Friday was spent at Epcot, or at least half of it; we still have to go back for the world tour bit. This was probably the bit I was looking forward to most. I have a memory, which I may have manufactured entirely, of an uncle telling me about a visit to Epcot. It seemed entirely foreign, a million miles away, and glamorous beyond words. And now I’ve been.

Lauren: My favourite thing at Epcot was by far the Universe of Energy when you saw a ladies dream where she met Dinosaurs and there was lots of anamatronics.
I also really enjoyed the test track where you go really fast

Sam: my favourite thing at Epcot was was defiantly the test track but I also liked the universe of energy

Yesterday we went to Disney’s Animal Kingdom.  We found this a better overall experience (not that Universal was bad by any means). I’ll let the kids tell you what their favourite bit was, but my guess is it was the same as Claire’s and mine.

Sam: my favourite part in animal kingdom was when we watched finding Nemo the musical.

Lauren: The Finding Nemo musical was really cool with the puppets and stuff and the Lion King play was also really good, I loved it when the lady flew using a bungy rope.

After a few days in Fort Lauderdale we’ve now made it to Orlando. Yesterday was Universal Studios, followed by a short visit to the Wet ‘n’ Wild water park to cool off. Here are the verdicts of our roving correspondents:

Lauren: I really enjoyed every ride in Unerversal Studios and I would love to go again sometime. Wet ‘n’ Wild was really fun as well The Surge water ride was awesome.

Sam: I liked yesterday when we went to the water park and went in the lazy river . I liked when we went to unerversal studios.my favourite ride was the woodpecker roller coaster

For the record, my highlight was seeing a young lifeguard with bigger moobs than me.

We saw the final episode at the weekend. I sat next to Lauren, and all through the ads and trailers she was actually vibrating with excitement; she pointed this out to me, but I’d noticed. I had to shush her multiple times, as she wanted to share so much of what she was thinking during the film. One point when I didn’t say anything was when there were tears rolling down her face at some unfortunate event.

Afterwards the kids competed to see who was least scared by the scary bits.

Sam went away for a long weekend camping with a friend’s family in the New Forest. They stayed in a camper van, possibly with associated tent (I didn’t follow the details) and had a whale of a time. In fact we’ve all to go there at some point, apparently.

Lauren enjoyed the weekend almost as much as Sam, partly because Phoebe came for a sleepover, but also because Sam wasn’t here.