Yesterday was a lot of fun, albeit also particularly damp and also just a wee bit scary!
A Day at the Water Park
We ended up going over to Aquatica (Sea World’s water park) in Orlando as an early celebration of my sister-in-law’s birthday. It’s always a little weird for me to walk around any non-Disney theme park because I tend to compare and contrast the crap out of them, but overall I think we all ended up having a pretty good time. If I do the math, we were really only able to do the slides and stuff for maybe 3-4 hours … we got there around noon, and then some really ugly weather rolled in mid-afternoon and pretty much closed everything down until we finally decided to throw in the towel … pun intended. 😉
I’m not sure how much I want to go into everything because I think I’m going to maybe do something comparing the park to Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon (which we visited for my birthday last year), but on average I thought that the attractions at Typhoon Lagoon were all a lot better designed than the ones at Aquatica. Their star attraction, the Dolphin Plunge, which features clear slide tubes running underwater where you’re supposed to be able to see Commerson’s dolphins swimming around, ended up going by so fast that I really couldn’t see much of anything except that I knew I was underwater.
We also had a bit of a mishap on HooRoo Run, which we thought all 3 of us could ride on together, but had overlooked until halfway up the tower that although we met the weight requirement, there was also a height requirement that the 3rd rider needed to be under 5 feet tall. And the reason that this posed a problem was the goofy seating configurations that they offered – 2 or 3 riders, but no single-riders. This is where I felt Aquatica really dropped the ball because when we went to board the tube and the lifeguard pointed out our dilemma … that was about it. She didn’t suggest for me to wait and see if there was another single rider who I could ride with, or even hop over to the other slide on the same tower that did allow for single-riders so that I could at least ride something … instead, I let the two girls go down together, and I had to walk back down the entire six flights of stairs back to the ground by myself. 😳
Nonetheless, we all still had a fun day … there was at least one slide that all three of us were quite convinced we were going to die on (Walhalla Wave) because we damn near flipped our tube inside the pitch black part of the slide … but I think we got to do most of what we wanted before the gigantic thunderstorm moved in and brought a series of closures that they never really recovered from. I was a little bummed that we didn’t really get to do the lazy river, aside from maybe 50 feet of it which feeds one of the slides in a weird way, anyways … although upon a second glance at the park map, that may have actually been half the river to boot, so maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to pass on after all! 😯
The park is definitely a lot smaller than Typhoon Lagoon is and if we’d had maybe another hour (or just waited for lunch instead of trying to beat the first sign of rain), we’d have likely gotten everything we wanted to do in with time to spare.
A Night at the Movies
Anyways, it was maybe around 5:30pm when we finally decided that it wasn’t worth waiting around any longer to see if they were going to re-open the attractions before the park closed at 7pm, so instead we decided to pack things up, get changed, and head on over to Downtown Disney to treat Christina to a birthday dinner at the AMC Dine-In Theatre – one of our favorite places to eat these days! 🙂
The movie was Prometheus … in truth, our third choice – the first being Snow White and the Huntsman, which was completely sold out, and second The Avengers, which I would’ve gladly seen again if not for the only seats available being in the front row … so even though it looked scary, I sucked it up anyways in the name of not heading home early, downed a bit of liquid courage even though the truly scary parts wouldn’t end up coming until halfway through the movie, and we dined upon a mighty, yet excessive feast while we watched scientists break pretty much every rule of being a scientist as they explored the ancient ruins of mankind’s creators…
Now I cannot tell a lie – in retrospect, apparently there were a ton of things that went over my head because when I got home I probably spent another three hours reading through this thread on reddit that analyzes and overanalyzes every facet of the movie, picking it apart in true Internet style, but also offering a lot of interesting insight that I didn’t really pick up when my main focuses were “I think there might still be a little rangoon dip left!” and “Don’t look now – the scary part might not be over yet!!!”
Hell, I didn’t even realize that it was a prequel to Aliens until the last 15 seconds of the movie! 😯
That said, it was still more or less entertaining and gave us something to do that night while we dined on succulent dishes a’plenty, and sometimes, you really can’t ask for much more than that… 😛