After our quick one-night stay at the Grand, we woke up really early and called bell services to come gather our luggage for our final hotel transfer of the trip. Once our room was empty, we said goodbye to the most comfortable bed ever, and headed out to the main lobby – of course I took some pictures along the way 🙂

I also took some pictures of the grounds at the Grand, and the main lobby – where they were refreshing the flowers for the day.

We knew we would be taking an Uber/Lyft to our breakfast ADR, so we decided to be a little extra and ordered ourselves a Minnie Van – so stinking cute! (This was during the time when it was still a flat rate of $25 – I don’t think I’ll be taking one now that they charge by mile – it’s so much cheaper to just use a regular Lyft).

We arrived at Animal Kingdom Lodge, and headed downstairs to check in for breakfast at Boma – one of Luke’s favourites! Review here 🙂

After finishing up breakfast, we were ready to get into the parks, so we took the very short bus ride to Animal Kingdom! Did I mention – it was cold this day! This Canadian is pretty soft, and was bundled up…

We arrived, and decided to head towards Dinoland after checking on the wait times. We got into the standby line for Dinosaur, and since it was still within the first hour of the park being open, the wait wasn’t too long at all- within 10 minutes we were seat-belted into the ride

This ride consistently gets a “just ok” from me. I think I would have a much higher opinion of it if I’d never been to Disneyland, but it’s a very similar ride to Indiana Jones in California – and Indy easily wins in the comparison to Dinosaur!

Also – most of our family and friends who were due to arrive in a few days had never been to Disney, so I had been asked by a few of them about what to do with their park bags while on rides – so I took a bunch of pictures to show them how accommodating the Disney rides are for backpacks! This one is to show how large the storage pouches are on Dinosaur –

We then decided to was time to finally see Pandora for the first time! We walked in, and wow! What an amazing Land Imagineering has created, with the floating mountains and the waterfalls and all the plants. Just incredible.

We stopped for a few Photopass pictures –

… before we headed over to use our first Fastpass of the day – on Flight of Passage! I was so excited for this ride, and it did not disappoint! We were also very lucky to have a Fastpass – the wait time was listed at 240 minutes (4 hours!) for most of the day.

After our exciting ride on the back of a Banshee, we spent a bit more time exploring the land (and yes, of course I took a bunch more pictures, the land is just so pretty and deserves to be photographed!)

The park was really busy this day, but we had another Fastpass to use so we made our way over to Asia for my favourite Disney ride – Expedition Everest!

I again took a picture for our wedding guests to see that there was nothing to worry about when it came to space on the rides for their backpacks – hopefully these pictures can help anyone currently planning their first Disney trip!

The ride was as great as always! We still had quite a bit of time to kill before our next Fastpass window, so we headed back out to the main area in front of the Tree of Life. By this point some of the huge crowds that gather for Photopass pictures first thing in the morning had dissipated, so we decided to stop for some pictures

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