Jedi trippie - part 26

[Dawn]

I've got worms in dirt

Universe of Energy was next and Nanny Lesley took the opportunity to draw attention to herself by once again photographing the roof of the pavilion. I can’t explain why, apparently it’s a craft thing. Anyway we only have a few minutes to wait before we are herded into the theatre where we all sit on the floor before being told to stand up. The Ellen story is the same as last time; she does get on my nerves a bit sometimes but the movie is still quite funny: Stupid Judy. We trooped forward into our big moving car things for the visit with the dinosaurs. Harry fell asleep here so missed the whole thing; shame as he does like dinosaurs, but somehow he still managed a few hours later to give the attraction a “not gairy,” rating. In fact he said the whole thing was great. Curious.

As Harry was still asleep as we exited Universe of Energy, we decided to give Wonders of Life a miss and return later if we had time to play on all the toys there. We had about 40 minutes to kill before our lunch seating time came around so we headed for the best place to kill 40 minutes in Epcot: Mousegear! We worked it out as 20 minutes browsing time, 5 minutes collecting time, 5 minutes checking out time, 5 minutes walking to The Land time, and we’d arrive 5 minutes early for our Priority Seating time, as instructed to by WDW Dining. So off we went. We browsed. We chose. We collected. We lined up at checkout. We had the slowest checkout CM I’ve ever come across in the whole history of my trips to Disney World. They weren’t even an “Earning My Ears,” CM, they were just slow. Really slow. I can see our PS time creeping closer. Adrian starts to fret, as he does when things like this happen. He wants to run ahead and secure our table. I hope this won’t be necessary as we at last make the front of the line where the slow motion CM proceeds to fold everything very deliberately and begin to place it into a bag for us. Then of course we have to fill in the form for resort delivery as we’ve bought a lot of stuff. Then we have to go through the same procedure with Big Steve and Lisa’s purchases. In case you are wondering, there was only one other checkout open and that had a huge line, probably due to everyone seeing how slow our line was moving.

We practically flew across to The Land, threw the buggies into the parking area, burst through the doors and charged up to the podium outside the Garden Grill and announced our arrival, bang on our 1.10pm seating time. We are checked in and handed our flashy/beepy thing and half of us collapse on the benches in the waiting area, while the other half visit the restrooms. Of course our flashy/beepy thing started to flash/beep while the restroom half were still ensconced in said restrooms so there was a bit of a delay before we were shown to our booth. We had a whole booth section to ourselves, and Steven’s highchair slotted neatly between the two tables in the area.

We hadn’t even had the chance to give our drinks order when Mickey and Pluto appeared from nowhere to say hello. There was much photographing and signing of autograph books and much one-way conversing by Harry. Steven got to meet the top mouse and I think he was impressed. He certainly acted as though he knew that Mickey was very important, and only tried to shove his hand in his mouth once.

Our drinks arrived, along with a couple of loaves of wonderful bread, and a chipmunk dressed as a farmer. After a quick chat with Harry and Ellie the chipmunk moved to our end of the booth and started to play with Steven. After a couple of minutes, and a photo, I asked Chip if he would sign Steven’s book for him. Chip took the book, signed it, then turned the book round to show everyone that he had written, “Dale.” Oh the shame of it, confusing Chuck and Dave like that. I swear I do know the difference: a CM in the Regent St Disney Store taught me many years ago that Chip/Chuck has a brown nose like a chocolate chip. I swear that Dale/Dave had a brown nose. Well it looked brown to me. I didn’t think to count the teeth, I just saw a brown nose and called him Chip. I was forced to crawl down under the table and hide in shame until Dale/Dave had left us. Luckily he was very forgiving and came back two more times before we finished our lunch.



We had two loaves of bread on our tables so Lisa sliced one for their end of the table and Adrian took charge of the one at our end. Curiously, he decided to cut it into wedges like a cake, much to the amusement of our server who had just arrived with our food. It is all-you-can-eat here but is bought to your table for you in metal skillets. There was catfish sticks, slices of turkey and pork, broccoli and carrots, mashed potato, and a bread sauce/stuffing thing. All of it was very nice and we all had seconds of everything. Chip – the real one – visited during lunch and spent ages playing with Steven who was having a whale of a time. Steven ate the same as us here – bread and mashed potato and broccoli from the adult’s skillets, and macaroni and cheese from the kid’s skillets, which also had chicken strips and fries in them.

Our server tried to trade Harry for the boy on the next table but Harry was having none of it. Shame, because the other boy was very well behaved, not that Harry wasn’t, it would just have been nice to have a change. Anyway, every time our server came round Harry would yell, “it’s that man again,” and he’d ask that man to send Chip back round because he wanted to show Chip his worms in dirt which he had for dessert. The grown-ups got apple crisp and vanilla ice cream for dessert and it was delicious. Then Mickey came back round and was helping Ellie do her puzzle sheet but he kept getting distracted by Harry who was telling everyone that went past our booth that he had worms in dirt. Dale came around again and set about tickling Harry, which he thought was great fun. We lingered there for quite a while before paying our check and making our way out of the restaurant, pausing only to visit the restroom of course.

There now followed a very strange incident. Unfortunately you will have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happened.

[Jodie]

There's a knack for always choosing the slowest queue!



Jodie

[josh.p.]

oh they are so exciting.. i wanna know about the wierd incident!

[Tink]

Look at the face on that precious boy! He's not sure if this is supposed to be fun or not. Looks a bit like he is ready to bolt if the Chipmunk on Steriods makes a move towards him!

[Dawn]

He's actually thinking "is this Chuck or Dave?"