Animal Kingdom Disney Day 2 and the Beach

I spent all night worrying about the tickets for Magic Kingdom and kept trolling the app trying to get reservations. Eventually, I decided that we could just get the kids two tickets into the park and we could hang out in Orlando or even go to a less popular park like Epcot. While in line for the Avatar ride, I decide to do just that. Two tickets open. I book the kids and immediately go back and try to get us in as well. Two tickets open. It's weird that four tickets were a no go, but two tickets at a time worked. Thank goodness.

So it's set. We can go to Magic Kingdom in a few days with the entire family. I could finally rest my mind and enjoy the day.

Avatar is a pretty amazing area of the park. The floating lands above your head seem like they are hovering for real. The designers of this land were simply brilliant. Although the park is at reduced capacity, the lines were still a bit long for our taste. There are no fast passes due to the decrease in capacity, yet some lines were still 60 or 75 minutes long. 

Thankfully the park has a lot of shaded area for waiting in line, but unfortunately for us, some of this park has hills and our older legs are getting a bit tired. We remind ourselves that grandma did this trip with us twice, once at age 65 and again at 75....so, we shouldn't be this tired. We did get a little wet as the clouds drizzled on us from time to time. The weather is always humid here, but the clouds seem to be holding some rain that feels desperate to drop.

This is a much smaller park and we didn't plan to be here very long. Since it opened at 8am, we are wrapping up most of the park by around noon. We decided that instead of getting some park food for lunch, we'd prefer some more of the Cheesecake Factory that we had for dinner last night. 

We head off to grab lunch and say goodbye to the Animal Kingdom. This time we sat inside (still a novelty after a year of COVID takeout) and got a BLT, more lettuce wraps, and more flatbread - because it was really good the first time.

After a delicious lunch and some doggy bags to go (aren't their portion sizes incredulous?), we drove the 1.5 hours out to Daytona Beach to meet up with the rest of the family. The beach was warm and the weather was less humid by the water. The kids enjoyed so many hours at the beach before half of the party broke off to go to a timeshare presentation luau - we ordered dinner via Uber Eats and played some board games in our condo. 

Have you ever heard of The Cat Game? Wow - it's kind of like Pictionary where you draw a picture and others guess it, but it all revolved around Cats. We spent a few rounds laughing and having a great time with this new game - I'd recommend it for some fun family game nights.

As 11pm rolled around we realized that our day had been quite full with one Disney park, an afternoon at the beach, and a rousing game night. Sleep was needed.