Fun With Floridiots

Let me tell you, it's nice to be back in the land of the literate. Four days in Florida, while a good time overall, was enough to make this ninja consider a quick bout of genocide. (For those of you who might quibble with my use of "genocide," believe me, Floridiots are an entirely different race, if not species, of idiots.) Here's the lowdown:

Sunday, Dec 31 - Spent the morning driving to Midway, and took a AirTran flight (I assume they were an offshot of AirTron Airlines, the official airline of the Transformers) to Orlando. Overall, smooth sailing. Took only carry-ons, no checked luggage, which meant we got to bypass all the long lines. Only glitch occurred when Miss Hays attempted to sneak her morningstar through the metal detectors. But that problem quickly resolved itself when roughly fifteen to twenty airport security guards suddenly died of myterious morningstar-related injuries.

Got to Orlando, where a shuttle took us to our hotel (a Howard Johnson) in Kissimmee. Well, not our hotel, actually. A different Howard Johnson. The shuttle lady asked for the address, explaining that there were multple HoJos in Kissimmee. So we gave her the address. The correct address. It was on a long, popular highway stretching from Kissimmee to Disney World, and apparently it was all officially called "West 192." However, another highway crossed it about halfway down, and those sneaky (read: retarded) Floridiots took to calling one half the west part of 192, and the other the east half. And our hotel, which was technically on West 192, was on the eastern half of West 192. So the shuttle driver takes us to a Howard Johnson on the western half of West 192, disregarding the actual address of the hotel, and disregarding the actual name of the hotel ("Howard Johnson Enchanted Land," as opposed to a regular HoJo). Then we point out we're at the wrong one. Oh, damn - somebody screwed up. So he has to take us all the way back down this godforsaken highway, which takes forever. If we had just gone to the correct hotel in the first place, it would have cut out about45 minutes of driving.

Rest of the evening was kind of quiet, since we didn't have transportation to get downtown by the bars, unless we wanted to shell out $100 round-trip to a cab. We ate at a Smokeybones restaurant nearby, which was essentially Famous Daves by another name. I.e. amazing. I had to seriously restrain myself from chugging a bottle of their barbeque sauce. We noted the Packers game was on tv, and they were currently whupping the Bears, so we decided to make an emergency "Cake Day" declaration, pick up a cake and some champagne, and go back to watch the game. However, the grocery store had closed just moments before, dashing our dreams of ridiculous chocolate cake. At least the Packers continued to stomp the hapless Bears. That was pretty funny.

Monday, Jan 1 - The real game day. We decided to rent a car, and took that downtown to the stadium. We had our Badger reds on, but apparently the Razorbacks were also red, so all the fans were in red, except the morons who showed up to support the Gators. Anyway, the game was awesome. We were in the thick of the student section, the absolute place to be. I got me some nice inflatable boom sticks, and rocked the shit out of those for most of the game. We were at ground zero for all the chants and waves, as well as the crude yet often hilarious chants at the Arkansas fans expense. (My favs: "We won the war," "NASCAR sucks," and "You can't read!") Badgers jumped out to a 17-7 lead at halftime, thanks to some nifty Jonathon Roderick Stocco action, then held on for dear life in the second half. Other than the Bager's subpar second-half performance, the whole thing was pretty awesome.

Then, some more useless Florida driving. We wanted to find a couple of books, but we forgot that no one in Florida is literate, thus rendering bookstores hard to come by. We drove and drove, found a WalMart, and checked around. It had some books, but not what we wanted. On the way out, we decided to ask a WalMart employee whether there were any bookstores nearby. Naturally, the woman had no earthly idea what the words "book" and "store" meant. She had a vague notion when we mentioned the word "mall," but that was the extent of her expertise in the realm of words and knowing things. Needless to say, we never found a bookstore. However, we did get lost on 192 on the way back, since whoever designed the layout and labels for the highway were undoubtedly several filthy hippies short of a filthy hippie commune.

Then we decided to get lobster. 192 was littered with places advertising lobster feasts, so we settled on one with a coupon for cash off on our drinks (clearly in need of drinks at this point). For $35, this place offered all you can eat lobster, crab legs, sushi, other seafood, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, salad, desert, etc. So we went for it. Now, the lobster was tasty, don't get me wrong. It was also kinda gross to get at the lobster. They just handed us a whole lobster, eyes and all, plus a few claws. Prying the lobster apart was frickin' disgusting. It had some sort of brownish-green substance inside. The meat was really only located in one section, plus the claws (which turned out to be the best part). One Kristin's lobsters had a bunch of red dots all over the inside, which happened to be eggs. Eugh. The rest of the meal, while not fantastic, was pretty good. My margarita was phenomenal. The crab was excellent, and much less gross. Plus chocolate cake, key lime pie, and cheesecake afterward.

All of which led to way too much food ingested. And afterward, my increasingly-apparent inability to digest tequila caused me to recapitulate most of the food at about 1am. Not fun for anyone.

Tuesday, Jan 2 - Disney day. Hadn't been to Disney World or any of its theme parks for over 12 years, and not to the Magic Kingdom for even longer. It was cloudy that morning, seemed like the rain might hold off though. For most of the morning, it did. We hit up the Small World, Peter Pan, Snow White, (Gay) Haunted Mansion, and some other stuff. It was all very cool, and very nostalgic. The FastPass thing works pretty well, and allowed us to cut out about a half hour of waiting for Peter Pan. However, when we attempted to get one for Space Mountain, some sort of malfunctions screwed that up, so we had to skip it and come back later. About lunchtime, the rain started. And it rained, and continued to rain. By now, you either stood somewhere protected from the rain, or stood in the now-ridiculously long lines. People weren't leaving; not with screaming children in the balance. The line for Pirates of the Carribean was about an 80 minute wait. We got a FastPass for some train adventure thing, but that wasn't for another few hours. So we tried to find something relatively dry to do. We went on the Teacups, and that was alright. Then we arrived back at Space Mountain, and decided to camp out. What else could we do? Our shuttle wouldn't return until 6, and it was only like 2 by this point. So we stood there and stood there, and got poured on. Probably 40 minutes of pouring rain, and we were still 30 minutes from actually going on the ride. Then a worker came out and told us that Space Mountain wasn't working, and we could either stay and wait in line, hoping it would be fixed, or go elsewhere. By now, we were both pretty distraught, and that was the last straw. We called a cab, and got the funk outta there.

Then, illiteracy strikes again. We just wanted to get home, find some dry clothes, and stop shivering. But as the completely incoherent cab driver took us down 192, we realized he was going the wrong goddamn way. We told him the address, we told him the exact name of the hotel. He takes us to the wrong fucking place. He agreed to cap the fare at a certain level, but then it rang up about $12 past that, so he reneged on that deal. I still didn't have to pay the full fare, but needless to say, neither of us were happy. We pretty much slept off the next couple hours to de-hypothermiaize. Fortunately, a damn good pizza hut pizza capped the night, and the knowledge that we would be escaping Florida the next morning calmed the nerves.

Wednesday, Jan 3 - Another Airtran flight back to Chicago, with smooth sailing. We got to Midway, found my car, and proceeded on a horrific drive around the city attempting to find the interstate. Our directions kinda messed us up, and took us deep into the 4th circle of Hell, surrounded by FIB drivers who made me look like frickin' Miss Manners behind the wheel. Cutting each other off left and right, nobody obeys traffic lights, or yields the right of way, or uses turn signals. It's kill or be killed. Despite my reputation, I'm not on that level. We eventually made it out, found an Oasis, ate some Panda Express, and the world corrected itself.

Finally we reached Madison, and hit the first two bookstores that greeted our arrival. That's a hella-nice feeling.