fammmmjammmmm.

Today did not start off early. :)

We slept in this morning! Yay! At 10am we headed out for a buffet breakfast at the Wood Grill Buffet; it was delicious!! I had oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon apples, and vanilla yogurt with granola and chocolate chips, and scrambled eggs and sausage with maple syrup, and tater tots, and ice cream, and some of Daniel's gummy bears. A perfect breakfast, if you ask me ;)

After breakfast we headed for Cast Connection to pick up some more pins for pin trading ... because the 100 Dad brought aren't enough. Yeah, you read that right. There's so many cool pins here! And I'm trying to collect an alphabet set! Unfortunately, when we got there there weren't the inexpensive pins I'd seen last time. So we left without them, we'll just have to pick and choose which pins we like instead!

We headed for Disney's Animal Kingdom after that - the only park we'd yet to visit. It was afternoon and so our VIP parking lot was all filled up... but the parking tram basically felt like the first ride of the day! If it hadn't have been so hot, it would have been downright enjoyable! :)

We wandered up through the shops on Discovery Island waiting for the next showing of the Festival of the Lion King. Pin trading our way through air conditioned spaces is a good way to keep busy :) We made our way to Camp Minnie-Mickey for the show - none of my family have ever seen it, and it is quite excellent! Lots of acrobatics, music and general Disney fabulousness.

After that, we actually went home. Because of the way DAK is organized, Camp MM is wayyyy out of the way from everything else. So why not do only Camp MM on one day, and do everything else you want to do the next? So that's what we're doing. The rest of DAK comes tomorrow :) While everyone else relaxed, I blogged last night's post. It took me all afternoon to remember everything we did and write it down (and get the internet working!!) When that was done and everyone was feeling refreshed from the cool air and comfy beds we headed out again, this time to a family favorite - the Golden Corral. It's a buffet restaurant that's only in the US, and we love it! For supper I had steak and potatoes and fries and corn on the cob and chocolate-dipped strawberries and brownies and rice krispie squares. There was even cotton candy!

When we were stuffed to the brim, we headed for Epcot. We didn't really get to sit and watch Illuminations on Thursday night, so we planned to get a really good spot tonight and watch the whole thing. We entered the park and Mom and Becca wanted to see France and Morocco - the two pavilions we didn't really get to on Thursday. Dad, Dano and I pin traded our way up to our meeting place at prom; we hit Mousegear and the Traders and all the shops and stands in between. I found one more letter and a couple of nice ones, even venturing up through Canada to see what they had. We then found the best spot along the lagoon (right in front of Prom) and claimed our spot. Mom and Becca showed up shortly thereafter and we all sat at the fence. We waited for an hour to make sure we had this good spot, and by 8:50 other people started crowding in to try and see.

We met a lovely British family of three who were there for two weeks. They left their two oldest at home!! I told Mom that if she ever did that to me I would be very unhappy with her!! We chatted some more and I'll likely see them again as I work and they visit Epcot :)

At 9pm, the fireworks began. I've never seen them from right along the fence - nothing and no one was blocking our view and I had my favorite people around me. It was wonderful! The show was beautiful and I'm so glad we staked out an early spot for perfect viewing :)

We made it home in record time (again) and I'm so impressed with my family (again) for booking it to the car and getting out of the parking lot asap. It's so nice to be home and relaxing by 20 minutes after the show ends. Yeah. Like I said, record time.

Tomorrow is another (but the last) early day! This week has flown by!