8:07 AM – Cannot remember the last time I slept this late. Wish I could make this a habit.
8:15 AM – Cannot remember the last time the wife woke up this early. Wish she could make this a habit.
8:45 AM – Off to the cafe in our hotel for breakfast, where we have a wonderful meal but are reminded why there is an obesity problem in this country. I order lobster Benedict which is delicious and a reasonable portion.
Tracey orders this monstrosity:
The picture probably doesn’t do it justice, but the chicken is huge, probably twice as big as it should be for any normal human being. Tracey can barely eat half of it, with maybe 1/4 of the waffle. It is delicious, but enormous.
After breakfast, back to the room to begin the “let’s do nothing this morning and afternoon” portion of the day.
We do virtually nothing. Tracey naps. I have a bath. I lay down for a while. We do a whole lot of Jack Squat. It is glorious. We actually intended to go to the pool but we spent too much time doing other nothing to do pool nothing.
1:15 PM – We head down to the Club Lounge for a bite or two. We only want to eat enough to get by until we get to the Epcot Food & Wine Festival where we are going to eat a little bit of everything.
3:15 PM – We arrive at Epcot and head directly to the Mexican pavilion to start the food and wine portion of the day. We eat a ton of great food, have a ton of pretty decent wine (especially given that it was all served in plastic cups), and the weather is absolutely perfect.
The French pavilion is selling 3-ounces of Dom Perignon for $45. Not unreasonable, but I am drawing the line at drinking Dom Perignon out of a plastic cup. Not gonna happen.
Every time we come here, someone tells us that we MUST GO TO THE CANADIAN PAVILION AND TRY THE CHEDDAR SOUP!! Being Canadian, it doesn’t seem like a huge priority.
But this time, we get to do it; they are serving it at one of the booths outside the pavilion as part of the festival.
They were right. It is freaking outstanding.
I also order a glass of a Vidal Icewine from somewhere in Ontario. I love me some Icewine, and I love me some sweet Icewine, but this is sickeningly sweet. Too much.
One of the shops actually has a bunch of half-decent wine they sell for $8 a glass, and I tried out this pretty respectable Amarone.
We wander amongst the pavilions, meandering along, taking our time as we have only one thing on the schedule for tonight. We eat everything. We drink all the wine.
And I get ID’d.
I kid you not. Three days before my 50th birthday, I get carded.
She is, maybe, 25. Now, for those of you who don’t know me, I think I look much younger than I am, except for one small thing: My incredibly grey hair. It’s been gray for a decade.
But tonight, we are outside, it is dusk, and my hair probably looks dark.
BUT STILL…… 🙂
7:05 PM – The time has come.
Three and a half years in the making.
THE FROZEN RIDE!
We missed the Grand Opening of this damn ride by two and a half weeks on our last trip. Today, we finally got to do it.
And it was a disaster.
Kidding, it was delightful, exactly as anyone would expect from Disney. A huge improvement over the previous ride in the Norwegian pavilion, which was called Maelstrom. Apparently there is quite a bit of special stuff going on here on Friday, which is the official release date of the movie Frozen II.
On the way out of the park, we also get a non-Fastpass ride on Soarin’ Across The World. It is so quiet tonight, we are through the line in 10 minutes. We love this ride.
This is our best ever day at Epcot. The weather is perfect. The food and wine festival is awesome. The crowd is nearly non-existent.
Almost perfect.
What is keeping it from being perfect?
My poor wife is in so much pain.
Her disease has been attacking her feet all day. She was in pain when we got here four hours ago. At this point, she has her cane out and is still in so much pain she can barely walk. There isn’t a ton we can do about it at this point, except to make sure that she walks as little as possible on our way back to the hotel.
We are able to stop and get this pretty cool picture on the way out.
Tracey is so much stronger than I am. If I was in this kind of pain all the time, I would be a blubbering mess. As it is, we haven’t had a single sighting of Grumpy Bear this entire trip. And there is so much more fun to come.
9:00 PM – Back to the hotel and we stop for another “cordial” or three and back up to the room to unwed and get to sleep.
Tomorrow, we have to pack up our stuff and head from this amazing hotel back to our amazing resort. Boo-hoo, I get it. It has been amazing being here, but no complaints. It will be nice to get back to our townhouse and do some laundry and cook some meals.
Another relaxing morning tomorrow once we get back to our resort, then back to Animal Kingdom where we will see some animals, and hit a few of the top rides, including the E-Ticket ride in Pandora!
Confessions of a Huge Wine-R 