How Many Days In A Row Will We Wear Tie Dye (or Disney 2009 review): Part 8.1featured

Sorry for the delay…we’re doing some preemptive planning ;o)

Pic disclaimer: You know the drill. Don’t grab ’em without my permission.

Today was our long-awaited Animal Kingdom day. Well, long-awaited for me. Stephanie doesn’t like most of the rides at Animal Kingdom, so she didn’t want to spend any time there. Mom could take or leave Animal Kingdom, grandma has never been to Animal Kingdom and never really wants to, but I love Animal Kingdom. The theming at Animal Kingdom is nothing short of spectacular (and, in my opinion, is amongst the best of all the parks) and I hadn’t been to Animal Kingdom since 2001, so I was anxious to get back and see how it’s changed.

I planned a breakfast for us at Boma at the Animal Kingdom Lodge since I’d heard that they had a fantastic breakfast (and because we love visiting the AKL…we’d probably stay here if it weren’t so far removed from everything but Animal Kingdom). Since we’d need to bus it over, I planned a later breakfast than normal. The idea was that we could sleep in a little later and take our time since we only had a few things to see at Animal Kingdom. Grandma would sleep in and rest and we’d come back in the early afternoon and all go to Magic Kingdom. But you know what they say about plans…they’re made to be broken.

We had an 8:50 am reservation at Boma. I figured it would take an hour to get there and our best route was to walk to the Magic Kingdom bus depot to catch the bus. We only got an extra 10 or 15 minutes of sleep before we had to get up, and Mom decided she didn’t want to go to breakfast and would rather sleep so she stayed in with grandma and would meet us at the park.

So Stephanie and I grabbed some water bottles out of the freezer, got our bags ready and headed out to the Magic Kingdom walkway. It’s not a long walk from the BLT to the Magic Kingdom, maybe 15 minutes at a slow pace along a manicured (and at night, a well-lit) path, with the bus depot situated around the half-way point between the resort and the front gates of the park.

Halfway into our short walk, I was hit with intense leg cramps. Again. These just weren’t going away and the sensible part of me knew it would only go away with a few days off my legs. Still, the not-so-smart part of me refused a wheelchair, a scooter or rest of any kind, even though I was almost in tears with pain. We called Mom, who all but insisted on calling our family orthopedic (who has seen both Mom and Stephanie through on various leg and back problems while we’ve been on vacations), but I knew what he’d say and insisted I just needed her to go to the Fantasia Market and get me some Aleve, since it would be more powerful than the Motrin I’d been taking (and was now out of).

We kept on with our walk and were shortly at the Magic Kingdom bus depot. As the park hadn’t opened yet (and wouldn’t be for another hour), bus service was slow and almost non-existent. Looking back, we probably should have taken a bus or monorail to whatever park was having early hours and caught a bus to the AKL from there. We waited for 10 minutes before a bus driver saw us waiting and asked us what we were waiting for. When we told him that we had a breakfast reservation at the AKL, he offered to drive us over when his bus came. A private chartered Disney bus to our breakfast? That’s my kind of magic.

The last time we had been at the Animal Kingdom Lodge was a year before, when Kidani Village was still being built, so we had no idea the bus service had changed, but we knew we weren’t where we were supposed to be when he dropped us off at the Kidani bus stop. We walked inside, totally lost, and were directed to go back to the bus stop, take whatever bus came first and it would stop at the Jambo House (or main building). We were running pretty late by this point, so we hopped on a bus and Stephanie made a beeline to Boma to check us in while I made my way over. They gave her a beeper and we had a short wait before we were called, which was kind of odd since the restaurant had a sparse few patrons.

You’re probably bored of hearing me talk about theming, but I don’t think any Disney resort does it better than the Animal Kingdom Lodge. I could probably sit in that lobby for an hour or two and not be bored. I love walking around the grounds and looking around because there’s just so much to see (and then I work up an appetite for the delicious falafel pita they serve over at the Mara). Boma is no exception to the Animal Kingdom Lodge rule- the theming is fantastic. The space is very open, almost emulating an open air market, and I love the way it’s set up. Unlike Chef Mickey’s, where most everything is set out on in a linear fashion with one line, Boma has stations called pods, each one with different offerings. This diffuses the lines a bit, as there’s no need to wait in line to reach the eggs at the end of the line if all you want is eggs because the eggs are at a separate station.

I dropped my stuff off at our table and went to take pictures of the food while there was no one up at the buffet while Stephanie placed our drink orders. When I got back, she warned me that we had one of “those” servers…you know…the kind that can ruin a nice meal for you with their attitude. Our server, Brenda, seemed pleasant enough when she returned with some Frunch (a combination of lemonade, pineapple juice, guava juice, orange juice and papaya juice) and coffee, but then she put Stephanie on the spot and all but demanded that she recite every juice in the Frunch. I’m sure she was trying to be funny, but it almost came off as a teacher giving her least favorite student a pop quiz. Brenda’s interaction with us was minimal, even for a buffet. It took forever to get plates cleared and we weren’t offered juice refills until the very end, despite our cups going empty pretty early on (we had a carafe of coffee on the table, but Stephanie doesn’t like coffee like I do).

The lapse in service was disappointing because I thought Boma was one of the best breakfasts we had during the week, certainly the best buffet Disney has to offer (that we’ve tried, anyways). The food is flavorful, especially for mass-produced food that sits there under heat lamps, and the options are plentiful and in great variety. Beyond the basics (eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, cereals, fruits, etc), Boma has a custom omelette station, a variety of hot cereals and even a carving station. There’s no going hungry here, even for the most finicky eater. And the bacon was firm and crispy! That’s a rarity on ANY buffet anywhere!

We both started with some scones and muffins and a bowl of fruit. The scones were small but mighty, packing a nice, sweet flavor in the soft, crumbly scone. They might be the best scones I’ve had since we were in New York at Alice’s Tea Cup (though it might take 20 Boma scones to match the size of one of Alice’s scones). The fruit was excellent as well, sweet and succulent and perfectly ripe.

I went straight for the protein next and loaded my plate with the aforementioned perfectly crispy bacon, some sausage and some potatoes and decided to try both the regular scrambled eggs and the goat cheese and chive scrambled eggs. I left most of the potatoes (too heavy) and only had a bite or two of the sausage, but that bacon was sooooo good. Crunchy and salty and just perfect. I ended up preferring the regular eggs to the goat cheese eggs. Here’s the thing: I love chives and I love goat cheese. I’m the only one in my family who actually loves goat cheese (Stephanie likes it sometimes, I’ve never seen grandma try it and Mom abhors it). I cook with it a lot at home, usually when I make pizza. So I thought I’d love the goat cheese and chive eggs, but it was almost too heavy on the goat cheese flavor. I thought the soft cheese melted well into the fluffy eggs, and the sprinkling of chives was a nice touch, but it was really goat cheese overload when I really just wanted some plain and simple eggs with a dash of salt and pepper.

I really wanted to try the Pap (a hot cereal) and some of the other different foods on the line, but I was rapidly approaching full, so Stephanie went up and made us a plate of scones and sweet rolls to share while I finished our carafe of coffee and Stephanie attempted to spot Brenda to get more juice.

Here’s my major gripe with Brenda’s service: we were sitting with our plates stacked, waiting for Brenda to come over so we could get the cheque, for about 15 minutes. Brenda was nowhere to be found. She only had one other table, a large table (which is probably why she gave them more attention…she’d get a guaranteed 18% gratuity out of them), but she was nowhere to be found during most of our meal. It took her another ten minutes to pick the cheque back up, even though we had it up and waiting for her, and another five to run it. Her service was slow and her demeanor wasn’t pleasant. We let her know we were unsatisfied with her service with the tip we left (buffet our not, I’ll usually always tip at least 20%, but I wasn’t going to tip her my customary 20% for ignoring us for the duration of our meal). The meal came to $36.19, and we used two meal credits. Stephanie wanted to stop at the front desk to tell them how unsatisfied we were with the service, but Mom called us and was waiting for us at Animal Kingdom (I didn’t even know she had left the hotel yet!) so we walked through the lodge to the bus stop to go meet up with her.