Insert Title Here -Saturday, May 29, 2004 -7:22 pm-
This morning I set off in search of the elusive Net. Leaving the house, we drove west to the far end of the strip. Arriving at the "Internet Cafe!" we had seen the night before, I inquired about WiFi. That was a resounding no. I then asked if there was an empty port to plug into. Again, no. Call it a miss then. Of course, they had no idea where else there might be Net access. Driving east along the strip, I decided to look for a Starbucks. We called home and asked them to look one up in the Yellow Pages. In the meantime, I thought I recalled having seen one is Celebration (yes, it's really called that). Having only a vague idea where the town in question was, I set of in that direction. Vaguely. After having circled the shopping district several times, I gave up. Getting directions to the nearest Starbucks. East again we travelled, this time in search of Sand Lake Rd. The strip is labeled with a series of Markers. We're staying somewhere around Marker 3. Way out in the uncharted territories beyond Marker 15, we decided that Sand Lake Rd did not, in fact, intersect Florida 192. Turning around, for about the 12th time that morning (thank god u-turns are legal in FL!), we headed west. Around Marker 10, Michelle spotted a banner proclaiming "INTERNET!" below the sign for a coffee shop. Stopping in, I discovered that they had no problem with me plugging in rather than using one of their terminals, but the price was $5 for 30 minutes. I bent over and took it. Some of you caught me online. While I was there, I grabbed the 10.3.4 update and D2X. For those of you out there old enough to have earned your stripes, D2X is a wrapper that ports Descent 2 to MacOS X. Feel free to rejoice. Descent 2 was one of the coolest games of all time and I was hard-core addicted to it. NWN can go suck it, D2 is in the house!
In the afternoon, we tried to go have fun at Wet n Wild. Wet n Wild is a water park like Wyandotte Lake or The Beach back home. No, scratch that, not like them at all. Those things are at least fun, this place SUCKED ALL ASS. The wave pool was tiny, crowded, and pointless (i.e. the waves weren't fun). All of the rides were shorter than I had ever seen before and featured hour-plus lines. I think we were there for all of 40 minutes. There, were, however, two activities that we would have liked to have done. The first was a giant (100ft diameter), air-filled rubber hemisphere with water flowing over it. There were ropes so that you could climb to the top, bounce around, fall off, and slide back down into the pool. Mich and I were both too tall play. :( The other point of interest was a funnel into which you could shoot yourself. For those of you that remembered COSI before it sucked, think of the penny funnel where they went around and around getting faster and faster before they plunked into the bottom. This ride let you that with your body. It woulda been cool. The line wasn't. We went home.
Actually, that's not quite true. Before going home, we had to play an exciting game of Hunt the I-4. Florida has this huge problem with signs. They place them, if they bother to at all, precisely .75 seconds beyond the point at which you could possibly have acted on the data displayed. Given the speed at which traffic flows, this means most of them occur about 25 feet past the point at which the turn disappears over the horizon in your rearview mirror. So leaving the park, we followed the large sign pointing to the right bearing the inscription "TO I-4 EAST/WEST". This was, as you will see, a grave tactical error. This is because, and it's very important that your understand this, is that each location in Florida gets only one sign. Let that settle in. Yes, I do, in fact, mean that if there are 5 turnings between you sighting the sign and reaching your goal, you get only the one sign. So, there we were, going round and round, waiting to reach some kind of escape velocity of frustration and leave the consumer driven hell of neon and Cheap T-shirts Here. Eventually, we got lost into the Universal Studios parking lot, which has it's own private on ramp to the I-4. By some oversight during the road-planning process, it actually pointed the way we wanted to go.
Ah, that's another thing about driving in Florida. Though the urban and tourist centers are very dense, there's a lot of space between them. So, if you miss your exit/turning (see: signs, paragraph III) it's a long god-damned way to a way to the next exit. A half second's hesitation can easily cost you 30 to 45 minutes of driving. I never thought I'd miss driving in Ohio
Oh, on the way to the water park, we noticed a sign (strangely, before the turn off) proclaiming the existence of World of Orchids. On a whim, we dove for it (Explorer across 3 lanes of traffic denser than rush hour in Columbus, moving at 60mph [in a zone legally 35mph]). It turned out to be really cool. There were some really cool looking orchids and a lot of other neat stuff. There were some of the biggest carp I have ever seen, as well as some other odd fish I couldn't identify. There were four or so different species of terribly toxic frogs and an assortment of very fidgety lizards. One side of the conservatory had many kinds of parrots. Interestingly, none of the birds had their wings clipped. It was cool that they left them as birds. We spent about half an hour looking around and sweating our balls off (we were in Florida and they were actually adding humidity to the air in the greenhouse. Uck.). So I guess that made the day worth while. We're supposed to go to Shrek 2 tonight. Hopefully that will be cool.