9. Become a Wilderness Explorer

In Animal Kingdom, they have an activity based on the movie Up, in which Russell is in a troop of an organization called the Wilderness Explorers. So Disney set up a program at the park where the kids can do activities and become wilderness explorers! And also adults like me.

Before they give you the activity book, they teach you the Wilderness Explorer call ("The wilderness must be explored! Caw caw rawr!"). Then, you go around to different areas of the park to learn about things like animals, recycling, the environment, different cultures, and other countries. At each station, a cast member is waiting to tell you a little bit about whatever their subject is, and then they give you a badge (sticker) to put in your book.

Some of my favorite badges were:

- Handwashing Badge--because don't we all need to be reminded to scrub for at least 20 seconds?

- Signaling Badge--where we thought we had to find lots more flags than we actually did, so we walked around for quite a while before asking someone

-Explorer Badge--where we learned how to make an outline of something using the side of a pencil, and a lady thought Paul was doing it wrong so taught him the proper way

-Hiking badge--where we had to draw our favorite animal and the lady made fun of our drawings

After we were done, we got Dug and Russell to sign our books, and they were very excited for us to join them as Senior Wilderness Explorers.