Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 7 years and 7 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Traditionally we would do the resort pool and Disney Springs on Monday before heading home, but we decided to mix things up this year. No early plans today so we slept in and spent the morning at the resort, enjoying the Polynesian’s two pools after grabbing a light breakfast from the concierge lounge. The pools and waterslides were fun and my daughter enjoyed using my underwater camera to take photos and movies. I’m sure I got a few strange looks swimming around with a camera strapped to my arm, heh. After enjoying some malasades from the Oasis Bar, we cleaned up, dressed, and drove over to Disney Springs to do a little shopping.

Our afternoon at the formerly named Downtown Disney was cut a bit short, though, after my daughter had an allergic reaction to the guacamole in her lunch at Paradiso 37. So we drove back to the Polynesian to get her Benadryl and let her sleep off the after-effects. While she was sleeping my wife and I wandered around the resort and hung out in the concierge lounge.

After her nap, my daughter was feeling a lot better. It had started raining while she was asleep but seemed to be slowing so we decided to take the monorail over to Epcot before our evening plans at Animal Kingdom. By the time we got to Epcot, however, it was really raining. We wandered around in our ponchos for a bit, ducking in and out of buildings occasionally, but didn’t really do anything. We were trying to decide if we should just forget going over to Animal Kingdom with the weather the way it was, but we decided we were on vacation and weren’t going to let the rain deter us.

We had the Disney bus from Epcot to Animal Kingdom completely to ourselves, which my daughter enjoyed immensely. This was our first time at Animal Kingdom at night since the park is now open after dark. There’s very little lighting in the park to begin with (giving it that more “in nature” feel) but it’s even darker when it’s raining. With the weather being somewhat miserable, the park wasn’t very crowded either. The Everest roller coaster was closed, unfortunately, so we decided to try and get into the standby line for the last showing of “The Festival of the Lion King,” our favorite show. As we were walking towards the theater in the rain in our ponchos, a Disney cast member approached and asked if we were going to see the Lion King show. We responded “yes” and she said “follow me.” She proceeded to take us right into the theater, before everyone else, and gave us front row seats! What a great surprise! We’d sat near the front before, but never the actual front row. We got to trade high fives with the guys on stilts and the tumble monkeys, have performers dance literally two feet in front of us, it was just fantastic.

After the show (which took a while to let out since people seemed reluctant to go back out into the rain) we headed over to the Kilimanjaro Safari. We didn’t really need our FastPass as there was really no line (again, when’s the last time we just walked onto a ride like that?). Driving through the woods in a covered truck with the rain and the subdued light gave the whole ride a “Jurassic Park” vibe (“Ah, now eventually you do plan to have animals on your, on your animal safari, right?”). It’s definitely a different experience than the daytime ride (no flash photography!) so even though we saw only a few animals, it was still enjoyable.

It was still raining and we had FastPasses for the late night Jungle Book show but we decided to call it an evening and head back to the hotel. We just missed the bus for the Polynesian and Grand Floridian so we took the one for the Contemporary instead and then took the resort monorail from there (which hopefully still saved us time instead of waiting for the next direct bus). Back at the  hotel, we grabbed a late dinner from Captain Cook’s and dessert from the Pineapple Lanai. Eating back in the room, I noticed I had an e-mail from the Disney FastPas system informing me that the Jungle Book show had been cancelled so we now had replacement FastPasses that were good in any park, for any ride, at any time, good through tomorrow! Another nice treat!