Since Ben and Cameron are so into Harry Potter, Mom and Dad decided to take us to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal's Islands of Adventure park. We went on Tuesday because it was supposed to rain and the park has been known to be incredibly crowded since the Wizarding World opened.
And rain it did. As you can see in the pictures, everyone had ponchos on.
Dad and Ben went on the main ride inside Hogwarts, we all got wands for a souvenir and then we had frozen butterbeer with an early lunch.
From there, Cameron and Dad went to see Poseidon's Journey and then met us in Seuss Landing.
Ainsley really enjoyed Suess Landing, as you might expect. It had a lot of rides for her to go on.
Back over on Super Hero Island, we had fun too and even got to see a bunch of super heroes!
After the Animal Kingdom, we took the boat from our resort over to Downtown Disney. Some of you might remember this scene...
Unfortunately, the Pooh Corner store is closed and they moved this to a spot where the sun was in our eyes.
Ainsley found her souvenir in multiples at the World of Disney store.
While we were waiting for Mom at a shop, Dad was trying to get us to do a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil type of thing, but Ainsley was being too silly.
On Monday, we went to Disney's Animal Kingdom. There was a lot of debate as to what park we would go to other than the Magic Kingdom and we settled on the Animal Kingdom mostly because they had Extra Hours for resort guests on Monday. That meant we got in an hour early.
Like Cinderella's Castle at the Magic Kingdom, the Tree of Life is the heart of the Animal Kingdom. Here's the requisite picture of us in front of it.
We started our visit on the Kilimanjaro Safari in the (fictional) African village of Harambe. The safari was super dooper cool. Here are a lot of pictures from it. Birds!
Hippos!
Alligators!
A critter with horns!
The savannah!
Termites!
Lots o' critters!
Critters with big horns (that are hollow, by the way)!
How giraffes hide in the wild.
Elephant!
Rhinos can only see about 6 feet in front of them. We were happy to be 7 feet away.
But we were much closer to this ostrich and we were quite certain he was coming into the jeep with us.
The last animal we saw on safari was the Simba, sitting atop Pride Rock.
Needless to say, the safari was really cool. Right by the safari exit, there is the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail, where you can see animals that they couldn't put out in the open, like fish...
And frogs...
And educational resources... wait, what?
Oh, right, and gorillas.
On the way to Asia, we stopped and saw Flik, from A Bug's Life, and King Louie and Baloo from The Jungle Book. They creeped Ainsley out.
The first thing we did in Asia was go on the Maharajah Jungle Trek. We saw lots of animals here too, like this Komodo dragon...
And these bats...
Especially this guy, who was happy to see us.
Don't leave the path, because...
Tigers!
At the end of the trail, there it was in the distance... Mount Everest.
They say a Yeti lives in Everest and mounted an expedition to find it.
Here's a quick video of our attempt to scale the peak and find the Yeti.
We spent most of the rest of the day at Dino Land. The legend has it that some scientists found fossils and local gas station owner's Chester and Hester tried to cash in.
