Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern

I traveled to Florida this past month for a true, honest-to-god, whirlwind of a vacation. You could consider this a return trip, since technically I have been to Orlando before. That first visit is hazy in my mind, like I’m looking through fogged glass — because it was nearly 30 years ago, at this point. My family (including mom, dad, brother, cousin, aunt, and grandma) went to Disney when I was five. I’m not sure my brother even remembers it, and my then-two-year-old cousin definitely doesn’t.

My friend Soph of Uncultured Palate wanted to make some content for her food and travel site about the annual food and wine festival at Epcot, and I wanted to take a vacation, so we combined our powers (and money) and got to planning. In a lot of ways, this was a trial run for future vacations. We both love to travel, but hadn’t done it together yet, and we had to know what it would be like!

Pinned together at the park

The true reason that Epcot was our original destination was, as I mentioned, because Soph wanted to get some good film and photos of all the yummy food and drinks during the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival. She didn’t have to twist my arm too hard to go, though — I have been trying to travel more, to take time off work that isn’t just dedicated to catching up on sleep or other life activities. This seemed like a good opportunity to stretch our travel legs. Like a trial run for more complicated travel (think international). So this was, in every sense of the word, baby steps for international travel.

The international food and wine festival consisted of different booths scattered around the park with foods and drinks representative of the countries displayed. Epcot is organized in a big loop, kind of a horseshoe, with the giant golf ball (the quintessential image you think of when you think “Epcot”) at the entrance as a landmark to gauge your progress around the horseshoe, since you can see it from everywhere in the park. The idea was to go and try food at every stand. And at this? We utterly failed. We got drinks at several stands and got food in England and at the beginning of the loop. We got lots of foodstuffs at other places around the park. A sausage in Germany. A funnel cake in USA. Tacos in Mexico.

The problem? We hardly got any of the “festival” foods! We were just filling our faces with food that looked good.

And you know? I’m not sad about it. We got some amazing snacks and drinks, saw some kick-ass birds, and spent time in the warm Florida sun. I bought several pins for my collection.

And Soph’s video about the festival has some extremely good tidbits:

We also experienced a couple interesting rides while there, including a motion-based 3-D movie experience called Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure and Spaceship Earth (you know, the one actually inside the big golf ball). Spaceship Earth was especially interesting, with the uncanny valley of it all rearing its head and staring me straight in the face. If you’ve never had an opportunity to experience this ride, I highly recommend it, if only for the unintentional horror that is the animatronic characters placed throughout the ride. These characters felt… so real. They breathed, they blinked. I was tired enough, and it was dark enough, that I felt like if I watched for just a few more minutes, they would swivel their heads to look directly at me and accost me for staring at them. It was wild.

Friendship is cool, y’all

Despite our objective failure at trying all or even most of the festival offerings, I consider our Epcot trip a success for more than one reason. It represents a success of a year’s worth of planning — and saving, and stressing, and scheming. I’m proud of us for making a plan and actually following through with it. We even experienced an airport fiasco and handled it admirably, if I’m being honest. (Our first flight was going to be late for our connection and instead of wallowing, we very quickly made the decision to purchase tickets on a different airline out of the connecting city — but actually, it ended up working out so that we made our original flight. We’ll have another adventure to talk about later, as the extraneous tickets were exchanged for credit on a later flight.)

Before this, I had only ever been on trips with a significant other alone (aside from study abroad such and such), and flying (and sharing a hotel room!) with another person was a new experience. I really think we blew it out of the park with this trip. I am so grateful to know Soph. She is capable, outspoken, and in general just one of my favorite people. She handled the minutia of the trip extremely well, including managing me and my confused ass.

All in all, a success. 10/10. Can’t wait for the next adventure.