Walt Disney World Vacation Epcot

Epcot is the best children’s museum on steroids and then it had quintuplets.  This was my kids’ favorite kingdom at Disney World.  It was the ultimate field trip for us.

Pick your fast pass for Epcot

Disney created a tiered system for their fast passes at Epcot, you can Fast Pass either Test Track or Soaring.  My recommendation, whichever one you don’t Fast Pass head straight to that one because the line for it will be insanely long for the rest of the day.  Beyond that we used a Fast Pass for Test Track the first time at Epcot and Soaring our second day there.  Other good choices for fast pass: Mission SPACE and Spaceship Earth.  Most of the rest of the possibilities are for large shows and probably don’t really need a fast pass.

They are in the midst of revising the Norway ride into a Frozen ride, I’m sure when that releases you want to make that your fast pass.

What not to miss at Epcot

My kids loved the Innoventions East and West, we spent most of our time there.  There’s several small activities you can do at each one.  Innoventions West had a very fun investments (yes money) game we did 4 or 5 times, it is well worth trying it out (see the picture up above).  Innoventions East had two of the kids favorite activities: Design your own roller coaster and then ride it, and Habit Heroes (you’re trained as super heroes to fight bad habits).

 

World Showcase was their next favorite part.  It was fun walking through all of the areas and seeing the different lands.  My kids loved seeing the different cultures and we spent a lot of time at each of their favorite countries (Italy, China, Norway, and United States), going back to them a couple of times.

On the subject of the World Showcase.  There are some amazing street shows you can catch as you walk through there.  There’s Chinese acrobats, a guy who balances on stacked chairs in France (that was amazing), and more things than I can list.  Take your time through there.  Another cool feature, the workers in the World Showcase are frequently from the country you’re “visiting.”  Batman is very interested in China and learning Chinese and the people working in that area gave him extra information (including his name written in Mandarin), and talked for a very long time.  If I lived in Florida I’d have easy access to the best geography lesson ever.

There is a secret agent mission you can complete from Phineas and Ferb, but my kids had absolutely no interest in it.  From what I saw of other kids, it’s a really fun activity.  They also have a World Passport at each of the countries where you can get a stamp and a small craft at each country.

 

Things to be aware of at Epcot

They have about 200 warnings as you go into Soaring fear of heights, falling, blah, blah, blah.  They overstate it a lot.  The warnings were so over the top the first time Princess back out as we were getting on.  In reality if you can ride an airplane you can ride on Soaring.  It is nowhere near as bad as they make it sound.

Towards the end of the Innoventions area they have a Coke store, inside you can sample international Coke flavors as much as you want, so that can be a fun way to get some liquids into you.

Many of the rides had special games afterwards, and on Spaceship Earth we spent almost an hour exploring possible future technologies, like this shuffleboard game where you have to get energy moved to where it is needed.

 

Fireworks at Epcot

 

Each kingdom at Disney has their own super special light show.  Epcot’s happens over the lake the World Showcase surrounds.  You can use a Fast Pass to get a better seat (which I could easily argue for doing that).  We were over by the American Square and found a fairly decent spot.  The nice thing about Epcot’s show you can get a pretty good view no matter where you are because so much of it is high in the air.

 

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