Visiting Animal Kingdom Park in the Evening | Our British Family Holiday to Orlando Disney
Here’s another one of our mini Disney diaries: sharing about our afternoon at the Disney hotel pool followed by a visit to the Animal Kingdom park for the evening…
First up lets start with why we decided to go the Disney park in the evening rather than the day. I’d actually got advice from a seasoned Disney goer at the hotel swimming pool, when we happened to get chatting from our sun loungers earlier in the week. She’d suggested going to parks early evening was a good idea to miss the crowds, with 5pm being the sweet spot arrival time to have a calmer experience as a family, yet still enough time for enjoy the rides before closing. I’d also previously read before going on holiday that out of all the Disney parks, the Animal Kingdom can often feels the hottest because of the way its been designed, especially as there’s not a lot of shade to be found. So with all this in mind Animal Kingdom Park felt the best one to plan for an evening trip.
This blog makes up part of my blog series sharing all about our Florida Holiday from the UK to Disney World and Universal Studios. You can find all the different guides and lots more mini Disney Diaries over on my round up feature bringing all the different parts of the holiday together – Planning a Trip to Florida From the UK.
For families comparing park days, this Disney World planning guide can help with park hours, crowd patterns, weather and wait times before choosing dates.
An Afternoon at the Pool at Animal Kingdom Lodge
As we’d decided to not go out until the evening, today was the first day since arriving in Florida that we didn’t need to rush to get up and out of the hotel.
After so many consecutive park days, it felt nice taking everything slow and not having anywhere to be for a change. We grabbed pastries for breakfast and spent the morning at the swimming pool. Finally just sitting in one spot was lovely. I read my book, while my husband played with the kids in the pool.
Lunch at The Mara, Animal Kingdom Lodge Resort
We then had a late lunch in The Mara, the short order restaurant at Animal Kingdom Lodge. The food is pretty similar to other fast food Disney places we’d been to. Chicken tenders, caesar salads, pizza’s, fries and the like. Their pizza’s were actually flat breads and I’d say they are their best offering, with some nice flavour combinations and light bases. There isn’t a huge amount of choice though, for a hotel café you will most likely be visiting multiple times, but for what there is, it always tasted nice and we never had to wait long.
We didn’t sit outside much at The Mara, as there were often a lot of bugs flying about, but there’s plenty of tables to sit inside and in our experience it was always clean. My only little quibble was it was always so cold in there. Air con throughout our holiday was always very welcome after the stifling Florida heat, but it felt a lot colder than other places indoors in The Mara Restaurant. This wasn’t helped by the fact that we were then often already cold or wet when we went in, from being in the swimming pool for ages. It’s not a big deal but if for another Orlando trip in the future, I’d pack thicker pool cover ups and also a couple of jumpers to wear once climatized when we were in the aircon for long periods of time, such as some of the restaurants and shopping malls.
Is it Better to Visit Disney Animal Kingdom Park in the Evening?
After a quick change we headed down to the hotel mini bus station and got on the Animal Kingdom bus. It’s a quick transfer, being the Disney park that’s closest to the hotel. Our early evening arrival at the park was also a refreshing change in comparison to being confronted by masses of crowds in the heat when we’d arrived at the other Disney theme parks on previous days.
We got there around 5pm and there were no queues at all at the ticket gates and we were able to walk straight in. My only mini paranoia when we arrived was the feeling I got when walking in, that we were going against the tide. So, with the constant stream of people leaving, walking past us, I kept checking the closing time, worried we’d got it wrong and were about to really disappoint the kids. But it was fine and all those crowds leaving, actually left it far calmer and quieter for us to all enjoy.
I love the way all the different Disney parks feel so different. On walking in, the sight of the Tree of Life is impressive. It’s vast – standing at 145 feet tall and perfectly framed with the backdrop of the rest of the parks horizon, spanning out as far as you can look in every direction – it makes an amazing back drop for pictures.
My daughter Rose loves animals and as this park was the one she was most looking forward to, we let her choose the first ride. With it being the evening and not knowing how long things would run, we also thought it was a good idea to do the attractions we wanted to experience the most first. Having enjoyed being surrounded by the animals on the savannah at the hotel so much, she chose the Disney safari ride.
We used a Lightning Lane to book the safari, but other than that, because it was so quiet, we then didn’t need to use the Disney app to book any other rides again all evening. This made a nice break from having to plan out the rides to go on next, depending on their app availability, as we had been previously doing, most other park days.
Back to the safari – I was imagining just a short themed ride, but the Animal Kingdom safari experience was so much better and longer than I expected. We were picked up in an extended jeep with lots of rows that fit groups of four, to all be driven around the Savannah, while also listening to an interesting and engaging guided tour by the driver.
There was a huge array of different species to spot and you are driven pretty close to the inhabitant animals, who are obviously very used to the jeeps too, so it never felt too intrusive. All while the driver/guide talked us though all the different species and their characteristics. Rose was enthralled the entire trip, as were the rest of us.
To be honest if we’d just come out for the evening and only done the safari, I feel we all could of left happy, it felt such an experience.
After the safari we walked straight out and into the attraction next door the Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail. Disney describes it as “A lush and sprawling tropical forest providing opportunities for the troops of gorillas to rest, communicate, interact, hide and explore.” It’s a peaceful and beautiful environment to walk through and there were plenty of opportunities to get up close to the gorillas.
Another nice touch in this and many of the other large enclosures dotted around the park, is that there were often also Disney rangers on hand stationed on the walk ways to talk to visitors.
Both my children loved asking them questions and finding out about all the different animals at the park. Going through this and the other animal experiences at the park, made for a nice leisurely evening stroll which we all enjoyed. A real contrast to the hustle and rush we felt at some other parks getting around all the different rides, especially doing so in the Florida heat during the day.
We did still then manage to fit in a few rides here and there and the one my son loved especially, was the rapids. In hindsight, I feel I should have paid more attention to how wet through the people coming off looked though, as I got absolutely soaked, so was then pretty cold afterwards! So, I’d recommend it as a ride best visited during the day when its warmer! It was great fun though – a good one to go on, if you don’t want anything too high and scary but still a pretty good adrenaline buzz, as you fly round the rapids trying to avoid the waterfalls.
What are the Fossil Fun Games Like at Animal Kingdom Park?
After we’d gone on enough rides, an unexpected highlight of visiting Animal Kingdom was the fun fair style games we spent some time at in Dino Land. Fossil Fun Games is a set of different stalls that you pay to then play and compete to win dinosaur themed cuddly toys. We came across these just before leaving and although only a little thing, it really made the perfect end to our evening.
I admit, I was pretty cynical to begin with. Having to pay for tickets to play, I assumed it would be similar to UK funfair stalls where often when the prizes looked good, its then generally crazy hard to win. With us all feeling tired at the end of the day, I was dubious, thinking a little go on a stall on the way out, could easily transform into upset grumpy kids for the journey home. But I was very wrong!
The games were set up, so that one of the contestants playing always won and as there wasn’t many places at each stall to take park in every single game, there was a good probability to win and in some cases it was just us as a family playing against each other! The children absolutely loved it when one of us won a cuddly toy and were so excited in each game whether they were watching or taking part. (The prizes were all brightly coloured cute dinosaurs toys, that have now served to be a nice reminder at home of our trip)
Now it wasn’t cheap and I confess we probably spent more than we would normally getting caught up in the moment, but it was a lot of fun. In fact such a little thing but when I look back, this was one of my Disney highlights – all of us competing getting so excited when we won and then my daughter so happy holding onto the toys on the walk out and watching the kids play with them on the way home together.
Some great Disney products I’ve found online, perfect for a Disney holiday…
You can also find out lots more about the rest of our Disney world holiday over on my other UK family Disney blogs:
Our Disney Diary – a day at Epcot Eating our way around the World
