Got some nice waffles:

Blurry Scott

John  gave us a ride to the airport where we had to wait quite a while, luckily I found the first Starbucks I actually liked. There are tons of Starbucks in the U.S. but they don't really have that nice atmosphere and almost every single one lacks comfy couches. This one had couches though and played Jazz, so we sat there for about 2 hours and drew cartoons.

Had a nice flight to London-Gatwick and alot of space since the plane wasn't full at all. Flight to Amsterdam was also nice.

Met up with Michael in Den Haag after we arrived and finally got to get some sleep again, jetlag feels bad...
Thanks so much for hosting me! It's awesome to know so many extremely nice people all over the world.

Anyway, this is the end of my USA Trip report. Whoever may read this, I hope you enjoyed.
I'll only have s short stay in Vienna and then I'm in the air again, on my way to Cameroon for 10 days of adventure.

We went to see the "Festival of the Lion King" Show, which was totally amazing! It featured acrobatics, awesome performers and huge puppets. The park was far from busy this day, so we got to ride Expedition Everest again with no waiting time at all.
We met Dan, a friend of Randy who also works in the park, he showed us some neat details about the park.

artificial Tree of Life

After that we went to a coffeeshop where some local people hang out on tuesday nights, had a nice chat with some people, a good sandwich and a cheesecake.
It's still amusing how many people mistake Austria with Australia. I should have worn my "no kangaroos in austria" shirt.

John picked us up again and we went to his place since he lives more near to the airport. Chris came over for a bit too and we had a nice evening.
Packing was a bit hard since I bought lots of stuff.

Also saw the Nemo ride and then went to Magic Kingdom.

We saw the cheesiest show ever:

Splash mountain at sunset

Also went on Space mountain right before the park closed so we didn't have any waiting line.
The fireworks in Magic Kingdom was pretty awesome, right after it we hurries to get to Epcot where we saw even bigger fireworks, sadly I wasn't able to take any good shots.
Since we had to wait for Lon to pick us up, we just walked around in the park when everyone else had left already, which gave us toe opportunity to take some nice long exposure shots:

Viking Pavillon

Epcot at night

Went to animal kingdom this time and went on "Expedition Everest".
I didn't know much about it, and it was better that way since that coaster has a few neat surprises.
With 50 minutes this was the longest wait so far, but the whole waiting line was themed, part of it was a museum with partly real and partly fake artifacts fitting the rides theme.

The ride was a total blast!

also fish.

The park itself was also really well-themed, and we just went around for a bit and looked at animals until Lon picked us up and took us to Randys house again for another Show of FPS.
It was totally funny again, surprise guest was Samuel Conway, he's a scientist and Chairman of Anthrocon, a 4000-people con in Pittsburgh. A totally funny and unique guy.
He was staying at Lons place too this night, so he gave us a ride as Lon had to leave earlier as he also does cleanup work for the newest Disney movie.
We watched Shaolin Soccer, even though I've seen it before, it's still totally hilarious

Chris (Chorca) picked us up in the morning and we went to Universal Studios. Finally some megacoasters!
Thank god it was off-season, so the wait for the first ride (Hulk coaster) was only 15 minutes.
And it was AWESOME!

Hulk Coaster

Also saw the Spiderman movie ride, which was totally impressing, even the waiting line had awesome theming.
Next stop was probably the best coaster in the park, dueling dragons.
It's a synchronized coaster, but not symmetric. We chose the blue one since it had more loops. As expected it was totally fun!

Dueling dragons.

They had an awesome Dr. Suess part too:

Went on some other rides which were great fun too and eventually met up with Lon, John, Scott, Randy, and a bunch of other people at Universal City Walk and had dinner at Bubba Gumps, a Restaurant that specializes in Shrimps.
I got "Shrimper's Heaven".

VEEEEEERY TASTY

Went to the Movie Theatre across the Street to see Coraline in 3D. I never watched a full Movie in 3d so it gave me a slight headache, and the movie itself was... very weird. I won't spoil, but I can say it wasn't that impressing at all and the story wasn't deep either.
After that we went to hang out at Lons place again, got to experience the wonders of Cable TV ("man vs. food") on probably the biggest plasma TV I've ever seen in someones home.

Scott drove us to Epcot in the morning where we met up with Lon who signed us in.
Went directly to magic kingdom with the monorail, which looked really old but was probably really futuristic 30 years ago. First thing we were basically forced to see was the parade, as you can't really move when they block all the streets there.
It was nice and totally cheesy.
Got a fastpass for Splash mountain and got some really greasy cheeseburger for lunch.

Splash mountain

Big thunder mountain was nice too.

The theming of the park was pretty awesome, but the merchandise was.. meh.. all stores had the same crap, but at least I saved money this way.
Other rides we went on: Robinson Treehouse, Stitch's Escape, enchanted Tiki room, haunted house, etc..
At all pretty nice stuff, too bad there were no megacoasters.

Went to Downtown Disney in the evening and met up with Lon and John for Dinner in the T-Rex restaurant.
I've gotten used to themed restaurants already, but T-Rex is the most extreme one I saw yet.
Basically they had loads of animatronic dinosaurs all over the place, complete with (pretty loud) sounds and every 10 minutes extinction happened which was basically a lightshow and more noise.
It was fun though.

big mammoth

Didn't do much after that except hanging out at Lons place.

Saw some Kangaroos:

Birds that stole our fries:

And the best thing, we got into a talk with a keeper and she got out the Virginia possum which is normally not on display. We got to pet it and see it from really close up, so I'm spamming this post with photos:

AWESOME!
Saw some other cool animals too and went back to Johns place, where we hung out a bit with Chorca and then went to the Outback Steakhouse.

Chorca and John making the most hilarious expression ever

Finally some gooooood steak, good that I only took the small one.

There was no way getting to the parks today, so we just went to a huge Mall instead. Had probably the healthiest food yet (a subway sandwich) and browsed through tons of Stores whith Henrieke and Mike.
Comic stores are huge there but have way too few not-superhero comics.

Also, sunsets are really pretty here!

Hung out with some locals in the evening and watched movies.
Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow.

American style Berner Würstel

Went to meet up for a coffee with some people later, I tried to not eat too much this day because all that american food makes my stomach go nuts.
Finally watched Bolt after that. The whole point of the movie can be explained very shortly: Bolt is cute.
Personally I liked Ratatouille better, storywise, but still it was a good movie.
Not many photos because I forgot taking them

Said goodbye to Steve as he's going to leave at 5am tomorrow.

Bolt & me

Bolt concept art

After that we went to Epcot, went on that Astronaut training ride which was.. not fun for me at least
I have no problem with any rollercoasters, but after that one I felt completely dizzy.
Duco had to leave already after the ride as he was flying back to the Netherlands in the evening.

Steve, Duco, me

Anyway, after a bit of recovering we went on the ride I waited to see for a long time. The last page of the Eric Goldberg book says he did animation for a "three caballeros" ride in Epcot, so we went to see that.
Watch it here.

AWESOME! The animation was really really good
We're Erics biggest fans now.
The mexican Pavillon was definately the best of all, it was completely inside and had a great atmosphere.

It started raining really badly when we got out, which sucked since they closed down the GM Test Track ride..
So we just went to see all the Pavillons.

The german one was quite fun, americans have a very twisted view of how germany looks like. We had some Bratwurst with Sauerkraut there, which tasted authentic at least.

Japanese Pavillon was also nice, they had lots of familar food and we ended up buying stuff live Glicos and Pockys.

Also nice: french pavillon, UK pavillon.
Also been on the Spaceship Earth ride, which was also fun.

Spaceship Earth ride

John picked us up after work and we went to a place called Chilis where we met up with Lon and had some really good Tacos.

Sausage, Bacon, frenchbread, scrambled eggs with cheese, biscuits with gravy (not on picture)
Approx. calories: 58340

Went to a live puppeteering show that airs every sunday for 9 years. It was alot of fun and I'll post videos of it later if I can get them somehow.
We also met Duco and Steve there, Duco being from the Netherlands and Steve from the UK. Steve is about to become an airline pilot and will move to Washington next year.

Here's a pic of me and poink, one of the characters of the show.

First thing was the Killer Whale show, which was awesome!
After 10 minutes of really cheesy intro movie we got to see some fat whales:

Went to the rollercoaster they had there (the Kraken) and luckily had almost no waiting time and got to seat in the first row.

(cc) flickr user Travelin' Librarian

Also saw the most awesome pet show, saw sealions, fed stingrays:

you're doing it wrong!

Leafy Seadragon

Had dinner in a restaurant that has some wildlife show, and pretty unexpected I saw a..

..wallaby in seaworld

Went back to Johns place later, got some pizza and spent some time with Sophie, Chorca, Lisa and Matt later watching movies.

Anyway, here's us with tasty Burgers:

Henrieke, me, Lisa, Sophie

After that we were hanging out at Sophies place and went to Lons place later.
Lon is the guy who we'll be staying with the last few days, he worked on alot of Disney movies and currently does designs for Disneyworld while also working on the newest Disney movie as a sidejob. Check his IMDB page.
Anyway, there were white a few people at his place, we went to some chinese place at first which was.. okay, later we just hung out, drew and watched Horton hears a who. And some extreme Rollercoaster stuff too. Can't wait to ride some REAL rollercoasters!

Later a colleague of John gave us a ride to Downtown Disney, which was nice but a bit rainy. Henrieke and me mostly complained about bad character design on products, but we also found some really cool stuff.

John later joined and we had Dinner at "Wolfgang Puck's", went inside the Planet Hollywood and browsed through some random shops.

Placeholder Maquette from "Who framed Roger Rabbit"

Aerial View of the Doubletree from out plane

Our flight got delayed so we had to wait even longer and we eventually arrived in Orlando at about 8pm. John picked us up and we went to some really awesome Tex-Mex restaurant. It was soooo good and not even expensive. And the store manager made fresh guacamole (in case it's spelled that way) at the Table.
Also I had fried Ice cream for the first time in my life. It was delicious!
Didn't do much that evening and went to bed early.

We exchanged some more sketches, as most of the people we were hanging out with were leaving on early afternoon.
As we had quite some time left, we just spent it in the Lobby, saying goodbye to all the people leaving and watching boring Businessman checking in.
Some business people tried their best to ignore the costumes, some were totally excited, it was fun to watch
In the evening there were only about 70 people left and there was a small party in a conference room which was fun. We originally planned to stay up since we had to head out for the airport at 5:30am anyway, but we decided to get at least a few hours of sleep.

Jeff Pidgeon holding a panel about storyboarding

We met up with some other artists at his Table and did some Happy Beaver art jam, horray.

Henrieke and me trying to draw happy beavers

At the marketplace they also had a few copies of the Eric Goldberg book. I already got that one for christmas so I didn't look through, but as Henrieke did she discovered that the seller was a relative of Eric, and Eric signed them and drew a Sketch in each of them. Also the books were normal-priced, of course I couldn't resist buying it, it's worth gold!
In the lobby there were also funny things going on:

Photo by Henrieke, watch out for Sarah Palin in the background

Awesome Weasel with a mini-me.

helpdesk

We went to a really nice restaurant with Brian Reynolds in the evening. Restaurants are really different there, most are themed, the portions are huge and the best thing - you get free refills for drinks!
There are so much differences you only notice when you're there, but overall people are totally nice in the U.S. so far.

Jeff Pidgeon drawing stuff

The Cover of the Conbook also features artwork by Jeff:

Too bad I had to try to not spend too much money, because the happy beaver figurines he sold were awesome, but at least I got a nice T-shirt.
We also met Brian Reynolds who is also really cool, he was just a bit busy doing sketches.
For dinner we went to the first and biggest Chuck-E-Cheese Restaurant. We were 7 people in one car, with 5 people on the backseats. It was a *bit* tight, but the other 4 were girls so I didn't mind.
The restaurant was kind of... creepy, and you definately won't find anything like that in Europe.

me + some girls in front of Chuck-E-Cheese (note the CREEPY animatronic thing in the back, that was version 1.0)

We had some more or less good pizza, did some drawings and had alot of fun there.
When we came back there were already alot of parties going on at the Hotel, I think about 20 on one floor with a balcony connecting all the rooms. I thought the music taste of U.S. people was bad but I was proven wrong.
Time passed by way too fast, but I was still a bit jetlagged, so sleep was necessary.

Nighttime at the Hotel

yummy!

After that I went to Starbucks with Henrieke an a bunch of other cartoon artists, we made an artjam and I noticed that Starbucks in the U.S. lacks couches.

Had Dinner with Stephen, the guy who owns Arend Studios, and a few other people.
There was some dance with good retro music, but thanks to jetlag I was way too tired and went to bed early.