Day 2: EPCOT Future World

We’ll call this day our “good weather day.” We woke up with a little bit of jet lag on Sunday morning (SuperBowl day!) and decided that since the rain was coming on Monday, that we’d set out for gigantic EPCOT on our first day. So we hopped on our bus… and off we went!

First stop… TEST TRACK! This ride was almost open on my last trip, so I was excited that I’d finally get to ride on it. You can see Mr. M is pretty stoked as well:

We hopped into our cars after a 0.5 second wait in line (seriously… no one was there) and went off for our ride through GM’s testing facilities. Your car goes through lots of “test” situations, like testing its anti-lock brakes, corrosion and temperature simulations.

But the best part of the ride comes when you get to test out the car’s acceleration!

Test Track at Epcot Center from Kim M on Vimeo.

When we came back into the station, there was still no one else in line, so they said if we’d like to ride it again, we just needed to unbuckle/rebuckle our belts and we’d get to go again. Well…. why the heck not?!?  So we rode it again, which meant we missed out on our first “authentic” photo from the ride and had to settle for this one of me videotaping instead. :)

Then came the bad part of EPCOT. And by bad, I mean, “OMG I’m never going on that ride ever ever again” bad. The ride? Mission: SPACE. Think of the coolest and most authentic way to simulate a trip to Mars, and then realize that if you get the least bit carsick you’ll never be on that mission unless you’re drugged and asleep. They warn you about 1,000 times that the “orange” side of the ride is dangerous and icky and all that sort, but Mr. M didn’t believe me nor the videos and thought they were just there to psych you out. It was only when we climbed aboard our 4-seater ride vehicle and they lowered the console that we realized what we were in for! I was getting toe-tapping nervous from claustrophobia, and then the simulated “lift-off” began.

The ride pushes 2.5G’s on your chest to simulate space flight, and just in case you can’t handle it, there are barf bags sitting on the podium in front of you. I couldn’t find them when my eyes started to tear uncontrollably, so I just clamped my hands to my mouth and breathed as evenly as I could. In those warning videos, they tell you make sure that you keep your eyes focused straight ahead, never looking off to the side or closing them or else you might get really sick. I’m sure I was supposed to be pushing buttons to ensure the safety of the mission, but I only succeeded with that once… the rest of the times I was just focused straight on… straight on… omg don’t look to the side or else you’re going to lose your Nutrigrain bar!!!

Let’s just say we survived… only to walk out in the hall and find some of those passengers that, well, didn’t. We passed by them quickly, counting our blessings that we weren’t them, and at the same time thinking of the horrible job that the janitors have for that ride.

So we walked back to the front of the park and headed for gentle-moving rides… like Spaceship Earth!

You go through an audio-animatronic journey through the timeline of communication, as narrated by Dame Judy Dench, and get to take a little interactive journey as well! At the start of the ride, they snap your photo in the slowly moving train car. As your train winds back down through Spaceship Earth and backwards through the stars, they computer screen in front of you asks you a series of questions about your likes and dislikes. At the end of your ride, they create a little story of your future, and animate the characters with your photos! I thought it was a pretty cool way to personalize the ride!

[not a photo from our day, but rather someone’s else’s trip]

When you hop off the ride, you come upon a giant globe projected with the latest photos of visitors popping up on the screen. When your photo goes away, a small light illuminates on the map marking your home! (you tell them where you live in the interactive section) There were 3 other people from Northern California who had hopped on the ride that morning… and lots and lots of people from South America!

Our next journey took us to THE SEA — to visit Nemo and friends. The visit we took in our clam shell was a bit more comfy than a submarine ride, but it was short nonetheless. After our ride we hopped over to visit the manatees, the mini aquariums, and then for our favorite activity that is designed for children under age 10: TURTLE TALK! (Which is also at Disney’s California Adventure)

Cha dude! You, like, totally get to talk turtle with the totally righteous turtle dad himself: Crush! It’s really the coolest technology that lets kids talk to Crush and these two big kids right here always enjoy seeing the little kids ask questions and be amazed by what they see before their eyes. 

After that, we headed to THE LAND… where you get to explore all of the cool ways that people at EPCOT grow food and fish for the restaurants around the park. They also housed SOARIN’ (over California) in THE LAND, which seemed to be the most popular ride at the park that day. We decided to pass on it, since we’d been on it time and time again and instead opted for lunch over in the World Showcase…