Tuesday

Tuesday we didn't have a group breakfast planned, so we took advantage of this and slept in a little. We made our way on the bus over to Animal Kingdom in the late morning to see all the critters! The way into the park is an open walkway of animal exhibits, and we spent some time watching all the animals. Owen liked the pink flamingos, but I'm not really sure what he thought of the bats. Yes, this one is about 18" tall or more.... A large fruit bat variety. They look like small foxes with wings.

The "big kitty's" were of great interest to Owen's alter ego....

We watched "It's a bug life" in the tree theatre. Owen was fairly frightened. Hopefully he'll get a bigger kick out of it when he's older.

We were fortunate to catch the family of monkeys out and were able to watch them swing around their habitat. One of the keepers was answering questions and Owen asked her why the monkeys swing around... to which she responded that their arms are so long, that their knuckles would drag on the ground if they walked around on their feet. Owen's response was "Oh, yeah".

After this, Owen was melting down a little, so we stopped by the Aisan restaurant for lunch and had a fantastic meal.

Here's a very rare sighting of the squinty eyed popcorn eater.

After lunch we caught up with Danielle and Steve and Grandma and Grandpa. Shaun was sleeping, so Grandma watched Owen and Luke in the Dinoland playground while us grown up kids took Marissa on the Mt. Everest rollercoaster!

Later in the afternoon, we watched the Birds of Flight show in the ampitheatre. It's a great show and they do some neat routines with talking, picking thrown objects out of the air, and the traditional "fly into the audience and take the dollar bill". I've always thought Toucan's were really cool birds and this one was no exception. It was good news to learn that the Bald Eagle was recently taken off the endangered species list. What a beautiful bird.

Here's our tired little animal at the end of a long day.

Dave and Linda arranged for babysitters for all the kids for the evening so we could enjoy a relaxing adult dinner at the Artist Point restaurant in the Lodge. Some of us behaved, and others chose to tell lies about liquidating assets to buy a RV and become wandering nomads. Dinner was great and we laughed a lot. After finishing, we all went over to the Magic Kingdom to ride Space mountain and several of the other coasters.