Sarah is writing the blog again today. Alan was due to do it but he's just received the news that his only uncle has passed away so he's not really in a blogging mood right now.
As I write this, there has been a tornado warning for Sumter County and Lake County, which is the county to the immediate northwest of us. Thankfully it appears to be heading away from us. Let's just hope it continues to do so.
Alan did some planning yesterday on places to visit while we are here, with the least amount of walking scheduled for today to give my ankle a break. So today we went to Epcot but not before we tried out the free continential breakfast. Yum. Yes, finally a breakfast worth getting up for. Cold cereals, fresh fruit, waffles, pastries, toast, yogurt (if you like that sort of thing), juice, coffee and a different hot dish every day. This morning it was scrambled eggs with bacon bits.
We checked out our hotels "free shuttle" to the Disney parks and discovered that there are only three shuttles in the morning and the return three shuttles don't start until 6.45pm. We therefore chose to drive even though all the parks around here charge for parking. We thought that would be the case which is why we decided on having a car the entire time we are here.
Finding the park was easy, even for Alan. Although we knew that the day was humid when we left the hotel, by the time we got to the park the sun was out and the humidity was worse. Thankfully walking around the park wasn't too bad as there was a bit of a breeze. We discovered early on that there really isn't much to do at Epcot. It is mainly an educational centre for kids with a few rides thrown in, of which we went on two. The first was Test Track which is like a car testing centre and we were the crash test dummies. There were steep slopes, rough terrain, sharp corners with and without ABS brakes and, at the end, a fast speed test. It was a lot of fun.
The next ride was a Space Mission which was a simulator of a voyage to Mars. You could choose orange or green. We went on green as the orange apparently has a lot of spinning. Good that we did as the orange kept either breaking down or people were getting sick and they had to keep cleaning it up.
We went to have a ride of Soarin' which we thought was probabaly like the Soarin' over California we went on in California Adventure but the waiting time was 40 minutes, and what we had discovered already today, that their time estimations were out by about 20 minutes on each ride.
So we left and headed to Dennys. Yes, I know what you're thinking ... DENNY'S but we were dying for a chocolate milkshake and they have the best. We followed the milkshake up with a chicken salad which was lovely. We stopped by a local car dealer on the way back to the hotel to test drive a couple of cars. I chose a big Hummer and Alan picked a little Pontiac sports car which he could barely even fit into it was so tight.
We returned to the hotel just as the storm clouds rolled in and retired for an afternoon nap. I think both of us are still trying to recover from the three hours lost when we few from Las Vegas to here. When we awoke the rain was really coming down and a thunderstorm had just started. It is still hanging around five hours later.
We settled down to watch CSI which was the first show we've seen that hasn't been a repeat the entire time we've been in the USA. It was the season finale which channel 9 haven't yet shown in Sydney so we were kind of excited. Then, about 15 minutes in, they broke in with a tornado warning about 20 miles north west of us. When we returned to the show, they had cut out the bits we would have seen had it not been for the tornado warning. This happened about three more times and we missed a lot of the episode. Darn Americans.
So we are keeping an eye on the tornado. In the last few minutes the news has reported a severe storm warning for just a few miles to our north, with the potential to turn into a tornado.
Thankfully we had enough to eat at lunch to not have to go out tonight. Too much rain and of course the tornados.
Trivia for the day: American milkshakes are like Australian thickshakes. They don't seem to have the equivalent of Australian milkshakes.
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