Day 22 - Disneyworld

 Alan's writing the blog today with Sarah's thoughts in pink.

 

We woke up this morning to find that the roof was still on our hotel and the overnight tornados had passed us by. We chose Disneyworld, also known as the Magic Kingdom, for todays destination and drove there without even a hint of getting lost. I'm getting pretty good at this driving and directions caper now. Someone has to given Sarah's complete lack of map reading ability.  My skills as you all know are brilliant.  His ability to listen has NOT improved.  He's only good here because all the parks are extremely well sign posted.

 

Once we parked the car we got on the tram which takes you from the parking lot to the park. We arrived and got off only to find that we then had to catch either a ferry or the monorail to get to the entrance because it's on an island in the middle of the Florida swampland. So a short monorail ride later and we were finally at the gates.

 

We made our way inside after the obligatory bag search and found ourselves having a strange sense of deja vu. It looks almost exactly the same as Disneyland in Anaheim. After checking our map and wandering for a short time we came to the conclusion that it is indeed the same park except that it's missing 3 of the best rides - Indiana Jones, The Matterhorn and Finding Nemo. Oh yes, it smells too. Bad. I'm not sure if it's always like that, or if other people were even aware of the smell but it sure bothered us. Maybe if they're all Florida residents, they might all be used to it.  It smells like a mixture of garbage and stale beer.

 

So without those rides there really isn't all that much for people to do when they don't have young children with them. I'm sure kids would have a great time because most of the park is geared toward them but for us it was hard to find things of interest. We went on Splash Mountain 4 times during which time we got thoroughly soaked and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad twice and that just about did us. At least the queues here are much shorter than in Anaheim.  Both the rides are a little different than Disneyland.  Big Thunder Mountain Railroad isn't as rough and Splash Mountain here you get a lot wetter.

 

We left and caught the monorail back to the mainland and as we were getting off we heard that the monorail was broken down and out of action. We're glad we didn't get stuck half way along the track over an alligator infested pond or something.

 

Later in the afternoon we decided to head across the road from our hotel to a little place called Fun Spot USA which is like a travelling carnival type thing except it's always in this one spot. I went on the Vortex go kart track which is allegedly the steepest track in the world with a 32 degree drop. It was lots of fun and I managed to get through without a single crash and not even spinning out or anything. Gosh I'm skillful. Next door to Fun Spot is a place called Old Town where there's lots of shops and games and rides and people with hotted up cars and stuff like that. We wandered through the crowd until we found a little roller coaster which, of course, I just had to ride. It was small and tight but fun anyway.

 

After leaving there we were going to walk up the road to a mini golf place when we saw some lightning in the sky. We figured that holding metal golf clubs during a lightning storm may not be the best idea in the world so we headed back to our room for the evening. I ordered a pizza from the pool bar downstairs and after waiting an hour and a half I went down to find out where it was. Supposedly the person knocked at our door but we didn't answer, even though we'd been here the whole time. But at least we got it for free because they made us wait so long.

 

Some of our Disneyland photos have a water spot on the camera lens.

 

Trivia for the day: Florida has annoying tolls on some of their main roads. Every few miles you come across another toll booth and have to pay either 75c, $1 or $1.25.