Wild Africa Trek #7

Posted on by Ian C.

Today we revisited Disney Animal Kingdom for our first Wild Africa Trek since 2019; sadly it might be the last time since they’ve made changes that make it worse than it used to be … but first, the positives …

As always, we begin close to where the Kilimanjaro Safaris queue is, but we skip the queues and go our own way past hippos, over high walkways, and eventually to lunch with views of elephants:

After the Wild Africa Trek we walked the Gorilla Falls trail and I took a few photos of a single Meerkat, and some Gorillas:

I also took video at various times, and put it together to this sequence:

The downsides of this expensive trip, compared with previous times, were mainly that too much time is spent on the aerial walkways, which limits time at the lunch location – the lunch location is the best place to see animals including elephants, giraffes and more, but we had very little time there compared with previous visits. And the aerial walkway is largely a waste of time now; it used to be that you walked over a multitude of crocodiles, but now there is EXACTLY ONE, which is hardly an exciting event and moreover, the full group (12 people?) meant that Margaret and I could not even see the one crocodile when we stopped at the view point.

Disney needs to redesign this event, shortening the aerial walkway and omitting the pointless crocodile view, so there’s more time at the lunch spot. On previous trips the lunch stop also allowed a walk out to see the lion / rhino area, but that was not allowed on this visit “not enough time” – well who’s fault is that?!

Also: there’s supposed to be photos provided (especially important with the number of times we were not allowed to take our own photos, during the drive part) but it’s been a full day since we finished the visit when I type this, and there are no photos. Maybe they will show up, but a full day feels like it should be sufficiently long enough to get them out to us.

Disney, you did badly here. You took a lot of money and did not provide sufficient experience value.

Le Petit Paris Chocolate Bunnies

Posted on by Ian C.

This afternoon I spent a fun (and delicious smelling) time at Le Petit Paris, learning about the process of tempering chocolate and using it to create chocolate bunnies! Stefan showed us the tempering process of warming the chocolate to a specific temperature (which had been done before our arrival), cooling it by a specific amount (which he does by spreading on a metal table) then heating back a little (which he does either by mixing with some not-cooled chocolate, or using a heat gun!)

We then practiced pouring chocolate into molds (trying to get the air bubbles out) – we did this twice for each mold to give a thicker chocolate layer, with fridge time in between. As well as chocolate bunny shapes we did some egg shells and cases that we used later as chocolate stands!

Here’s a lot of delicious photos:

Here also is some video showing some of the tempering process:

X6 first annual service

Posted on by Ian C.

It’s already more than a year since I bought my X6 and even though it’s only driven about 3,700 miles, it’s time for an oil change. I booked it in at Fields BMW South Orlando because I’m still unhappy with the Winter Park location. In hindsight I should not have gone to the Winter Park location when I ordered this car – the only reason that I did was because their website claimed to have a vehicle in stock, and that wasn’t true anyway!

On the other hand, while service at the South Orlando location seems to be better, it was a pretty desolate place to hang out while I waited – there’s only maybe 6 display vehicles there, not a single salesman spoke to me when I looked at the display vehicles (they could not have known that I wasn’t a buyer) … there was happily made-to-order food service at lunchtime (I got a meatball sub). Overall I was at the dealership for about 1-1/2 hours, and headed home with a clean X6 with new oil.

I got this video inspection sent to me, which is quite amusing – the car is just a year old, driven hardly any miles, and unsurprisingly the tires are still perfect, the brakes are unused, and everything looks good!