Day 3 Highlights - Part 2 Animal Kingdom Lodge Room

Disney doesn't guarantee you'll have a ready room until check-in time at 3 pm, but I have never had to wait that long for one before. It was a couple minutes before 3 before we got our first text that the room was ready.
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I usually prefer to chill out in the room a bit before hitting the parks, not at the end of the night. But the fact that we had animals outside our room (even though we didn't pay for it) made up for the wait.
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Although the exterior view of the rooms wasn't that great and reminded me a bit of a zoo:
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But like all Disney resorts, the attention to detail was amazing:
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and I even found the obligatory Hidden Mickeys:
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If I had one negative comment about my camera, it's that it tends to have too much of a yellow tint to the white balance for indoor pictures and I can't figure out how to adjust it. I try to overlook it, but it does annoy me because adjusting the white balance after the fact tends to go too pink, so I don't bother. I guess, if I had to find a good point to losing my memory cards, at least now I can replace them with a size big enough to manage raw files instead of jpegs. Maybe that will help with the adjustments. But anyway...

The level of detail extended to the lobby and hallways as well and of course my obsession with Disney lighting hasn't subsided (for those that don't know, I seem to have a fascination with lights at Disney World for some reason...I don't in the real world, just the Disney one):
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and I found Hidden Mickey's outside the room too:
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Although Animal Kingdom Lodge is a lot like Wilderness Lodge in it's design (which makes sense since it was designed by the same architect, the same one who designed Disney's Grand Californian at Disneyland, our home for this year's trip), aspects of the layout made no sense to me especially when it came to where the food places were. You had to go downstairs from the lobby and, in the case of the food court, you had to literally go outside and walk around the outside to get to it, there was no internal entrance to it.
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and it felt like it was a bit "cavy" as well:
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but I had to try the Zebra Domes which everyone always talks about:
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Frankly, I didn't think they were that great. The liquor flavor was too strong, the cake was too dry and bitter and the humidity wreaked havoc on the exterior icing.

The zero entry pool was also a bit of a disapointment considering it already looked to be in bad shape:
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but the pool itself was very nice:
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And of course, I had to check out the gift shop (where I ended up spending more time than the food court):
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Again, great pieces of art:
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And it's one of the few resort gift shops that actually had resort-specific merchandise. I miss that at the resorts and it was nice to see it again!

This post was a bit shorter than the others, but I might make up for it in the next few posts. Day 4 sees us at Disney's Hollywood Studios and another wet day.

Comments

kate n said…
I'm enjoying reading these, it's interesting to hear about what you got up to when we were apart! Lol
It's weird though too, we both had very different experiences :) I must post a pic of you on your birthday! If only to prove that I was there. Lol!
Vickie said…
Great pictures! AK does have a great gift shop!