March 23, 2014
Hollywood Studios
The household of invalids dragged ourselves out of bed so that we could head to Disney’s Hollywood Studios park by 9-9:30 in order to be able to get Fast Passes to a few key rides. We got to the park at 10, and all the desired Fast Passes were already out (!) so we grabbed a few alternates in case we decided to use them. The FP guide was keen to suggest that we not take them it we weren’t planning to use them “so that other guests might be able to enjoy them instead” but we took them anyway – tough crap for them. And we did, in fact, use none of them. Whatever.
First-of-the-day ride was the Tower of Terror, a 60 min line that took 30 mins, and Risa offerred Mason $20 if he came on with us. Kudos to him that he faced down his fear for a sawbuck, although I am not sure if he thought it was worth it. Riley and Jackson certainly thought it was, and wanted in on the action but I only had one bet to make. We went right from the ToT to the Aerosmith roller coaster, a 60 min line that took exactly 60 mins. It was a decent roller coaster – opinions ranged from “awesome” to “pretty fun”, but it was no Space Mountain IMO!
You are the passengers on a most uncommon elevator about to ascend into your very own episode of The Twilight Zone.
After the initial rides were taken care of, it was more or less a random stroll through the park to find lunch, jump on Star Tours, try and fail to make it to the muppet show, and wander back to the Indiana Jones stunt show, where stunt actors did a pretty decent job of recreating live the scene when Indiana and Marion try to escape the Nazis and the bad guy gets chopped up by the airplane propellor. Still, all of this took a surprising 6 hours! By the end, we were all pretty parked-out and likely nobody will be too sad to be leaving Disney tomorrow.
10 days, 6 parks, 3 sporting events and 1 historical destination. And that’s a wrap!
Dinner tonight was our chef-prepared meal. The chef, Linda, made us Rosemary chicken, pasta and salad, with key lime pie and chocolate cake for dessert. It was way better than a restaurant meal would have been, and there were tons of leftovers (suggesting maybe yesterday would have been a good day for this instead). After dinner Andrew and Dave D tried to put the pool alarm back together and discovered that the button never actually worked when you pressed it from the outside – no wonder the damn alarm kept going off!!!
Dinner, and nobody had to cook.
We spent the last night trying to polish of as much of booze as we could, despite the horrible feeling you get after drinking heavily for 10 days straight, and we enjoyed one final day of antics from the children which included, but was not limited to, inappropriate use of a golf club and a smack-down with a purple rubber ball. Dave S also tried to crank-call Germany but we couldn’t find a German number to call so we tried Peter Kokan instead and only got his voice mail. Andrew talked all the men into going for a midnight walk into the neighboring woods, memories of gators all forgotten. Once they were in the woods, the appeal of the nighttime walk in a strange location seemed to fade. It wasn’t long before they were back helping with the polishing off of the alcohol.
Tomorrow, we are all off. Sandovers and Barrett/Zaleskis return to Vancouver and the rest extend their vacation in Miami. It’s been a good time. A really good time!
Final Big Brother Mansion Tally:
Total Meltdowns: 0 (!)
Total Breakdowns: 17
Total Rundowns: 8