We started off the day in Magic Kingdom, and then headed over to EPCOT to catch Test Track since we weren’t able to get to it yesterday

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This was a rainy trip to EPCOT, so we didn’t get many photos.  We had a wonderful meal at Le Cellier and traded in our passes to the new RFID version of the passes.

Our day at EPCOT.

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Back to the Magic Kingdom for a second day of fun.

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This set includes photos from the boardwalk, where we start our morning over to the Animal Kingdom Lodge, followed by the Animal Kingdom itself, then back to the hotel.

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Here are a few of the photos we’ve taken here.  I haven’t looked at them all that closely yet, I just grabbed a bunch to put some up for family to look at.  I’ll go through and refine these when we get back home.Further update…  The internet connection in this hotel is awful, so I’m lucky if I can post this message.  I’ll try again at the next hotel..

OK… This hotel (Bay Lake Tower) actually has a good connection, so I’ve posted these.  The rest won’t go up until I get home because I don’t want to spend my vacation sorting pictures and it’s getting time to get up and do some fun stuff…

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This was the second night I went to Halloween Horror Nights.  Main difference being this time I bought the good camera and not just the cell phone, so I’ve got more/better pictures of the fun.  (At least until it got dark.  Once that happened, there wasn’t enough light to take pictures.)  I haven’t posted the cell phone photos because i haven’t gotten them off the phone yet.  When I do, I’ll add  them to the blog.

Below are my thoughts on the overall experience.

It was a blast.  The first thing to remember is show up as early as possible and go through the haunted houses as quickly as possible because the lines get long quick.  Be ready to deal with loud noises.  If you are sensitive to loud noises, bring earplugs.  Some of the haunted houses were literally deafeningly loud.  It was like have an air horn blasting away into your ear for some of them.

Spoilers below:

I’m new to the haunted house thing, but there were several things I thought really cool in some of them. 

• The Gothic haunted house had people ready to reach down from above you to grab you as you went by.  Very effective since it was the only one that really had stuff coming from above.
• The Penn and Teller one had a room of nothing but christmas lights and the people in that room were wearing black costumes covered in lights so they disappeared as soon as they stopped moving.  Very cool.
• The Dead End haunted house had mirrors in some of the rooms that would open to having the person behind it lunge out towards you.  It really did catch you off guard because it was very well done and they opened so quickly that the ghoul was just there in your face.
• The dead end haunted house also had someone with limbs attached to them to blend in with the garden and they would crouch down and look like a bush until you walked by and would stand up next to you.  It was easy to overlook them unless you were really paying attention.  Again, very well done.

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Since we had done everything we wanted to do at Universal already, we headed over to Disney’s Hollywood Studios for the morning.  We had never gotten around to Toy Story Mania in this park and it didn’t disappoint.  I wish all rides had this much attention to detail and interaction.

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