Friday, January 8, 2010

My Disney Vacation, Part 4 - The Extras

There are several attractions at Disney World that don't fall into the "Kingdom" category. These include Downtown Disney, The Disney Boardwalk, some mini-golf courses, multiple real golf courses and a couple of water parks.

Given that the weather was cool (temps in the 60's most of the time), we didn't do any water parks, and I didn't play golf. However, we did play mini-golf at Fantasia Gardens mini-golf course. It was fun, but not the most spectacular mini-golf course ever. There was a "precision putting" mini-golf course at the same location. It looked really neat, but was going to be a 2 hour round, which was more time than we wanted to spend.

The Boardwalk at Disney is on a lake near Hollywood Studios. There are several restaurants and shops on the Boardwalk, including Kouzzina. The ESPN zone at Disney is also on the Boardwalk. We didn't spend a ton of time at the Boardwalk, but did enjoy the time we had there.

Downtown Disney was a really nice surprise for us. On our first day there, we decided to check it out. We really didn't think we would spend much time there. When we got there, though, we were shocked at how fun it was. It's just shops, restaurants, night clubs and a movie theater, but like all of Disney, the atmosphere can't be beat.

We stopped at a T-shirt shop, and my wife made a custom T-shirt to commemorate our vacation. We also got Mickey Mouse Ears for the kids. We walked around for a while, and eventually found ourselves at the movie theater. On a semi-whim, we decided to see "Sherlock Holmes", which we both really liked (detailed movie review later). After the movie, we were on our way back to the bus stop and we heard a music group playing. The name of the group is Nova Era, and they play classical music with a new age twist. It was really neat music, and we ended up buying 1 of their CDs. This ended a really fun night at Downtown Disney, about 3-4 hours after we thought it would end.

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