Day 1 – Animal Kingdom

As I was fully expecting us to be up at the crack of dawn and struggling to get through the day with jetlag, I decided to get an early start at Animal Kingdom on our first day, as this was the park with morning extra magic hours (EMH).

Our first stop was to be to head for Kilimanjaro Safari to get the first bus out. I’ve read advice on the best time to go when the animals are most active and the most popular options assist to be early morning and evening so we have planned to do both over the two weeks we’re here.

The rest of the morning was going to be a relaxed affair with exploring the park, following some of the animal trails, picking up and completing the wilderness explorer book.

Our fast passes today don’t start until the afternoon with a dinner reservation at 5:30pm. An early finish to retire back to our room at Coronado Springs straight after dinner as I expect we’ll be struggling in the heat, tired from jetlag and full up from all the food!

FastPasses

The three FastPasses (FP+) we had booked today were:

• Meet your favourite Disney Pals at the Outpost – 13:10-14:10.
• It’s tough to be a bug – 14:30-15:30
• Festival of the Lion King – 16:00

No big rides in my selection as I have plans to do the main rides later on in the holiday when my parents are joining us.

Dining

For breakfast we would have used a couple of snack credits on pastries from Creature Comforts.

Lunch; we’d planned to use a couple of quick service credits at Flame Tree BBQ. The macaroni cheese with pulled pork looks absolutely amazing. For a snack credit you can have cheesy fries with pulled pork too which also looks delicious.

Dinner: we had an advance dining reservation (ADR) for Restaurantosaurus at 5:30pm. Here they do a burger and ice cream sundae (with a bucket and spade for children) for the cost of a quick service credit. The bucket and spade would have then come in useful for the water park days and saved us having to buy one.

Dining plan credits used:

• 2 QS credits per person.
• 3 snack credits per person.