Day 4: Mickey Treats, Data Sheets, & Animal Kingdom Streets

Our fourth day of math and the mouse was spent with lots of group work in the morning followed by a fun time in Animal Kingdom in the afternoon. For the first time of the trip, the group was finally able to sleep in. On their own time, groups woke up, grabbed hotel breakfast, and got to work on the Mickey Bar project. Today was all about Excel and Tableau! For part one of the project, groups had to figure out where to put two Mickey Bar stands throughout the day on one half of the park in order to maximize efficiency. In part two, groups were given a hypothetical scenario where one of the rides shut down for an hour and a half and were forced to adjust their Mickey Bar stand locations to account for this. Finally for part 3, you paired up with another group that was assigned a different side of the park and you put your data together with the new scenario of only having three Mickey Bar stands throughout the entire park for the day. These projects will be finalized and presented on Tuesday so today’s task was to mainly wrap up your calculations and match them with spots on the park map.

After groups felt like they were at a good stopping point for the day, the whole class headed to Animal Kingdom! This was the last park we had yet to visit so far on the trip so the group was excited to try new things! To start off we went to arguably the most famous section of the park, the Kilimanjaro Safari’s. This was a 25 minute drive through of the animal sanctuary part of the park with a tour guide pointing out all the animals and telling us fun facts on each. We got to see all sorts of animals experiencing their days as if no one was watching. Our group was lucky enough to see some giraffe’s, rhino’s, elephants, hippos, cheetah’s, and many more fun animals.

After this we headed to the best thrill ride of the park, Expedition Everest. This fast moving rollercoaster goes all throughout Mount Everest and encounters a scary Yeti. There’s even a part of this ride where the track appears to be broken so we have to move backwards and down hill throughout the mountain in the dark. This was definitely a fun one for those who had never experienced it before!

Shortly after riding Everest, we decided to switch things up from classic rollercoaster rides and headed towards the more screen and movie based ride of “Zootopia Everybody Together.” While Expedition Everest was a fast-paced, thrilling rollercoaster, “Zootopia Everybody Together” was a 3D short film that took place inside a large, stationary theater. The show still offered many thrills as the 3D had the characters jumping out towards us, and the theater sprayed the audience with water and rumbled our seats. Overall, it was a nice change of pace from Expedition Everest.

Following the Zootopia show, we moved on to another ride involving a screen and set off for Avatar Flight of Passage. Since this is the most popular ride in Animal Kingdom, we decided to buy a Lightning Lane for this ride. It ended up being a great decision as the stand by line was a whopping 125 minutes. Avatar Flight of Passage involves riding on a banshee (a large flying predator from the Avatar movies) and has a 3D screen that makes you feel like you are really in the world of Pandora. This ride was definitely spectacular with amazing visuals, and it really is no surprise that this is one of the most popular rides in all of Disney World.

After some hours spent in the scorching sun walking about the park, we decided it was time for dinner and stopped at Satuli Canteen right by the exit of Avatar Flight of Passage. The restaurant was Avatar-themed and had some exotic-looking desserts inspired by fruit from the movies. The entrees mainly consisted of rice and noodle bowls with choices of chicken, shrimp, chimichurri beef, and pork. Overall, the food was great, and while we did not try any of the desserts, they looked good from a distance.

Finally, the professors allowed us to split off for free time to enjoy the last two hours of the park until it closed at 8:00pm. Our first thought was to try to ride Avatar Flight of Passage again, but we quickly realized the wait time was far too long. We decided to settle on Expedition Everest, and it ended up being the right choice. The standby line read 20 minutes for the wait, but it actually only turned out to be a 5 minute wait as the line moved quicker than expected. Even though it was our second time riding it today, we all had a great time, and as we were walking out of the exit, we noticed the wait time read only 15 minutes. Collectively, we decided to hop straight back in line and got up to the front even quicker than before. Now that we were all Expedition Everest veterans at this point, we decided to start posing for the picture, as we were well aware of the spot where it was taken on the ride. After the ride finished, we all rushed towards the screens that showed the pictures from the ride and had a good laugh looking at our poses. We decided to continue this pattern, and because of the short wait time were able to ride Expedition Everest 4 consecutive times with a new pose for each ride. This was one of the most fun parts of the day, and we were still able to rush back to the entrance of the park to meet the professors at the agreed-upon time of 8:00. Overall, this was an amazing way to cap off a great day of work and play as we visited Animal Kingdom for the first but definitely not last time on this trip.

Today's blog entry was written by Harrison Brown and Dylan Daniels!