Wednesday at Animal Kingdom

Wednesday's field trip to Disney's Animal Kingdom went a bit better than Monday's trip. We left much earlier (7:00 am) but we got home much earlier (6:30 pm). The first half of the day was even dry and overcast which kept the heat down. The first part of the day the kids and a select group of chaperons were taken on an educational 3 hr tour which I opted not to go on since my Jen had decided to drive down and meet us on the trip. From what I heard from the parents that did the "special program" I really didn't miss much.
I had about an hour till Jen was going to arrive and it was really kinda nice wandering around on my own for a bit. I bought a few Tinkerbell pins (no surprise there, right?). It was hard to narrow down which ones to get. Used to be there would be one or two Tinkerbell pins to choose from. Now there are probably 20 or so and in different price ranges. I then went onto the Safari Jeep ride right when it opened which was very neat. Most of the animals were up and wandering and the giraffes including a brand new baby were so close you could almost touch them. We did have an ostrich walk up to our jeep. Even the lion and lioness were up and awake. I didn't get any pics cause I left the camera with Nate but the second time on the Safari (with the kids) I got a couple of pics Sorry about the poor quality but it was taken on a very bumpy jeep and it was raining and we were moving pretty fast. And of course, I had to take a pic of the flamingos You can see that it's raining in this pic.

We had a much smaller group of kids. 7 kids total to 3 adults and since they were all 6th graders, they didn't have the same tendency to wander off. Here they are posing with the "tree of life" in the background.
Animal Kingdom is short on rides. We did go on the River Rapids, The Dinosaur ride and a few smaller ones. The BIG one was Expedition Everest. A very cool roller coaster that everyone was looking forward to. It, of course, has the longest lines so we got fast passes. With a fast pass you return to the ride at a specified time and you don't have to wait in line. Our time to go back was 2:30. Unfortunately it started raining about 1:30 with lightning and thunder and the ride was shut down for the remainder of the day because the rain never did let up and we never got to go on the ride. You can see it here in the background The coaster comes right out near the top of the mountain. The kids were all very bummed about not getting to go on but they really were very cool about it all.
Here's a great pic of Jen and Nate. Aren't they just adorable. Jen's been training for a 5K run and has lost quite a bit of weight. She's looking really good and I'm so proud of her. Can you believe how tall Nate is getting. He'll be passing Jen and I up in no time at all.
The rain was so bad though and I started to cough just about the time we were leaving and knew this was not gonna be good. By the time I got home I was running a fever and hacking up a lung. I have to say for a moment I was really worried about swine flu cause there have been a couple of incidents here and Disney is a prime breading ground. Thank goodness it was not.