Florida Day Cinque

Taking a break from Disney World, we ventured out to Universal, which had gained an awesome new park based largely around Marvel superheroes since I had been there last. We made our way onto the Spider-Man 3D adventure, which had a cartoon J. Jonah Jameson being all kinds of awesome in it, the Hulk, which was an awesome roller coaster that sends you looping around upside down and whatnot, and Dr. Doom, which lets you watch some brilliant propaganda videos while you're waiting in line (the ride itself, which just sends you shooting straight up in the air and back down, was pretty good too).

The new park also had some non-Marvel rides, including a log flume that just completely drenched us all (with my sunburn paining me as much as it was on this day, I wanted nothing more than to ride this all day) and a stupid jerk pteranodon ride at the Jurassic Park section that I wasn't allowed to go on because only children and people with children were allowed on it. There was also the Dueling Dragons or whatever the hell it was called, that surprisingly wasn't about the adventures of Billy and Jimmy Lee, but was two roller coasters that occasionally come charging at each other (it's really only noticeable once while on the ride, at least if you're in the back like I was).

Eventually we left and made our way to the other park, where we promptly went to Terminator 2, as it was indoors and we were all really overheated. We also saw the Shrek 3D movie, which meant that we made a possible miscalculation in doing both of the big 3D shows back to back rather than spacing them out a bit more, but we stalwartly soldiered on anyway. The Mummy turned out to be a cool ride, much better than the movie itself (and also rather violent, as we kept changing directions pretty viciously and without warning), and I even convinced my family to go on Earthquake, whch they claimed to enjoy. Unfortunately, the line was too long to justify going on Jaws, and it looked like it was about to start raining, so we made our way back home.

Once at the hotel, I of course spent my evening at the pool with two girls rather shamelessly hanging off of me (Hi Dom!), and unlike my future Brazilian wife, they actually live only half an hour from me, so we exchanged Myspace pages and I woke up my brother in law to let me back into my room, because really, why on Earth would I take my room key anywhere?