The alarm went way too early this morning, I just wanted to keep sleeping (especially after all the drinks we had the night before). But, we pulled ourselves out of bed, got ready and called an Uber to take us to the Animal Kingdom Lodge for breakfast at Boma! This was our first time seeing AKL, what a beautiful hotel!
Once we finished up with breakfast, we caught a bus to Animal Kingdom- such a quick drive from the hotel! I was really excited about being able to see the progress being made on Pandora – I had not seen the movie Avatar at this point, but I was still excited about the new land being built, it sounded amazing.
Since the park had already been open for about half an hour, the line for security was not bad at all, but the line to scan your Magicbands was backed up a bit. No worries, we just went to the far left and entered Rainforest Cafe, cut through the gift shop and scanned our Magicbands with the cast member at that entrance – which never has a line! It’s one of my favourite Disney Park hacks 🙂
We stopped for a few Photopass pictures in front of the Tree of Life.
We were getting close to our fastpass window for Expedition Everest, so we headed over there. Here’s what our day was going to look like (minus the Wild Africa Trek, we had cancelled that a few days earlier for a full refund).
After going on my favourite ride in the park to see Disco Yeti, we started slowly making our way over to the Africa section of the park. Oh right! Proof we went on Everest (and in the back seat!):
We decided to stop for the Baloo and King Louie meet and greet, we had really enjoyed it the year before.
I was pointing out to Baloo that he was on the record we were getting the characters to sign.
And then, we got engaged.
I know, you were expecting a big lead up to it, if you’ve read my trip report this far you know I can be wordy. But, don’t worry, I’m going to let Luke tell this part of the story.
We began making phone calls, first calling our moms, then my grandmother who was in the hospital at the time (and passed away less than 2 months later)- who laughed and gleefully proclaimed“I knew!”. It turns out, instead of being traditional and asking my dad to marry me, Luke had snuck out of the house on our last trip to New Brunswick under the guise of ‘going for a run’, and instead ran to my grandma’s house to ask her permission for my hand in marriage. I consider myself a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need anyone’s permission to marry whomever I want to, but this gesture of asking my Nanny really meant a lot to me.
Luke called his sister and texted the other one (she was out of the country at the time), while I called my Dad.
We actually had a Fastpass for the Safari that we wanted to use, so we headed over there and used that at the very end of our fastpass window.
After our Safari, I kept checking the MDE app but our pictures of Luke proposing had not shown up yet, so we headed out to the Photopass store located by the main gate. Once we explained what the pictures were of that we were missing, the Cast Members assured us that they would find them. It only took them a few minutes to locate our missing pictures, and then they even printed one off as a 5×7 for us free of charge 🙂
We had called our immediate family, but we decided to start texting extended family and our friends to let them know we were engaged. We found a spot on a bench and sat there for the next hour and a bit just letting the world know our happy news – our phones were going crazy with text messages of congratulations. It was a really amazing experience, sitting beside my fiancé in one of our favourite places in the world, feeling such an outpouring of love from all the important people in our lives.
We had purchased a FuelRod at the beginning of this trip, and we definitely got our money’s worth out of that thing just on this day! I think by the end of the day, we had swapped it out 4 times because we spent so much time on our phones haha. We typically only swapped it once/day, and only because I tend to take a lot of pictures.
Next: January 10, 2017 Part Two