CostcoWarrior

Orlando Story: Islands of Adventure 16 August 2006

The day before we left Orlando, 5 of us got cheap tickets and went to Islands of Adventure, the rollercoaster park next to Universal Studios. Of course I could give you the play-by-play and describe every ride and every joke and every funny thing we laughed at, but I wouldn’t want you to be jealous….So the best part of the whole day at Islands of Adventure was when we got stuck on one of the rides. Yep, you read that right– Stuck.On.A.Ride.

We’d gone through the whole park and came last to Seuss Landing–the “kiddie” part of the park. And while none of the kid roller coasters drew our interest, but being Dr. Seuss fans, we did want to ride the elevated train/trolley ride to catch a glimpse of the whole area. It was like stepping right into one of the Seuss books–so cool!

Just as we get near the end of the track our train stops. The rhyming “tour guide” recording finishes, but we’re still stopped on the track hanging out 20 feet above the sidewalks. A train on the neighboring track passes us, but stops just 50 feet ahead in the end-of-the-ride tunnel. And then we notice a third train coming up behind us on our same track…um…this doesn’t seem right…um…is that train going to stop too…um…um…oh good, it stopped too about 50 feet behind us. What is going on?

And then a gentle voice came over the P.A. system “We apologize for the delay this ride is currently experiencing. We thank you for your patience and we will keep you informed.”

Delay? What ride gets delayed while you’re on it?? Notice how they didn’t mention “technical difficulties”. Maybe there was an incident at the loading/unloading area, some kid or some medical emergency…that would cause a delay, right? Wrong. All the people waiting were GONE. No one was near the ride. Not a soul.

And we all started laughing–there was no delay–we were stuck! Sweet! We had just entered the elite “I’ve been stuck on a ride in a roller coaster park” club. Ha!

Once again the pleasant PA voice announced a delay and forthcoming information…And then the ride manager was on the roof of the nearby building calming and reassuring riders that we would be okay and they were coming to get us off… (poor guy was totally stressed out, talk about tough day at work, eh?)

All the maintenance men showed up (dressed in Seuss train conductor costumes) released the emergency brakes til we coasted over the building, assembled a safety ladder, manually released the safety bar restraints, and evacuated us one at a time off the ride onto the roof. We got a bottle of water and a free express pass to any ride of our choice…not a whole lot of compensation for 20 minutes of stuckage, but we did get tons of pictures. Yep, I have evacuation pictures…or I will as soon as I develop my film…

The delay? That would be a ride power failure…

Return to Jr High School 15 August 2006

Last night I dreamed I went back to Junior High. It wasn’t the cool dream where you go back and are suddenly the most popular kid in school–funny, flirty, carefree, confident, and zitless…
No, it was my first day of 7th grade and I felt miserably out of place…again.
And the weirdest stuff kept happening to me…again.

• Like there was this nazi-strict patrol girl on the walk to school yelling and snapping a whip at anyone who didn’t walk on the designated pathway up the hill and across the lawn through the tennis courts….but she was freaky nice to the down syndrome girl…
• Like some random spanish kid kept picking up on me to impress his friends. I couldn’t get rid of him…turn the corner–spanish kid…go to lunch–spanish kid…check out books in the library–spanish kid…leering spanish kid everywhere–GAH!
• Like all the kids were bragging about their *skills*. If you didn’t have *skills* you weren’t cool. And smartness didn’t count as *skills*. Total Napoleon Dynamite flashback, and sadly I wasn’t cool by any means.

I woke up wondering how much of real life is just Junior High revisited…random nazi-strict policies & procedures that offer concessions to the disabled…wierd lurking “spanish kids”…*skills* that make you cool…

Orlando Story: Looking For Walmart 9 August 2006

On our second day in Orlando, after dinner, we decided to go to Walmart to pick up some snacks, breakfast foods, drinks, etc, thinking to save money on food. Good idea, right? Of course.

One guy in our group had been to Orlando multiple times and had a good idea of where things were. We in the 2nd car were following those in the 1st car, when the 1st car pulls one crazy traffic maneuver and we lost them–we end up on the freeway with no exit for 2 miles!

Good thing for cell phones, we called them up and explained we’d lost them, etc. etc. They gave us directions to the Walmart: get back on the road we started on, get in the left lane, it will curve off and turn into the road Walmart’s on…go down about a mile and it’s on the left.

Easy enough, right?

Wrong. Oh. So. Wrong.

We get off the freeway. We spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic getting back to the road we’d started on. We turn, get in the left lane, it breaks off, we turn the corner and are driving directly toward a high security mysterious compound of some kind!!—barriers, flashing lights, security booth with car-blocking arm straight ahead. No way to turn around. And when we get to the booth? A turban clad Indian guard who speaks only heavily accented English.

Aaron: rolls down window “Hi, um, we’re a little lost. Can you tell me how to get to the nearest Walmart?”

Well the Indian guard proceeds to give the most confusingly detailed directions, and Aaron begins to repeat them, trying to understand…

Aaron: “I go down the road, stay in the left lane, get to a stop sign, turn left—
Indian guard: “No, no! I never did say to turn left…”
Aaron: “No. Okay. So I get to the stop sign and turn right?”
Indian guard: “Yes, yes. Now we are getting somewhere…”

The Indian guy finishes the patronizing directions and lets us pass through the security arm. We try our hardest to follow his directions, but they were as bad as the original directions. Ten minutes later we’d turned at least 7 circles and were heading back down the same street for the 8th time. We decided to try the directions again and just as we were going around the last corner I realized what was going to happen and I shouted, “DON’T TURN THAT WAY!!”

But Aaron didn’t listen—what is it with men not listening to directions from women? Like I didn’t know what was going on or I hadn’t been paying attention the whole time? Yeah. He should have listened. Why? Because we rounded the corner and we.were.back.at.the.compound. Flashing lights, security booth, no exit, everything just as before. Hmm…deja vu anyone?

And what else was there to do but burst out laughing. There was no way to turn around; we were going to have to face the patronizing Indian guard again. And we couldn’t stop laughing. We were crying, we were laughing so hard!

And suddenly Aaron stopped the car about 60 feet from the booth and very seriously commanded: “STOP LAUGHING! This is embarrassing enough as it is, and I can’t drive up there with a car full of hysterical people. I’m just going to pretend like I’ve never seen the guy before.”

We calmed down a bit. Well, okay, we hardly contained ourselves, and we all looked the opposite direction to hide our convulsive fits while Aaron drove up, rolled down his window, and said “Uh, I just need to get through to that road right there…”

With a very puzzled how-do-I-know-you look, the guard raised the security bar and we didn’t wait around. As we turned onto the familiar “get out of the compound” road, we looked back at the booth to see the guard staring after us, sure that he was just figuring out who we were—the crazy walmart kids he’d given directions to 10 minutes ago…

At least now we were all laughing. But PROBLEM!! We still did not have good directions to the Walmart! So we did what any normal lost tourist does—we ignored all directions and just started driving around in the general direction we thought we should go…and crazy enough 10 minutes later we were pulling past the Walmart. Only it was on the right, not the left. And we laughed again at how incredibly BAD our directions had been.

We park and Aaron calls up our friends. We walk into Walmart listening to Aaron’s side of the conversation, which sounded like this: “You’re in the back…okay, we’re almost there… Okay we’re in the back…and you are…where? We can’t see you…no, really, we are in the back…in front of the milk? Like you’re staring at the milk? … oh. We are too.”

Yep, WE WERE AT DIFFERENT WALMARTS!!!

Frustrated, tired and yet extremely amused, we arranged to just meet back at the hotel….to which we bravely took directions again.

Really, does it get any more comical than this?

Bitter Sweet Goodbye 7 August 2006

Have you ever had to say goodbye when you didn’t want to?

Like when summer steals away the rain of spring…
Like when diet steals away chocolate smothered ice cream sundays…
Like when time steals away your early twenties…
Like when distance steals away your best of friends…
Like when moving steals away your favorite haunts…
Like when circumstance steals away your first love or second or third…

A part of you wants to throw a 2-yr-old fit and cry and scream until magically you don’t really have to say goodbye.

But most of the grown up you realizes that really life is just one big recurring round of goodbyes.

And you can accept that with peace and comfort because you trust God who knows and love you.

But the whole thing is still just bitter-sweet. So you end up both crying and smiling—promising yourself to always remember, yet realizing that life has a way of helping you forget.

And despite the tantrum, magically you really still are happy.

Orlando Story: Denny’s 2 August 2006

So, I should probably warn anyone still reading my blog that then next bajillion or so posts are going to be about Orlando, because that’s the coolest stuff I’ve got, and because I didn’t have one free second to even talk to my family about the trip, so even they are reading the stories after the fact here…

Airports are funny places. Actually the people in airports are the funny part. The trip out to Orlando was pretty uneventful, though interesting:

I listened to a little girl get her “Brittnay Spears” rap on while waiting with her mother to board–”la la la, whoa whoa whoa, peace out baby” with a little hip jiggle thingy…

The computers in Minneapolis Airport were down. How did I know? Because someone was announcing it over the loud speaker every 20 seconds “Ladies and Gentleman, the computers are down, thank you for your patience….At this time we can not make seat assignments, the computers are down…please check the monitors for gate information, the computers are down…since our computers are down we are unable to verify the standby status…the computers are down…seat assignments…the computers are down…check the monitors, the computers are down….I swear I never want to hear that phrase a 5837th time…

Of course I had to trip and nearly fall on my face getting on to one of those anti-exercise moving walkways. Everyone got a good laugh at that.

And once again I am completely convinced that the smartest fliers pack their own pillow and blanket as carry on–comfortable sleep no matter which seat assigment falls to you, and somehow the airlines have an interminable shortage of these two “frills”. And yes, I humbly add myself to this class of travelers…

My group (I traveled with 12 close friends, singles and married couples) made it into Orlando around midnight. After making it to the hotel and unpacking a bit, we were all starving, so headed to the only place open to eat at 2:30am: Denny’s. You know the story is going to be good when it’s staged at Denny’s in the wee hours of morning, right?

Well, the 12 of us wait in the “to be seated” section for 10 minutes without the smallest professional greeting–maybe the group wasn’t big enough?…well, a group of 4 came in as well–three young black women and a black man, all with really fun attitudes and strong southern drawls. Concerned about the lack of service and the “wait” at 2:30am, the one gal took matters into her own hands.

She had worked as a restaurant manager a few years earlier, so she just marched around the counter saying “don’t worry, dears, we’ll get you taken care of”. She grabbed some menus, walked over to a seating section and asked how many in our party…

We poor conventional midwesterners just stared in disbelief until she jolted us into action, “Come on people, it’s not that hard…let me count….12, okay then, you big guys come over here and move these tables around for yourselves, so you all have a seat….good, good, a bit faster, don’t stare so stupidly…I’ve got it all under control.”

So we built ourselves our table and took our seats. She seated her own party in a nearby booth, then grabbed some scratch paper and came over to our table again–”okay, baby, what can I get you to drink? I recommend the lemondade, I think Denny’s has good lemonade…”

Flabbergasted, but finding this completely hilarious, we all give her our drink orders and she takes off to either find a waitress or manager or make the drinks herself. And of course, my only thought: “I can’t wait to blog this!”

I guess the whole thing got the real manager’s attention, because we were well taken care of the rest of the night.

If you ever need a laugh, just head to Denny’s in the middle of the morning. The food and company is enjoyable around 3am…