Popcorn Lights at Everest

I feel like you can feel the heat rising off of this picture–but that’s probably because I remember taking it in the middle of July while we were in the queue for Expedition Everest at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We always try to do the standby queue at Everest since it might just be one of the best themed queues in all of Walt Disney World–taking you from a fictional “Himalayan Escapes” touring company, to a replica temple, to a tea garden, and onward until you reach the “Yeti Museum”. Before the attraction opened on April 7, 2006, Imagineers had spent six years taking research trips to the Himalayas to inform their work on every detail and you can tell.  To date, Expedition Everest is also the last attraction opened at Walt Disney World that wasn’t based on pre-existing intellectual property, and I love that too. Just the fact that that this attraction got its own storyline–something that we didn’t know to expect, and for which we could fill in the details with our own imaginations–make