No sudden but inevitable betrayals here, just lots of neat things to see at The Land pavilion in Epcot. Hello, this is intrepid guest blogger Kate!
When we first got in to the park, I had my requisite oohing and ahhing moment at the giant silver faceted sphere (actually called Spaceship Earth, after the ride it contains, but we'll get to that later) before we headed off to The Land pavilion. Our guidebook highly recommended Soarin', a recently installed ride in said pavilion, so we decided to go straight there and get Fast Passes for it so we could be assured a space.
I'll take a moment here to explain about Fast Passes, which we used quite extensively at the Magic Kingdom the next day. Basically, you take your ticket to the entrance of the ride/attraction and insert it into one of the Fast Pass machines. It prints out a pass for each ticket. The Fast Pass has an hour window in which you can return and get into an express line. So, for example, earlier in the day you might be able to get a Fast Pass for 11:00 to 12:00, but by midday you might be looking at 5:17 to 6:17. For the really popular rides, Fast Passes run out by midafternoon. Captain EO was Fast Passed out by the time we got into the park, which couldn't have been more than half an hour after opening.
We got our Fast Passes pretty early, but we still had two hours before our window opened. We decided to go on the Living with the Land ride, right next to the entrance for Soarin'. This is a boat ride through several animatronic landscapes, such as a jungle, a desert, and a prairie, followed by some environmental discussion on the effects of humans on the land (i.e. over-farming and deforestation versus conservation efforts) and finally a brief tour through the actual working fish farm tanks and greenhouse right on the premises. This is possibly the only remaining part of Epcot that's stayed true to Walt Disney's original vision of a place to actually live and work.
For an extra $18/person, you can take a walking tour of the greenhouse, which lasts about an hour. We were intrigued by what we saw on the boat ride and wanted a closer look. I admit to a love of greenhouses in winter and an interest in cool biology stuff passed down to me from my mom, a former high school biology teacher. So we decided to spend the extra money and take the tour. They gave us nametags to fill out and told us where to meet up for the tour star.
We had about half an hour to burn before the tour started, so we went to see The Circle of Life, a film starring Timon and Pumbaa (with a guest appearance by Simba) that's billed as an ecological fable. It was a little preachy, but not overly annoying, and I'm a fan of the original Lion King movie, so it was fairly cute. I admit to being a bit worried that we'd be late for our tour, but the timing worked out perfectly, continuing our streak.
Photographs taken by Kate and family available under a creative commons license. Slideshow to be included in the second half of the post.
Recent Comments