2024.11 Disney Animal Kingdom during US Thanksgiving

2024.11 Disney Animal Kingdom

When you are planning to visit Disney World, and you don’t have time to visit all four parks, what’s the criteria you use? For us, our first pick was the zoo, err, Animal Kingdom!

Disney Animal Kingdom

As background, we have visited Walt Disney World twice — this trip was our third time together visiting the land of the Mouse. To me, this was the park I really wanted to visit — the Safari ride is a guided tour through a zoo, where barriers and fences are hard to find to us visitors making the experience even better. So, let’s go!

Upon arrival to the parking lot the basis of the theme park was evident on the parking area signage! We weren’t trying to be part of the initial morning rush, so we had a leisurely start to our day. There was a shuttle service that drove us to the entrance and it avoided an unnecessary walk through the parking lot. Before even entering Christmas decorations were in full swing:

Once inside, we visited the Pandora area, as it was under construction from our last visit. Our first ride of choice was the Na’vi River Journey. The upside of the waiting area for the ride was that almost all of it was covered from the sun. Avoiding the sun while waiting over 45 minutes for the ride was great. While in line, it gave us time to people watch. We noticed that some groups would continue to individually hide behind their phones, whereas others had loaded group games to play while in line. After the ride, we had lunch in the Pandora themed restaurant and the meal presentation was awesome, as this was the dessert:

We headed over to the Safari, and the line was long. It was also made longer by a large multigenerational family near us where the youngest child had been given a phone to watch and listen at full volume, their YouTube or Netflix kids show. The more annoying part out of it was the child’s complete meltdown the instant the parent (or grandparent) required the phone to answer a call. The screams were as if the child had lost a limb.

Eventually we were on board a truck, and off we went. Here is a slideshow of some of the animals we saw during our visit. It was excellent:

It was a wonderful time, and somehow we were at the park long enough that the sun had set as we were leaving the park. The Christmas tree outside of the gates were even more impressive being illuminated.