Thursday-Downtown Disney, Animal Kingdom, and Rainforest Cafe

Thursday was our "relaxing" day. We had breakfast at the Boatright Restaurant at the Port Orleans resort and then headed over to Downtown Disney to do some shopping. We headed into the World of Disney first and about halfway through the store (which is huge BTW), we ran into Bethany and Carrie! Ha! It was so great to see Bethany and finally meet Carrie in person. We talked for a few minutes, finalized our lunch plans, and then finished up our shopping. There were so many things we wanted, but we held ourselves back! We also visited the toy store. We had lunch at the Earl of Sandwich with Bethany and Carrie and sat for about two hours just talking about all kinds of fun stuff. It was quite enjoyable. I wish they both lived closer because I think it would be so much fun to hang out.

After that, we went back over to Animal Kingdom and rode Everest again, watched Mickey's Jammin' Jungle Parade, walked a couple more of the nature trails, did the Safari for the third time, and checked out a few more shops. I love the safari, it really was different every time. I had forgotten about the Maharaja Jungle Trek, or I would have wanted to do it again too. Then, it was time for our dinner reservations at the Rainforest Cafe'. As we were heading over to the Rainforest Cafe', the park was closing and they were "trucking" Mickey, Goofy, Donald, and Minnie somewhere, I guess their dressing room, and we got to take pictures of them. That was fun. The Rainforest Cafe' is so cool with such detailed decorations. It is decorated to look like a rainforest with all kind of animals that move. For instance, there was a huge snake slithering around on a tree branch that hung out over the dining room and several families of apes that would start jumping and making ape noises randomly every few minutes. I kept hearing tigers roaring and birds cawing. It was interesting. We had to pay for this meal as it was not on our dining plan, so we just shared an appetizer sampler, but it was really good. I believe those were the best chicken fingers I had ever had! After that, I took some pictures of the huge tree that had been put up in front of the entrance to the park between when we had been there on Monday and Thursday when we got back over there. They really had a lot of detail on that tree. We headed back to our hotel and had a dessert of those chocolate covered icecream bars shaped like Mickey's head. Those things were surprisingly good and much bigger than I expected them to be!

You can see here how big the tree was. The whole tree was decorated with all types of animal ornaments and then under the tree were toys and the Winnie-the-Pooh and Jungle Book characters.

This was at the entrance of the Rainforest Cafe'. I thought it was funny.

Scott and I had some fun with the Rainforest Cafe' sign!

So, that was our day on Thursday. We tried to take it easy.