15 Days to 15 Years- 2004

Thank you for visiting 15 Days to 15 Years– our homage to the upcoming 15th Anniversary of Disney’s Animal Kngdom.  Beth and I are thrilled to welcome Rosanne @DisneyRoe and her cast member’s “point of view”  to the series today!

I remember my first trip to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It was August 1998 and we were excited to experience a new park. We weren’t quite sure what to expect, except it was “Nahtazu.”

Anybody
who has ever visited Orlando in August knows one thing for sure. It
WILL be hot. It WILL be uncomfortable. And you WILL NOT be able to
escape the heat no matter what. Here is what I remember:

• The Tree of Life was breathtaking.
• The Festival of the Lion King was one of the best shows on Disney
  Property – but at the time it was in an outside theater directly in the
  sun. (read: brutal)
• Everyone wanted to see the new park and the lines were LONG. Especially Kali River Rapids which was one escape from the heat.
• There were a lot of bright points like the still amazing Kilimanjaro
  Safaris, Countdown to Extinction (now called Dinosaur) and It’s Tough
  to be a Bug.

Needless
to say, we didn’t have the fabulous experience that we were looking
for. However, that was before my personal DAKlamation in 2004.

What
is DAKlamation? Lets break it down. DAK is Disney’s Animal Kingdom. So
DAKlamation is an acclamation to Animal Kingdom. DAKlamation is also the
official class that every new Animal Kingdom cast member must take on
their first day of work. In 2004 when I began my College Program I was
assigned to work at Space Mountain. I didn’t get to do the official
DAKlamation class because I worked in the Magic Kingdom and we had a
class called “Once Upon a Time is Now.”

My personal DAKlamation was very different. Quite often during my College Program we visited Animal Kingdom. I learned about the park on a much more intimate level with my roommates. We walked the beautiful trails, took the train to Conservation Station. We watched DeVine for hours. We sipped tea while watching the animals roam.

We literally took trips to Animal Kingdom JUST to watch the Festival of the Lion King and come home. (Now in a beautiful, air-conditioned theater)

By Raul654 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

In addition, we got to watch the amazing construction of Expedition Everest. It was so much fun to see the progress week after week. When we got to ride it finally we were excited to say we saw it built beginning in 2004.


Thank you for stopping by! Thanks to Donna and Beth for hosting as always! Please follow The Disney Point for more posts like this one!




And you must stop by Rosanne’s blog to learn more about her experiences in the Walt Disney World College Program (and that famous Disney “point”), and her special relationship to Disney Parks ever since!  Please follow her “once upon a time is now” attitude on Facebook and Twitter, and visit her 30 Days to 30 Years post as well. 


2005 and @adisneymom Beth are on deck!!