hollywood Studios. The only reason we hit the studios was mainly to catch the newly freshened Disney Junior: Live on Stage! Avery is obsessed with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so we knew she had to see the show. She loved it, barely moving the entire time. After wrapping up at the studios, we headed to the Magic Kingdom for the rest of the day. We arrived and Aves was able to meet Daisy Duck as soon as we got there, which she loved. After that, we did the new Town Square Theater Meet and Greet with Mickey and Minnie. I can't say enough good things about this experience! The room groupings were small, and the CM's were more than happy to let us linger as long as we liked for her to spend some time with them. After meeting Mickey, we headed to the Harmony Barber Shop for something very special: Avery's very first haircut! This was awesome, the barber did a great job holding her attention and making her feel special the whole time. She capped off the cut with some pixie dust and a special ears cap, embroidered with "first haircut" on the back. I was completely impressed with the amount of attractions she did that day: Pirates, Dumbo, Aladdin's Magic Carpets, it's a small world, The Laugh Floor, TTA Peoplemover, Jungle Cruise, and the Mad Hatters Tea Party. We ended that day with the Main Street Electrical Parade. Avery loved all the lights, but man does this one look old and tired. Time for something new here. We spent Wednesday at SeaWorld, which was much different with a 13 month old! We made a few loops around the park, feeding the Stingrays, Dolphins, and Sea Lions, but not seeing any shows. This park is still beautiful, but I've been disappointed with the food quality since the ownership change. Thursday began with Animal Kingdom, and the weather was perfect for it. We started by getting FP's for Kilimanjaro Safari and then hopping on the train out to the Conservation Station. Avery enjoyed the "affection section" petting zoo, but this who area has a very non-Disney feel to it. We did the safari next, and then a few odds and ends before leaving the park. From Animal Kingdom we departed for our favorite park: EPCOT. Here, were were able to do the Character Spot meet and greet first, as Avery can't get enough of these characters. This was followed by a long nap (for her, not us) in her stroller as we staked out a shady bench in FutureWorld. We followed the nap with rides on SSE, The Seas, Living With The Land, and Journey Into Imagination, all of which she absolutely loved! We had dinner at the Rose and Crown before making the World Showcase loop. She really loved all the sights, sounds, and smells of the different countries, and she rode Norway's Maelstrom without even batting an eye! We did a few rerides on SSE and JII before heading home for the night. The rest of the trip was spent lounging by the pool and spending the evenings at Downtown Disney. It was very, very different than any other vacation we've ever taken, but it was so much better in so many ways! It's exciting to think about how her reactions to these things will change over the years. Now, onto the pics! Travel / Resort Randoms

Some more images that were posted here a few years back. Hat tip to sam32cpa for finding them!

What else is there to do when patrolling Kings Island at 3:30 in the morning? Might as well go and check out the new ride!

This is a satellite image of the area in 1994. I'd love to see the monorail outline overlaid to see how the yards and paddocks were laid out.

I'm not really disagreeing with you but merely adding a point to ponder. Doesn't the daily admission to the park, parking, and/or cost of a season pass discourage most vandalizing "riffraff" anyway? To an extent, but a visit to the park will show you that plenty of vandalism and defacing of property goes on. I'm not saying that the $5 upcharge will eliminate it, but it will certainly limit it.

Let's not confuse the Facebook complainers with the park's average guests... Plenty will complain and whine that its an upcharge, but why aren't they complaining about Ripcord? Thunder Alley? And what about the beloved, dearly departed monorail ride through the Wild Animal Habitat? Let's look at it this way: Let's say that KI caves in to the Facebook whiners, and Dinosaurs Alive (!) is now free with park admission. What issues would that bring about? First, if they planned to charge $5.00 per head to get in, but now it's free. That lost revenue would need to be made up somewhere. If they expected 1 of each 5 park guests to visit Dinosaurs Alive (!) at $5, they'd have to tack $1 onto each general admission to make up for that. And if their projection had 1/2 of all guests visiting Dinosaurs Alive (!) this season (high, but closer to likelihood than 1/5), that's $2.50 they'd have to add to each GA ticket to recoup. In addition to that, if DA were included with standard admission, you'd had to account for much higher maintenance and repair costs. As has already been mentioned here, the upcharge discourages riffraff who may otherwise damage and vandalize the attraction. Those costs would then be spread across the gate as well, increasing ticket prices. There's also the issue of the peculiar timing of this addition, debuting the same year as WindSeeker. If I were to guess (and I guess I will), DA (!) was in development before CF corporate P&D decided that Kings Island would be one of the lucky parks to receive the new swing towers. A contract for DA (!) had likely already been signed (it takes quite a while to hand-carve 60 lifesize dinosaurs, I'd imagine), so the park brings them both the same year: One is free with admission, the other a nominal upcharge.

The more I look back at this... this style of exhibit design was way ahead of its time. In the early '70s, zoos were still building concrete grottoes and tiny yards for land mammals. I'd be very interesting to see how the lion area was paddocked. With the large number of lions that they had (even if it wasn't 70), they would have had to have been separated into several smaller family groups and likely rotated through the different yards.

There was some impressive artwork done for the stateside Paramount Parks as well... the attractions just never looked quite as good when they opened.

I've read through this 5 times now, and appreciate it even more each time. While I don't have reason to doubt the number of animals, they are almost unbelievable. I have childhood memories and remember the compound being huge, but I thought those had been romanticized by my youth. The housing of 70 lions, 25 rhinos, and 12 elephants would make this a much more ambitious operation than even I remembered. Think of it this way: The Columbus Zoo has the largest pachyderm building in the world, and houses 4 (formerly 5) Elephants and 2 Rhinos. If anybody has any photos of the infastructure or support buildings (especially those which have since been demolished), I'd love to see them. A few questions... The black leopard and snow leopard enclosures near the monorail station... Where these in the station itself, or built onto it? Where were the tigers along the route?

And some of us wish they would retheme Action Zone to match a (refreshed) naturalistic Timber Wolf. No more primary colors and sheet metal in that corner of the park, please!

Such is the risk one takes with early adopters of new concepts. Now, imagine if some silly company bought, announced, and planned to open five concept rides from the same manufacturer in the same year.

Mean Streak and SOB were first to come to mind... $9 million seems awful high, so I think it'd be a larger structure. Have any cost estimates come out of their other projects?

Judging by the red outline seen in the diagram (just behind Racer's turnaround), I'd expect the length of this path to be quite impressive. I'm crossing the red outline with Bing aerials now, and that spot looks perfect for this, uhh, purpose.

To me, it looks very dino shaped... And I'd expect the dino to go on the new concrete pad, not the shipping container.

LINK - Ultimate Roller Coaster Remember who said it first. I'm wondering if the "trail" will be a "just because" exhibition, or if it would perhaps be part of launching Dino Island in Action Theater? Still some questions to answer, but I'm pretty sure we got this one.

Send in the cranes?

Man! You mean this might all be a sham? I never saw it coming...

I don't think it's the same fence... look at the scale of the tire tracks and leaves/debris compared to the width of the pickets. The fence in the photo almost looks like a dune fence to me, which could have been used to keep the wind away from the sand they would have used for the pavers. Just a thought...

Blog =/= Facebook The Blog is a great way to play off the curiosity and enthusiasm of, well, enthusiasts. She can be a little "geekier," and go into a little more detail. The folks visiting the blog are going there on purpose, with expectations of what they'll see. Facebook is a way to reach casual fans, "GP" as we might call them. The park's posts pop up in fan's newsfeed, so they don't necessarily have to be looking for the park's message to see it. A good New Media strategy uses the company's website, Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes sites like Living Social and Groupon to reach as wide of a base as possible. Each of those sites has their own strengths and weaknesses, and a good communications rep can identify those and play off of them.

Quietly watching PointBuzz as WWL was torn down and work for Maverick began remains one of the funniest, most drawn out internet exchanges I've ever witnessed.