Innovations and Les Chefs at Epcot

Anna here, to talk about the amazing end to my birthday celebrations. Last Sunday, my mom, Matt, and I went to Epcot to end my birthday week with a bang. Once again, I wore my Happy Birthday Anna button. I had made reservations at Les Chefs de France in Epcot about a month ago thinking my dad would be in town, but it ended up being just the three of us. We had planned to go to Magic Kingdom before going to dinner for Matt to play The Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, but he had forgotten his cards at home, so we decided to just explore Epcot. We first fast passed Soarin’, got a Mickey ice cream, and then sought after a new adventure.

Innoventions

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While at a theme park, air conditioned buildings are always very attractive when you’re just trying to wait out a storm or a heat wave. One of the first buildings you encounter in Epcot are the innoventions buildings. They are called innoventions east and innoventions west. We explored innoventions west and immediately came upon the Video Playground. The playground is a wall full of seven game consuls with the newest Disney Interactive video games ready for anyone to play. I’m not into video games, but I was willing to give it a try. The new video game from Brave caught my eye (as all things princess does) and I started playing around with it while Matt played a WALL-E inspired game. I got so into the game that I didn’t realize that Matt was beside me until I heard him laughing at the faces I was making while trying to jump Merida across a river. After playing a little bit longer, I could tell Matt was itching to play so I handed over the controller. After finishing up there, we decided to explore the countries.

World Showcase

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The first country we made a stop at was Norway. We looked in the little shop and I got some Swedish jelly as a house warming gift for my friend, Michael. We then went on the ride, Maelstrom – A High Seas Norwegian Adventure. The ride was really cute, but by no means a high seas Norwegian adventure. After getting off our “boat” from “Norway”, I noticed that the main restaurant in Norway is Akershus Royal Banquet Hall. The restaurant advertises “Disney Princesses Storybook Dining inside a medieval castle with soaring archways and cathedral ceilings”. I’m defiantly going to have to go back to that one with my girlfriends!

After just perusing through some of the other countries, we finally made it to France. As we were waiting for it to come closer to our dinner reservation time, we saw Belle from Beauty and the Beast (my favorite princess) skipping along the fountain as she does in the movie. The seen got me really excited for dinner.

Les Chefs de France

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The interior of the restaurant was beautiful and reminded me of the actual France. Although, our waiter, Harry from Paris, France, was very nice and did not give me dirty looks for my lack of French speaking skills and everything was rushed in American fashion which brought me back to reality that I was indeed still in the US. This restaurant had the option so do a set price three course meal, which my mom and I took advantage of. I had their house salad, beef short ribs with pasta, and the puff choux with vanilla ice cream, all of which was very delicious. Since I was wearing my birthday button, the waiter knew we were celebrating my birthday and brought out my dessert with the rest of the waiting staff singing what I can only assume was the birthday song in French. All in all, a great experience. The only let down was that I had heard a rumor that Chef Remy from Disney’s Ratatouille made appearances in the restaurant, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Return to Epcot

Shannon reporting in to detail this week's Epcot visit with Neil and Ashleigh. We started the morning of July 5th (Friday) and decided it would be best to try to make our way to Soarin since none of us have ever been on it. Even though we arrived pretty early (at least for us) there was still a wait of about 90 minutes with fastpass returns at 4:15pm! Needless to say we sucked it up and hopped in line.

Soarin

The queue line is relatively bland with a few landscape paintings but not much else. However, we noticed the group behind us playing a trivia game on a phone and they looked like they were having a blast. Naturally we inquired about it. The game is called "Heads Up" and costs $0.99 in the App Store.

Here's how to play:

1. Fire up the app and chose a category.
2. Hit start and place the phone on your head with the screen facing your friends.
3. A subject appears and your friends start giving you hints.
4. If you guess right, you flip the phone down to count your guess.
5. If you don't know it, you have to keep guessing until time is up.
6. After a certain number of seconds the buzzer goes off and your score is tallied.
7. Pass the phone to the next friend and repeat!

It was good fun, but I just got too excited sometimes! I'm also pretty competitive, so that's probably half the problem.

Surprisingly we made our way through this line pretty quickly and we found ourselves boarding after only 60 minutes (vs. 90)! Moral of the story? Even though the line seemed outrageous our gamble was rewarded with a much shorter wait time, so don't let long queue times keep you from enjoying an attraction.

Onto the ride:

Soarin is a ride that takes you on a sensory simulated hang-gliding ride over many of California's feature highlights. The seats and environment are comfortable, but if you're afraid of heights this ride may not be for you.

After the ride the group agreed that it wasn't as exciting as we had hoped, but we were glad that we got to experience it at least once. I personally would have enjoyed it more if instead of California they let us fly through different Disney movies...but that's just me :).

Some things that might irritate the discriminating adventurer

• the video quality
• scene transitions
• the city scene it was very shaky

Still, overall the ride was enjoyable and Anna told us that's one of her favorites. Worst come to worst, the queue line is air conditioned and always will be a great place to seek refuge from the Florida sun.

After departing Soarin, we were greeted by our traditional Epcot rain (which happens every time we visit), but this passed in just a few minutes. Hunger struck so we decided to tour the countries and snack at the ethnic carts near each country that we had enjoyed during the Flower and Garden Festival. We traveled from country to country to discover that there were no carts! Only the permanent buildings were open and served a limited selection of just alcohol and desserts. This was a disappointing discovery and we're not sure why the food carts were closed. Since we were craving food, we stopped in China at Nine Dragons Restaurant.

Nine Dragons in China

Neil and I dined here for lunch not long ago during the Flower and Garden Festival.The entrees are filling and the prices are fair for a high-quality table service restaurant. We started with an appetizer of pot stickers, which were delicious. Then we shared the Nine Dragons Fried Rice and General Tso's Chicken entree between the 3 of us. It was all very delicious and there was very little left over when split 3 ways (this would have certainly been too much for 2).

By the time we finished lunch it was nearing 2:00pm so we had to depart in order to get Anna's birthday cake and reach Fort Wilderness in time.Fortunately there is plenty of shopping and grocery stores within a 10 minute radius of Disney and we stopped at Publix and picked up a Chocolate Lovers Delight. After that we moved on to Fort Wilderness and got there just in time. Be sure to read Anna's post about her birthday weekend!