The restaurant itself is divided into several sections. There is a prehistoric deep sea section, which contains a large bar in addition to dining. This section features lots of huge jellyfish and a gigantic animatronic octopus. There is a volcano section, where you can see the grill they use to make your food, and it has lots of pterodactyls and spiders. There is an ice age section, which is easily the coolest section of the restaurant. This section showcases dinosaur skeletons encased in the walls, which are stylized to look like ice. To further enhance the ice wall look, there are glowing blue lights behind the “ice” to make the ice, and the entire room (which looks like a cave) glow a bright blue color. Just outside the ice age section is a woolly mammoth and it’s cubs. The final section of the restaurant is like a prehistoric forest – where a majority of the animatronic dinosaurs are located. In this room you can see huge animatronic insects buzzing around on the ceiling. There also some dinosaurs that seem to climbing hills on their way up to the ceiling.

Every 15 minutes, there is a meteor shower event that takes place. The lights dim, and all the dinosaurs begin to moan and bark. Loud deep “crashes” can be heard through speakers, and the forest canopy ceiling of the forest section shows blazes of light and electricity. In the ice age room, the normally blue walls flash from their normal blue to a glowing red color, coordinated with the meteor impact sounds heard through the speakers. It really is an awesome event, although it tended to scare my two year old the first few times is occurred.

I heard many people in line suggesting others to request to sit in the ice age room because it’s environment is the coolest (no pun intended). I can tell you that while the room is very neat, it doesn’t have any animatronics, and very little dino models as well. That being said, I saw many peopel getting out of their seats in the ice age room to go look at the other rooms – especially during the meteor shower. I sat in the forest room myself and not only do you get all the animatronic dino’s, but they even have dinosaurs RIGHT next to the tables (as in – you can touch them EASILY) if you sit along the wall the separates the ice age and forest sections. That being said, I would recommend the forest section over the ice age section any day, especially if you have kids.

The food was really good here as well. I will admit that I’m not exactly a big fan of the Rainforests cafe’s food. Not that it’s not good, it’s just that there isn’t a lot on the menu, and the stuff they do have aren’t really my “type” of food. The T-Rex restaurant had a much bigger menu, and EVERYTHING seemed good. Even the salads looked good in the pictures, and I’m not one for salads normally. I got a nacho platter myself, which consisted of enough nachos and cheese that it really could have been for two people. My wife got a chicken and bacon sandwich thing that was made with pita bread, she said it was delicious. At the Rainforest cafe, the “king of the dessert platter” is called the Volcano, which consists of brownies and ice cream. Not to be out done, the T-Rex restaurant feature the “Chocloate extinction” which is fudge cake, ice cream, whipped cream, fudge and caramel sauce and sprinkled with Butterfinger. They prolly call it the extinction because if you actually ate all of that…well..I doubt you’d make it back to your car

The restaurant also features a store, much like the Rainforest cafe does – this time with dinosaur and prehistoric items instead. Behind the store is a new “Build-A-Rex”, by the Build-A-Bear company. Instead of bears and other animals like in the Build-A-Bear though there is…you guessed it…dinosaurs! While I would attribute the Build-A-Bear to be mostly a place little girls would love to hang out at, I could say the Build-A-Rex is more of place for boys. The layout and details of how the store is done are almost identical to the Build-A-Bear though, except for the more prehistoric environment of the shop.

Anyways, this place is cool. I would definitely want to go here again, and I do highly recommend it over the Rainforest if you are going to Downtown Disney (which has both). While the rainforest only has a few animatronic things and most of them rarely move anyways – the T-Rex is almost completely animatronic, and most everything moves even when there is no meteor shower going on. That plus the better choice in food (in my opinion) causes the T-Rex to make the Rainforest look…well…outdated.

The first thing we did when we got there was head over and see the Disney characters. The boys were extremely excited to see the characters they watch on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse come to life. Unfortunately we missed Chip and Dale and Donald, and the link got to be too long to see Daisy by the time we got back around to see her. An interesting note, around the rest of Animal Kingdom and throughout all the parades and around the park in both Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom (we went there a couple weeks later – I’ll write a post about it soon), we never saw Daisy other than that one time. Just thought that was weird since I would think she is one of the more prominent characters of the “series”. Ah well…

In any case, after we saw the characters, we decided to do some rides. We wound up going to the Bug’s life movie first, not knowing what it was. A word of warning to parents: if you have younger children or kids that scare easily – do yourself a favor and don’t take them to that. It’s basically a 3D movie where bugs jump out at you and stuff (scary enough for my 2 year old) but of course that just got worse when a Grasshopper appeared (if you remember A Bug’s Life you’ll remember that the Grasshoppers were the bad guys) and starts to have spiders come down from the ceiling, the seats move, stuff (I assume cold water) is sprayed at you, etc.. …. Yeah, my kid was freaking out.

Anyways, after that we went and had some lunch, and then rode this ride that is kind of like the dumbo ride @ Magic Kingdom, except it’s Dinosaurs. The boys loved flying high up in the sky apparently – Ethan wouldn’t stop begging us to go on it again hehe

They have this huge playground area at Animal Kingdom, so we let the boys play on that. It has like 15 different slides, a rope walk, wood bridges, and a bunch of other cool things for kids. After this we walked over and got a FastPass for the safari ride, and then jumped on the train. It’s a very peaceful train ride, it just takes you out to this petting farm and then comes back, but you mostly look at trees and stuff along the way, although there is one part where you get to the some animals in their cages that they normally sleep – we saw a couple rhino’s while we were on that train. The boys drifted off to sleep as well, which was nice that they could get a nap. We rode the train around the track a couple times before finally waking the boys up and hoping off.

The safari ride was cool; they have alligators, hippos, giraffe’s, flamingo’s – even apparently some lions and ostriches, although we didn’t get to see them. They have a list you can see on the ceiling of the safari truck which shows all the animals you could possibly see on the trip – the list is huge.

After we hoped off the safari truck we went and saw the parade that was going on. The boys got to see Mickey, Goofy, Donald, Pluto, Minnie, Chip and Dale, Timone, Rafiki – well, a bunch of Disney characters. It was nice and they really enjoyed it.

Next we went on the “nature walk” and saw some other animals like gorilla’s and hippo’s. The hippo was really cool because it was a glass window that looked above and below the water into the hippo habitat, and there was this hippo that kept swimming right by the window – definitely the closest I’ve ever seen hippo before. After leaving the walk we saw the parade again just cause the boys liked seeing the characters so much. This time Timone actually came up and gave a high five to the boys.

It was almost time to go home after this, but we managed to get over and Ethan and I rode the raft ride. You have to be 38 inches tall to do the raft ride, luckily Ethan was……drumroll….38 inches tall (talk about cutting it close!). The raft ride had this huge downhill drop part – Ethan screamed the whole way down, I’ve never heard him scream like that – it was pretty funny He said the ride scary, but after we got of he begged to go back on it.

Unfortunately the park was closing, so we started to head out. We noticed the Rain Forest Cafe that is on the edge of the park though, so we went there to avoid the rush of people heading out to get on the buses.

The boys still like the Rain Forest cafe, Logan especially liked the Leopard that kept moving and roaring in the shop while we were waiting to get in. Once inside they liked the elephants and gorilla’s too. After we ate we decided to get the boys a Volcano (‘the’ Rain Forest dessert) and we had the Rain Forest people sing happy birthday since Ethan’s birthday was the nest weekend. The smile on his face was huge when Ethan realized they were singing for him

Anyways, after that we got on the bus (we had parked over at Disney Village), got back to the car and headed home. All in all a great day – I know we all had lots of fun

Anyways – we went to go see the new Disney/Pixar movie WALL-E.  Normally Pixar does a good job with it’s movies IMO – we love Cars for instance, and this movie was no exception.  For one there were scene’s where you would have swore that live pictures were used instead of computer graphics (i.e. – WALL-E cruising down this empty road). The story I thought was good too – Pixar’s normal suitable for kids but enjoyable for adults as well.

Well first off, I’ll say that Logan (being only a step away from two years old) was VERY interested in the movie…for about five minutes.  After that he must of notices that ‘Hey! Movie theaters are big!’ and ‘How fun would it be to go for a walk in this place!?’.  So, unfortunately Mariel and Logan didn’t get to see the movie.  That left Ethan and I.  I propped Ethan up on a booster seat so that he could see – he looked so (insert manly word for cute here) sitting there with this popcorn and soda – just kicking back and watching the movie.  We had a little plastic cup for his popcorn, and when he ran out he would ask for more.  I refilled the thing 1….2….3……..8….9  well, you get the picture – anyways, enough times until he looked at me and said “No more – my belly HURTS”

He enjoyed most of the movie -even laughing at some of the funny parts (such as the massaging robot that beats up all the other robots and then dances on them).  About half way I did have to bring him on my lap though – partly because he was getting tired, partly because I think he couldn’t hear me when I kept saying “shhh”…perhaps he though I was trying to tell him important movie plot information…

There was one part where the movie had TONS of sound then suddenly went blank and there was no noise.  There was absoutley no noise in the movie theater for about five seconds – then Ethan chirps up “What happened??!”  It was loud enough that everyone in the movie started laughing – seeing how you can obviously tell it’s from a toddler talking.

Anyways, we had a good time – Ethan was real happy about it and I think he got a special feeling about going to the movies (just given how good he was when we got home and how big I saw him smile when I told him I had a good time at the movies with him).  We don’t get to go to the movies that often – but if he always get’s that happy about it, perhaps we should do it more.