Amount of sleep: 6 hours.

Today, Epcot! Somewhere I've wanted to go since I first heard about it as a kid!
It's...okay.

Today's things I did:

* "Living With The Land:" (This entire area is called "The Land." I want to make Firefly jokes about this so bad.) Unless there is NO line, do not go on this. Mostly quite dull, though the "weird stuff we do with plants" section is mildly interesting.

* The Seas With Nemo and Friends: Quite cute, actually. You ride in doom buggies...er, clamshells. Also plays the "Big Blue World" song from the musical at Animal Kingdom.

* Turtle Talk With Crush: I've done this before at California Adventure, but it was cooler here. Not so much of questions from the kids so much as having Dory come in and teach you how to speak whale. Then guess what happens...Very cute. I still want to know how they do this one.

* Innoventions: Better/less dull than the DLand version, but still pretty little kid. Did go on a Velcro-themed game show that was rather amusing, though. Mom had to wear a Velcro poncho while I shoved things into Velcro bags and stuck them on her. Obviously, I don't have photos of that, but the photos of the other competition of baby diapering are a hoot.

(Sadly, could not go on Fast Track with Ms. Motion Sickness At Random Times. Mission: SPACE was just not happening. But I was fine with the latter, considering that the book I had on DWorld talks at length about the people who have DIED on that ride.)

* Spaceship Earth: I was ridiculously excited to go IN THE BALL! You wind around going up and looking at dioramas of progress. Then at the top, there's a big pretty night sky/planet. They they turn you around and you creep backwards out of the ball, while you play with the car's computer setup "designing your future." This produces a cheesy postcard pic you can e-mail people with after the ride. (Went on this ride twice, with me doing it once and her doing it once. Oddly enough, she picked the same dang things I did.)
Then they have other games you can play downstairs. We assembled a skeleton and did a car driving game. I say we on the latter because she got dizzy WATCHING the screen and threw me in halfway through. (I actually did okay on this game- I have issues with driving games too- but the "smart car" overcompensates for you. Like, "oh, the bad guy did X to the road! Press the OK button to get around it!" That's too easy!)

* Ellen's Energy Adventure: Didn't exactly look exciting, but eh...might as well go on everything I can, right?

Good point:
* Opening video is actually pretty amusing, and I'm not an Ellen fan. It's meta-Ellen talking about how she saw her college roommate Judy (an uncredited Jamie Lee Curtis) on Jeopardy kicking ass- Ellen is annoyed at this. "Neighbor" Bill Nye comes in at one point, in that "nobody locks their doors in NYC" sort of way. (I appreciated how meta-Ellen actually rolls her eyes at this.) Ellen goes to sleep on the couch. And thus Ellen's Wacky Dream Sequence begins.

Meh point:
* For a "ride," 80% of it is sitting in a car watching Half-Circle-Vision while the theater rotates. There is one part where you slowly go through a dino diorama and see Audio-Animatronic Ellen fighting off a dinosaur. The latter is amusing, but mostly this just seems like an excuse to do something with dinosaurs.

Really dull point:
* The opening video is 8 minutes, the "ride" is 37. Dress it up and try to make it interesting, and it's...still too freaking long. I told Mom I wouldn't judge her if she fell asleep on this one, I almost did it myself.
Oh well, if you want indoors, AC and a nap for 37 minutes, the "ride" is good for that.

After that we did a lot of shopping, and I got a purple witch hat with ears and an orange bow on it, which I have to incorporate into my Halloween costume somehow now.

* Journey Into Imagination With Figment: Eh, it's okay, I guess. Not that interesting.

* Honey, I Shrunk The Audience: Same as DLand.

Anyway, we pretty much did the Future World section relatively quickly, and saw a little of World Showcase (UK and Canada) before having to leave for La Nouba, the Cirque de Soleil show.

The Disney resort bus system...has some issues. It's supposed to come by every 20 minutes- more like 25-30 in execution. What it really means is that every time you park hop, it takes you an hour and a half. I really hate the reservations system (plus being unable to know ahead of time which parks have extra hours) because we are always having to leave parks 1 1/2 hours early, when I'm not done yet with the park and have another ride or two that I want to see before leaving.

Today was a particular nightmare because we left Epcot at 4:30, were at the bus stop by 5, and the Downtown Disney bus didn't show until 5:30.

* Even worse: it was FULL and the driver said, "I can only take 10 people." We shoved on.
* Even worse: one lady also going to the show told us she'd been waiting since 4:30 because she needed to leave early and hit Will Call for her tickets first.
* Even worse: we got there RIGHT at 6 p.m. Thank gawd the show didn't start promptly and even the lady at Will Call got in before they dimmed the lights.

La Nouba was probably the best thing about the trip. It was beyond awesome, I'm not even sure there are words to describe it. Just go watch YouTube for awhile, you'll see. I came out of this thing GRINNING. I apparently screamed quite a lot. The lady next to me (who is a regular to the show, I believe) said afterwards to me, "I think we could be friends." (Incidentally, I had seen the La Nouba cake episode on Food Network, and was delighted to find out I was seeing that show.)

You know what's interesting? They DO screw up on stage. One guy on the highwire wobbled. Then there were these tiny little diabolo girls, one of them was having a really bad night. And later one girl missed the leap onto two other guys. They just either carried on or did it over, and got even more applause for their efforts than if they had done it right the first time.

After the show, we got the DVD and went around Downtown Disney. Some fun stores- glass, Lego, etc. I was very sad that I was with Mom and thus couldn't go to any of the Disney nightclubs, which are getting closed. (I really wanted to see the Adventurers Club, but noooooo.) Went to Raglan Road and ate Irish food instead.

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