Vacation Day 0/1

Ahhhhh, vacation at last!

I’ll be posting a day by day account of the trip to Orlando. It was a long and mostly fun trip but despite all of my planning many things went wrong (both within and beyond my control)

Got to sleep in and it felt great! Nothing much to do today except rest, get ready to leave and pick up Susan. Our flight isn’t till 10:45pm so we have plenty of time to do stuff. I did have to go to work for a little while today but nothing big. After I picked up Susan, I went to work and then after that we had some ice cream at Dairy Queen and did some last minute shopping at Wal-Mart.

We went to the Cortez Room at the Gold Coast for dinner. Great steak at a great price. It was just the right size (11 oz) but I felt like I could have had another one ha ha. After dinner Susan and I went back home, got packed up and then waited for Alvin to take us to the airport. I had to do something I very rarely do on a flight; check luggage! So we had to get to the airport a little sooner than usual since I had to check the bag. Since it was Saturday night, the airport was almost empty. The busy days at the Las Vegas airport are Sunday, Thursday, and Friday. Sunday and Thursday for people leaving Vegas, and Friday for people to get in and lose all their money!

The first of wackiness happened on the flight. I fell asleep with my glasses on, and then woke up and they were missing and I found my left lens in the seat next to me! I looked frantically and found that my frame was 2 rows up! Somehow after I fell asleep the glasses fell off and were either stepped on or bent or something and the left lens was popped out. On the bright side, the frame for the glasses weren’t broken, just bent, so I think it should be able to be repaired ok.

We landed at 6 am in the morning (Eastern time)! Man that was early! It was still only 3 am in Las Vegas! So we had about 4 hours of “not sleep” during the flight so Susan and I were really sleepy. We waited in the lobby for about an hour (the info said that the Disney transport didn’t start till 8 am) but we found out when we went to the check in desk that it starts at 5:30! So we could have left anytime! So we got on our shuttle to the Port Orleans Hotel French Quarter and the vacation has started! The ride was smooth and uneventful (which was a good thing) but we got to the hotel around 8:15 in the morning so nothing was open and our room wasn’t ready yet.

We checked in and left our luggage, and went down to the Doubletree Hotel (which ironically was the hotel that Mark and I stayed at last year. We got our rental car and drove off to Universal Studios. Whew it was a bit hard to drive without my glasses especially since I hadn’t had any sleep and my eyes have two different vision grades. But we managed to get to Universal with only a minimal amount of getting lost. Today was going to be our toughest day since we had to do 2 theme parks in one day (I found a special ticket to Universal that was a 2-parks for the price of 1 but you had to do both parks in the same day. I had gone over the list of the rides so I had a general idea of what to ride, but we didn’t get to the park till past 11 and the freaking park closes at 8 pm! What the hell is that? It’s the Sunday before Memorial Monday and they’re closing at 8 pm! So we had to work fast! We went on as many rides as we could, but we hadn’t had any sleep so any ride we were in that was dark (like a 3D or 4D ride) I was a falling asleep. We went on the following:

Amazing Spider Man (WAAAY COOOL)

Hulk Coaster (just me, Susan didn’t want to go)

Storm Force Accelatron (like the teapot ride at Disney world)

8^th Voyage of Sinbad (a 20 minute show, pretty cool)

Men in Black

Shrek 4D

Twister

Jaws

Jimmy Neutron’s Nicktoon Blast

It doesn’t look like a lot but when you’re waiting in line forever (even with the Fast Pass) it’s enough to take up a whole day (plus everything is so far when you’re walking across 2 parks)

After we left Universal at 8 pm we made our way down to Steak-n-Shake. I’ve always wanted to go there but wasn’t able to in KC or when I was here last year. They have pretty good food and shakes but I think I was too tired to appreciate it. After leaving I noticed that we were right by the Doubletree again! Mark and I almost could have walked there (well maybe not as it was over a mile or so from there).

After semi driving by the seat of my pants (I wasn’t quite sure where I was going since I hadn’t stayed at the Port Orleans before) we made it back (I recognized some of the landmarks from earlier in the day and from when we were in Orlando last year). Got back and went swimming for a bit (well as close to swimming as Susan can get since she can’t swim) and then went to bed!