Hi yall, and welcome to the very first Ampersand Field Entry! I am writing this on my sister’s laptop in her apartment in lovely (and warm!) Tampa, Florida, part of my weeklong Central Florida Tour, consisting of Orlando, Oviedo, and this fine city where my sister goes to school! Yay! Sister has internet access! Whooo!
Well, so. I’m here because Carl is here (in beuatiful Central Florida, I mean, he’s not currently at Becky’s place. For one thing, there’s no room for him). Carl’s here because he’s attending a conference for his new job, which I may have mentioned. He’s working for a sissy environmental non-profit place now, as opposed to being self-employed at a sissy non-profit that does work for other sissy environmental non-profit places. I’m pretty pleased with his having got this job, and I hope he will be too. This conference will be the first time he’ll really be a part of the new company.
But I digress. We’re talking about me here, aren’t we? That’s right. So, yeah. I got a cheap flight, my mom and sister live in Florida, and here we all are today. Becky picked me up at scarily weird and weirdly scary Downtown Disney yesterday, and brought me back here. We’re going shopping and to the Florida Aquarium today, and then driving back to Orlando to meet our mom, who is very sweetly driving up from Miami to see us. Tomorrow I guess we’ll do touristy stuff and then Carl will meet us and we’ll all put a cherry on the top of our Banana Split of Touristy Stuff by going to see Cirque du Soleil. Sunday Carl and I will go to Oviedo to spend the night with Ash and Tom, and then Monday back to cold and rainy Seattle. Everyone with me so far?
We got in late Tuesday and after driving around for a while on the oddly smooth and straight roads of Orlando found our hotel…Carl’s conference is at a very nice resort, and all the conference-ers are staying…next door! It was a fine hotel, seeing we got there after midnight and were already pretty tired. Carl had stayed up until three the night before…
…which didn’t stop me from waking up at 6:30 the next morning and jumping on his bed to wake him up. “Come on, sweetie! We have to get up now! We have to go visit Mickey! Cooooooommmmmmmmmeeeeeee oooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!” Much to his credit, he did not immediately arrange to have me killed, but instead acceded to my ridiculous whims and got up and got ready to go to Epcot .
Now, I know I’ve told you about the place Disney has in my life, right? Right. The last time I went to Epcot was with the Key Girls and some other friends, the foirst winter back from college. We went there for New Years, and it was, um, pretty fun, actually. I always sort of dug Epcot…you know, it’s all educational, and it’s sort of cheesy, so there’s lots to make fun of, yet it’s maybe sort of kind of cool. So I was excited, and I didn’t think that Carl would be able to take going full-out Disney, like going to the Magic Kingdom or whatever, so thence we went.
And it was…fine. That’s it, just fine. We did our thing and of course over-analyzed it to death, but honestly, there wasn’t a lot to analyze. We went on a couple of rides, which prompted a lot from me in the “That’s Not How It Used To Be!” department. They got rid of my two favorite rides, Horizons and Imagination World Or Something That Involves a Pink Dragon and Is Sort of Trippy. Horizons somehow had this orange-scented breeze going on when you finally got to go on the ride after standing in line for an hour and a half, and that was very nice, plus you got to see a lot of robots. It also had a very breathy song that pretty much just went “HorIIIIIIIIIIIIIIzons!” over and over again and which was very funny. Yeah, well, totally gone now.
We went to the aquarium there and Carl saw his first manatees, and we had lunch at a Moroccan restaurant in MorrocoLand or whatever that was surprising yummy and had great tilework, for those of you who like that sort of thing. We had a good time looking at the forced perspective of all the tiny buildings that looked like big buildings. We went on a ride about Norway…the announcer guy goes, when you get on the boat “You are not the FIRST travelers who have sought the spirit of NOR-VAY…nor vill you be the LAST!” That was pretty good. We went on a tour of the hydroponic greenhouses in one of the exhibits, which was very cool and netted some pictures of Carl holding gigantic gourds, which I’d like to post here should I ever get image hosting for this journal. And then we…left. It was simple.
I think part of the thing about this whole theme-park thing is that it’s meant for giant crowds of people, and when you’re there without giant crowds of people, it feels slightly lame. And also the nostalgia factor was gone for me, what with Horizons not being there, and so it was just fine.
It was great seeing Ashley and Thomas and Our Friend Omar on Wednesday, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again Sunday. I’ve had a great time and some good talks with my sister, and I can’t wait to see my mom tonight. And I might even like Cirque du Soleil tomorrow night, you never know. All in all, I’m glad to be here with my sweetheart and my family and friends, and if that involves the Disney franchise (“The Place On Earth That Is Just Fine, Thanks”), well, so be it.