He was supposed to arrive at the airport around midnight, which would have given me plenty of time to get some sleep, then head off to work while he recovered from his jetlag. Thanks to the wonders of US airlines, the arrival time turned from midnight, to 2am, to 4am, and finally to 5:30am. By the time I picked up him up, I'd had no sleep and had to head straight to work. Not a fun day. Whereas Moistie was able to sit back on my comfy couch, watch cable and surf the internet. Tough life. Gator Girl wasn't around to keep him company, as she was exploring Florida with her parents who were also visiting at the same time.
I got back from work that evening to find him asleep on the couch, against my very strict instructions to avoid jet lag. So I dragged him to his feet, stuck him in the car and started the driving tour of the Northshore. Naturally we ended up at our local pub (the Tap Room), where we sampled the local brew and ate a tasty burger.
I'd managed to score the rest of the week off work, so on the Tuesday we packed up and headed down across the lake. We did our now usual tour 'o devastation, then headed to the airport, as we were on a surprise trip to Orlando! Trip went fine, Gator Girl picked us up at the airport at the other end, and we had two days to spend at Disneyland.
First day we got up stupidly early so as to avoid the crowd and headed off to the 'magic kingdom'. This is the classic Disney experience, and I thoroughly discourage adults from going. But if you do go, whatever you do avoid the 'It's a small world' ride. Basically everything is designed for kids, so the rides are really not that exciting. The only decent one was Space Mountain, which is basically a roller coaster completely in the dark. The rest ranged from average, to boring, to lame. Look, I'm sure it's awesome if you're young, or young at heart, but I'm old and cynical so it didn't really work as well for me. I'm there for the rides. And you spent a lot more time queuing than you did on the rides.
Having said that, we did run around like kids a lot of the time. And Gator Girl had a great time, so perhaps she's not a cynical as me. Space mountain was great, the wild west roller coaster was ok, splash mountain was very dull with one really exciting drop, and pirates of the carribean was more an experience than an actual ride. Oh yeah, and the jungle cruise was dire. However the teacups were impressively nausea inducing.
The crowds straight after opening charging to the castle.
It's a castle!
Can you tell we're tourists? Gator Girl, GG's Mom, Me & Moistie out the front of our disney hotel.
A sight we saw a lot - people backs in queues.
Passing time in the queues for Space Mountain.
Passing time on the wild west roller coaster.
Aaarrrrr, there be pirates!
Come out of the barrel, and put the silly accent away.
Desperately holding my lunch down.
The queue for the lamest ride of all time - the Jungle Cruise. We waited over an hour for this.
And this plastic hippo was probably the highlight.
GG Mom showing her excitement after the jungle cruise.We stayed at the magic kingdom until about 2pm, then we headed over to the part of the Disney trip I'd really been looking for - Blizzard Beach water park! Woo!
Now to set the scene, the temperature was easily 35+, it was school holidays for some of the schools, and we'd been wading through crowds all day. We were hanging out for an exciting ride, preferably involving water, and when we arrived at the water park we saw in the distance.........
.....the tallest free-fall body water slide in the world waiting for us. Oh yes.The place was seriously packed, so we started out with a relaxed family water slide. Moistie and I then couldn't wait any longer and started queuing for the summit plummet (yes, that's what the big slide was called). It took about an hour to get to the front of the queue, an hour happily spent discussing who was likely to win the speed race, as naturally they had a radar gun trained on the slide. Moistie had the edge in weight, I had the edge in talent (in my opinion of course). When we got to the top, it was a little nerve racking as you couldn't actually see over the edge of the slide - it was too steep. 36m pretty much straight down. Who won?
Fun on the family slide.The rest of the afternoon was mostly spent checking out the many other water slides they had in the park. The most fun was probably the 3 side-by-side mat slides which went down a slalom course. It even had starting lights so that the races were fair. At least fair for most people, GG's Dad had a tendency to ignore the light and just go whenever he felt like it :-).
The evening rounded off by watching a shuttle launch from Kennedy space centre from the top of the waterslides. We were about 40km away from the launch site, so we got a spectacular view.
That evening we went the 'adult' Disney. Now this isn't what it sounds like, no skimpy pictures of Mickey. Instead it's a series of bars and restaurants where, sadly enough, every night is new years eve. However after a hard day, we didn't even make it as far as midnight, so we didn't see the celebrations.
As you can tell from the photo......Next day (Wednesday only by now), Gator Girl and family headed off to Daytona for some Nascar craziness - I'll leave it to GG to blog about that one (should she blog again this year...ooooooh, narky). Moistie and myself had a flight back to Nawlins about 4pm, so we realised we had just enough time to head to the other water park for another morning of water slides.
Being the slightly fanatical people that we are, we planned our day properly. We decided that the major attraction (the crush 'n gusher) at this park would get packed early, so we'd get there as soon as the park opened, then sprint to this and go on it as many times as possible until the line gets too long. Then we'd check out the rest of the park.
First run down the crush 'n gusher.The slide was a two-person slide on an inflatable mat. The highlight is that in three spots it actually goes uphill, blown upwards by a jet of water. This is an incredible amount of fun, thought with the amount of water being sprayed around it's pretty hard to see for the second half of the ride.
It's probably worth pointing out at this point that generally the oldest people getting really excited were about 14. Anyone older than that was acting a little more maturely. However Moistie and I made so much noise (read: screaming) coming down the water slide, that a couple of park employees took us aside.......
.... and gave us special mickey hats for really getting into the spirit of the occasion.
Which we of course wore on the next run down the slide.
And the next one.....
By this stage the queue was getting pretty long, so we skipped out on a fourth run and explored the rest of the park. Lots of different waterslides, and lots of fun, thought the only thing that really stands out is the time I uncrossed my legs doing down a speed slide. It took several minutes to extract my togs after that experience.
We ended the day with a casual float around the outskirts of the park, only occasionally trying to sink each other's inflatable rafts. All in all it was a huge morning, and we headed back to the airport fairly exhausted.
So back in New Orleans my store of photos starts to run out, so I'll try and wrap this up a little faster. We had rented some accommodation in town on the Friday and Saturday nights so that we could get really really drunk and not have to drive home. This seemed like a foolproof plan.
Everything went to plan on the Friday, we cruised Bourbon street, listened to morbidly obese Al Carson play some blues, drank the local ales at the crescent city brewhouse, wandered down to the Marigny and Snug Harbour to listen to some more blues, only to find a whiny jazz singer. Wandered back to Bourbon St, found a Gyros for a late night snack, then eventually staggered back to the hotel.
Woke up the next morning with a nasty hangover and a stabbing pain in my ear. Several litres of water and some panadol removed the hangover, but the stabbing pain continued. Luckily Gator Girl was home by this stage, so she arranged a doctor's appointment for me - turns out the water parks had given me an ear infection. This kinda cut short the drinking weekend, as I had to go home and lie on the couch and complain about the pain. This probably wasn't the finish to the week that Moistie was hoping for, but we did manage to feed him some more po-boys so at least he wasn't too unhappy.
Sunday night I was still no good (ended up off work Monday & Tuesday as well), so dropped Moistie in town so that he could get to his Monday flight on time. And if you want to know the rest of his adventures, you'll have to wander over to his blog (and wait for him to update it).
So in summary, it was great to spend a week catching up with the moist one as we hadn't seen each other since we'd left Oz. Disneyland is pretty lame unless you're a Disney fanatic or you enjoy queuing - however the water parks are spectacular and really worth a visit.
And I beat Moistie in the water slide speed race 97kph to 92kph. Yeah!
