Universal and the last 2 days

Check out pictures from Day 1!!

Well, what a long, strange 2 days it's been so far. Sorry for not posting an update last night..or the night before, but as you can imagine, we've been really busy down here in Orlando having fun. This has been a great vacation so far; it's been very rare that I even think about anything that's computer-related. Nice change. The only thing I have still been able to think about is my new wheels for my truck(that SHOULD be waiting for me when I return)..and I didn't even think about that until late tonight. :)

We arrived at around Midnight late Saturday night. We got a ride to our new home for the week, Orange Lake Resort, in a shutte with a weird but funny lady. The place is a timeshare that Brian's parents graciously gave us for the week. So, thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Korte!

We pretty much came in, dumped our stuff and crashed hard Saturday night. We were all pooped.

Sunday, we slept in until around noon or so, and then went and got our rental car (a burgundy Chevy Venture minivan). It's not a bad little ride..it gets us around. Paul and I joked about cutting the springs on it (lowering it), but that would be too much work to reverse before we have to return it on Saturday.

Once we had wheels, we went and got groceries and drove around to see what had changed since we were here last. It's a lot different than I remember, but the last time I was here was back in 1987, I think. It still amazes me how much money and effort Disney and the other places down here put into making this whole place perfect. It's worth noting that It's very interesting to pay attentiion to hoe different life is down here. People are just really different than they are in Richmond. To me, it;s kinda like when you go to California and everyone is really laid back and cool about things. This is kinda like that, but not wuite to the extreme level that Californians are.

Sunday night, we made our way to the Magic Kingdom area (but not actually IN the park) to go inside the Contemporary Resort and ride the monorail. That was pretty fun. We looked around in all of the gift shops and got some great shots of Cinderella's castle from the roof of the Contemporary Resort.

Today, we woke up at around 9am (later than we had hoped), threw on some clothes, and headed out for Universal Studios theme park. It turns out that there's TWO Universal theme parks now: Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. Islands of Adventure is basically an extension of the Universal park, but has mostly roller coasters and other thrill rides, where the regular Universal park is mostly movie tour-related rides. We ended up going to Islands of Adventure so that we could ride the thrill rides. We had an absolute blast. We rode all of the roller coasters except Spider Man (because of time), including the Incredible Hulk coaster and the Jurassic Park water ride. We had lunch at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville and it was really good. Cool place. We ended up getting SOAKED riding a few of the water rides near the end of our trip and we were all happy to be back here at home so we could change into dryer clothes.

Tomorrow, I think we're heading to MGM for the day. I've have TONS of pictures that I've taken with my digital camera so far, but I've had LOTS of problems uploading them. We brought my Airport with us and Brian and I are doing wireless with our laptops and then the access point is dialing up for us. For some reason, FTP uploading has been extremely unreliable. I'll keep trying to upload photos tonight.

Also, for a different perspective on today's events, don't forget to check out Brian's website.

Posted by Jeff at June 26, 2001 01:21 AM