WDW Boardwalk and Downtown Disney

In addition to the four major parks, there are two other areas to explore, no admission tickets required: the Boardwalk and Downtown Disney. We skipped both of these areas on our last trip, so I was excited to check them out again.

We didn't spend long at the Boardwalk, which is mostly shops and restaurants, because we were really just passing through on our way to play mini-golf (more on that later). It was pretty quiet there in the morning, but I imagine there's a lot more happening at night. Still, it was a nice place to take a few pics. After mini-golf, we walked back through, took some more pics, and caught a boat over to Epcot, which is pretty nearby.

On the boat...slow but scenic 

in the Boardwalk Resort

At Downtown Disney, there's also a lot of shops, including the huge World of Disney store and the Lego store, which has some awesome Lego sculptures.

our favorite Lego sculpture

one of these things is not like the others....

There are also restaurants, an indoor theme park called Quest, and a venue for Cirque de Soleil. And, we could travel to and from Downtown Disney and our hotel by boat, which we did once at night and once during the day.

the blue building is Quest; the white is Cirque de Soleil

on the boat

We set aside a few hours one day to go to Quest, which we'd never done before. Unfortunately, the second "attraction" we did there (a virtual reality thing) made us both feel awful, so although we tried a few other things, we didn't feel well enough to stay, and we completely lost interest, even in the arcade-style games that Mark probably would have enjoyed if he hadn't been so queasy! In the end, we decided that this wasn't worth doing again!

However, I would like to go back to Downtown Disney to spend more time exploring the shops, and to see how the current construction/transition to "Disney Springs" turns out. We decided that if we do another long trip, we might not buy park tickets for our first day, and we could instead spend that time exploring our hotel and visiting Downtown Disney to stroll, shop, and have dinner. (I think this is what we did on the trip that my Grandparents hosted in 2007, actually).

This might also be the place to mention the water parks. Disney World has two: Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon. We spent one morning at Typhoon Lagoon, which was Mark's first water park experience. Thanks to a swim shirt and sunscreen, he didn't get sunburned at all! :-) We had fun, but we didn't take our camera, so there are no pictures to share. If you want to get an idea of what it looks like, this blog has some nice photos. Going in the morning was a great idea--we didn't wait in any lines, and we were able to have a full afternoon/evening doing other things.