Less than 200 crow-miles from the port where most Caribbean cruises depart, there's a side-trip many cruise travelers never consider. Combined with your cruise, it may well be your best bet in money-saving stop-over vacations going today!
Mickey Mouse is not allowed in EPCOT. Unlike Disney's Magic Kingdom. EPCOT serves more as an educational look into present and future technology combined with the enlightenment of an ongoing world's fair.
Although you won't see Mickey and his pals strolling the streets, you will be able to walk from the Eiffel Tower to a cheery London pub without crossing the English Channel. You can make your own color painting on a television screen with an electronic brush and giant dinosaurs will do battle on a ledge over your head. Mr. Hamm trades jokes with Mr. Eggz when kitchen characters come to life, and Ben Franklin and Mark Twain escort you on a tour of America.
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However you get there, you'll find Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) a fascinating new attraction. Twice as large as the Magic Kingdom, its sister attraction three miles away. Epcot is far beyond it in concept.
Where the Magic Kingdom is almost wholly pure entertainment, Epcot is a theme park of a different color. All in one, it is a travelogue and a technological tour de force, a classroom and a carnival, a game room and a dining room.
Part of it – Future World – is basically educational, sugar-coated with a heavy frosting of Disney showmanship, of course. In this section are pavilions dedicated to energy, communications, imagination, motion and other basic human endeavors.
The other half of Epcot, ringed around a 45-acre lagoon, is World Showcase, a sort of permanent world's fair where you can sample foreign lifestyles in enclaves built to resemble and show off the best qualities of individual nations.
It is a curious blend of reality and illusion. When Ben Franklin walks upstairs in World Showcase American Adventure, that's a clever recreation of history. But when you walk on color-coded stepping stones to create a melody in Future World's Journey Into Imagination pavilion, that's the here and now.
In less adept hands, an Epcot could be a yawning bore. But Disney has a special touch.
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