Dear God -Friday, May 28, 2004 -12:41 pm-
Florida drivers are bad. Seriously. I'm from Ohio, I know about bad drivers, and DAMN, yo. Everywhere we drove today I thought I was going to die. We first went to Universal Studios, not the main part, but the Adventure Island (or something like that) part of it. Some of it was cool, some of it was damn lame. The hulk coaster is just stupid. It's a long wait for no point. There's no real drop and the twistings aren't creative enough to make up for it. We did the Spiderman ride next, which is actually kind of cool. It's a 3-axis motion simulator on a tracked vehicle. The ride is set within a typical movie/theme park type environment with 3D (via polarization) movie projections to tell the story. There's a great bit where you appear to be dropped down a giant apartment building that does an amazing job of fooling your brain into ignoring the signals from your butt and inner ear. We rode Fire and Ice next. It's a pretty basic suspended metal coaster (think Raptor but not as groundbreaking) of the racer variety (a la Gemini). While fun overall, it's nothing to write home about other than the outside loop where the two tracks run feet to feet. It looks like you're about to kick the other train. Finally, we went to Poseidon's Adventure, which is a stand/walk through SFX show. Overall, it was kind of dumb, but if you're of a technical theatre persuasion, then there's some really cool bits. To leave one of the rooms, you walk through a tube of flowing water. There's a large tube of acrylic (>10ft diameter) which is dry when first exposed. High velocity water is fired tangental to the inside of the tube at the bottom. The water is travelling so fast that it sticks to the inside of the tube all the way up and around and back down on the other side. You then walk through a gentle rain on a suspended catwalk to get to the other side. When you eventually get to the final room, there's a series of projections done onto falling water. This is a really clever way to make a movie screen because the location of the screen can be changed simply by varying which nozzles are active. Oh, aircraft navigational strobes should be illegal for indoor use!
We're staying at one of my parent's condos in Kissimmee (the city Disney is in). Tonight we went to dinner at a little grill in the back clubhouse. It was wonderful! It was also surprisingly cheap for Florida. Dessert was a inhumanly good chocolate cake layered with malted chocolate mousse. Mmmmmm. After dinner, we went over to Disney's Boardwalk where Michelle and my mom spent 10 minutes catching a damn cockroach. One of Mich's friends collects bugs. Oi. Boardwalk is a recreation of a early- to mid- nineteenth century east coast American boardwalk. It's actually kind of cool and worth walking around just to look at. The only thing I actually like about the Disney properties is the fanatical attention to detail. I appreciate that everything is done and done well. Nothing gets left out or overlooked. So many places you see a interesting idea with half-assed execution. Not so at any of Disney's properties.
On the way home tonight (we got a little lost), I saw a sign saying "Internet Cafe", so I hope to post and check mail tomorrow. We'll see if they live up to their signage.