Birthday Celebration in EPCOT

Although tomorrow is my 54th birthday, the celebration was a day early as Brett, Cameron, Doug and I headed to EPCOT early this morning.  It was the last week of the Food & Wine Festival and the perfect place to celebrate.  Traffic was a little heavy on the way to Orlando, but we still made it just as the park opened.  We started our day with a ride on Remy.  It was fun as usual.  We then walked right on Test Track through the single rider line.  Somehow we all ended up in the same car anyway and only had to wait ten minutes instead of seventy.  That was fantastic.  We tried Soarin' after that, but it had broken down and the wait time was well over an hour.  Cameron and I instead went to Figment while Brett and Doug waited for Margaritas.  We all met up afterward to start our tour around the countries.

The first food on our list was the impossible meatballs at Earth Eats.  They were very good.  We next went to Mexico to try out their food before walking through Norway and China.  Doug and Cameron found food at Kenya while Brett and I tried several dishes at India.  Brett found a pretzel at Germany while I tried a pineapple beer.  Cameron talked about getting Sushi in Japan, but decided on the octopus instead as he had never had it.  After that Doug and I had just enough room left to get a Welsh Dragon and Bumblebee from England.  The boys spent their time walking through the rest of the countries finishing their Remy hunt.  They found each and every one of them earning a souvenir cup from the gift shop.  Although the prize was fun, the hunt was the best part.  

At 1:30 we headed to the monorail to park hop to Magic Kingdom.  We only had a couple of hours before Brett and Cameron had to be back at EPCOT for their spot in the virtual queue at Guardians of the Galaxy.  Cameron had never ridden it and Brett really wanted him to try it.  While at Magic Kingdom the four of us had time to ride Pirates of the Caribbean and Big Thunder Mountain.  We then split off so that Brett and Cameron could ride Splash Mountain while Doug and I enjoyed the new Mickey's Philharmagic.  

We returned to EPCOT just as it was getting dark.  We had time to try a few more food booths including Mac & Cheese, Fire Eats and Mexico.  While the boys were riding Guardians, Doug and I listened to the Sugar Ray concert in the American Pavillon.  We were surprised by how many people were there as we didn't really know the 90s singer.  Once he started, however, we did recognize three of his songs.  

The boys met us back in Belgium where Brett got a Belgium Waffle while Doug picked out cheese bread from Brazil.  Cameron wanted to get Escargot, but they were out of it in France, so he tried their beef instead.  We toured the store in England looking at the Monty Python and Beatles merchandise before getting our last food of the night - chocolate pudding cake from Ireland.  It was fantastic as always.  We left right at 8:30.  I was absolutely exhausted, but extremely happy with my 54th birthday celebration a day early.