6th day, Epcot again

To finish up where Marf left off on yesterday's post will actually segue right into today's. We did love the Mission: Space ride, as well as he "Mission Control Training Center" area that you walk into right as you exit the ride. Here they have a multi-person game based on a space race between two teams. There is the mission control floor where team members figure out puzzles that send "fixes" up to the astronauts, then the astronauts apply those fixes. It's nothing but a ton of button bashing and yelling back and forth - in other words lots of fun. Our team won each time we played - which was like four or five times. And yes we were very vocal and totally got into the spirit of the game. There's nothing like having your little nine year old turn around to a pack of adults on the mission control floor and yell "I need a YELLOW fix STAT!" and having them jump to. I think the controllers got sick of us, but we didn't care :P

The rides in Epcot are all located in the "Future" area, where there are all kinds of info-rides (rides with an agenda), an innoventions area (where the future meets today type gadgets) and a few theatrical performances (Honey I shrunk the audience type stuff). We loved the entire area, and we were even surprised when towards the end of the day we went on a boat ride to kill some time and ended up loving it so much we were taking notes on napkins. It was basically a ride about the science of horticulture, and innovative ways to grow veggies and fruits. It was amazing, and if we could ever get the energy up we'd love to mimic some of their ideas. We'll see :P

So after the future area we went to the World Showcase area, which is amazing. about a dozen countries have put together a showcase of their history, culture, cuisine (ooooh the cuisine). We had lunch in a Moroccan restaurant, which was delicious and very entertaining - they had a belly dancer performing while we ate. It got Martha thinking about her belly dancing again, while I just enjoyed the show :)

While walking around the British area we came upon a small street show (we watched one in the french area as well, which was very cool) and when they started pulling in people for audience participation, Martha was selected as the beautiful/hideous witch. Using her feminine wiles she lured the poor Galahad into a long, deceitful tale. Martha was amazing, totally hamming it up as she switched from a beautiful (and bouncy - which they all loved) seductress to an old, screechy hag. She performed wonderfully, and afterwards she had the cast asking her if she was an actress with professional training, to which she responded that no, she was just an over actor and a ham and that she takes every opportunity to embarrass herself in public. Hours later she had people coming up and telling her how great she did in the performance.
It was definitely her high point.
Later that night we had dinner at a Japanese restaurant that was soooo good. The kids loved it, and Martha and I were trying to not lick the dishes. All the country areas are ran by people that they bring in from the countries just to work there, and most don't even speak english, so we believe we were eating in as true of a Japanese's style as one can have with American produce. Hint: their rice (and the japanese are VERY particular about their rice, so much so that they don't export it) was from california called Niski. We need to look into it.

So that brings us to today (I promised you a segue):
We ended up at the same Japanese restaurant for lunch today; we just couldn't get it out of our heads! We were going to go to the mexican, then the german, then italian...but we ended up at the Japanese. And again it was great. But today didn't end up as nice as yesterday due to bad weather moving in early - it wasn't supposed to be here until tomorrow. We got some umbrellas to help with the rain, but the wet on top of Maegan and I not feeling good we decided that it was time to call it. We ended up timing it about right because about the time we arrived to our condo we were put under a tornado watch, and a funnel cloud with "Tornadic activity" hit just to the east of Orlando - tearing up some roofs and such. We were hit by quite a deluge, during which we went swimming :P
So we didn't hit any rides, but we did walk around for a few hours, bought a few things (I got a Moroccan drum) then went back to the condo. It's kinda been nice though, we all could use a little vacation from our vacation.
Which wraps it up, we head home tomorrow. We will be posting our thoughts on how we could have done things better and things to consider next time, so stay tuned!

maegan: best ride mission space; favorite event Japanese restaurant
gwyn best ride mission space; favorite event fireworks
marhta: best ride mission space; favorite event getting to be in a play
meesh; best ride mission space; favorite event playing the space race game

Meesh