Do they take Discover in Heaven?
There's a tickle of giddiness in my belly tonight. (It's not as gross as it sounds.) I've just booked a hotel room in Orlando for my upcoming vacation. This is exciting for lots of reasons, the biggest of which is that I'll be hauling my sister and nephews down there for their first-ever trip to Universal Studios. I'm a sucker for theme parks and I can't think of a better place to take a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old who've never been to an amusement park but who love them some Spider-Man. Another reason this excites me is that the last time I took a proper vacation was more than two years ago. I think. Hell, it might have been three. Incidentally, I went to Universal that time too, with Phil. We had an excellent time despite running out of money fairly quickly and having to eat on the cheap (McDonald's and KFC) the entire time. It was in May, and because it was the off-season, our super-nice hotel was super-cheap, and the parks weren't crowded at all.
I'm hoping we'll have a similar experience when we go down there in a few weeks (sans the part about being broke ... hopefully). I purposely booked our trip during the off-season in the hopes that people will be occupied with going to school and not going to ride roller coasters. I'm a little worried that we'll get caught up in a big hurricane, since we'll be traveling snugly inside hurricane season and there haven't been any big storms yet this year. But that's not something I can plan around, so I'll banish the thought.
The trip down there is slated to take a good 12-15 hours from what I can remember/have been told. It'll be the four of us crammed into either my sister's car or mine (hopefully hers as mine is ghettofied these days), the kids in the back seat playing with their GameBoy and nodding off with their heads against the windows. I'm going to make up some fun road-trip games to play to keep them (and myself) occupied. We'll stop at gaudy Florida tourist traps and look at the trinkets while we take turns using the restroom. And then we'll pile back into the car and keep trucking along, burning that black gold in pursuit of a couple of days of carefully choreographed thrills.
My family didn't really do vacations while I was growing up; we did occasional summer road trips, which are a different breed of family vacation altogether. We didn't go to the beach and just lounge around for a week; we drove to St. Louis to look at the arch and see the Cardinals play the Pirates. That sort of thing. Lots of museums and whatnot (which cultivated my obssessive love of museums). I have grown to love road trips because of our time spent driving to neighboring states. There is something rewarding about taking off into the countryside, watching the landscape shift along with the road signs, until your legs are cramped and you're exhausted from sitting in the sun all day, but you're there, you've made it, and you're just a quick night's sleep away from an entire day of silliness and sightseeing.
I hope our trip goes well enough to make lifelong road-trippers out of my nephews.
I'm hoping we'll have a similar experience when we go down there in a few weeks (sans the part about being broke ... hopefully). I purposely booked our trip during the off-season in the hopes that people will be occupied with going to school and not going to ride roller coasters. I'm a little worried that we'll get caught up in a big hurricane, since we'll be traveling snugly inside hurricane season and there haven't been any big storms yet this year. But that's not something I can plan around, so I'll banish the thought.
The trip down there is slated to take a good 12-15 hours from what I can remember/have been told. It'll be the four of us crammed into either my sister's car or mine (hopefully hers as mine is ghettofied these days), the kids in the back seat playing with their GameBoy and nodding off with their heads against the windows. I'm going to make up some fun road-trip games to play to keep them (and myself) occupied. We'll stop at gaudy Florida tourist traps and look at the trinkets while we take turns using the restroom. And then we'll pile back into the car and keep trucking along, burning that black gold in pursuit of a couple of days of carefully choreographed thrills.
My family didn't really do vacations while I was growing up; we did occasional summer road trips, which are a different breed of family vacation altogether. We didn't go to the beach and just lounge around for a week; we drove to St. Louis to look at the arch and see the Cardinals play the Pirates. That sort of thing. Lots of museums and whatnot (which cultivated my obssessive love of museums). I have grown to love road trips because of our time spent driving to neighboring states. There is something rewarding about taking off into the countryside, watching the landscape shift along with the road signs, until your legs are cramped and you're exhausted from sitting in the sun all day, but you're there, you've made it, and you're just a quick night's sleep away from an entire day of silliness and sightseeing.
I hope our trip goes well enough to make lifelong road-trippers out of my nephews.
posted by theogeo | 8/16/2006 10:45:00 PM
2 Comments:
I am also living in the excited delirium that takes over when you are weeks away from a majorly anticipated vacation. I will miss out on the car ride, however, which I am both glad for and sorry about because vacations don't feel right without several hours in the car.
Oooh, you're going to have so much fun on the Schlong! Sucks that you won't be able to take your iPod on the plane.
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