Stephanie goes to visit my brother, Scott, and his family in Florida at least twice a year. I was down for a weekend trip, so I decided to join her over Memorial Day.

Saturday, I had enough time to drink coffee, clean my house, and finish packing, and then it was time to head to the aeroport. I felt a little bad about the fact that I was in first class and my sister was in coach, but she said she didn’t mind as long as I brought her back something good. So, having never flown first class, I was kind of enamored of the novelty. The seats were huge (I sat crosslegged most of the flight), and had footrests. They got us drinking before the flight even took off (FYI: Northwest Airlines serves Jack Daniels), gave us snacks and a full meal. However, the first class restroom did not have a Jacuzzi, as I was led to believe. I’d never pay to be up there, but it was pretty nice to exploit them for once.

Staying with my brother and his family was awesome; I don’t see them anywhere near often enough. Kaitie is four years old now, and Melody (aka the smilingest baby on earth) is one.

Kaitie

Melody

While it’s fun to be around the kids, it stresses me out immensely, and I’ve begun to appreciate the little maintenance involved with my cats, who I’ve sometimes considered too demanding. Also, I happened to notice that when you have children, it’s difficult to stay out until the ante-meridiem hours; in fact, Scott and Ali were often in bed before 9pm. ACK.

Stephanie with the nieces at SeaWorld

On Sunday, we all went to SeaWorld, which I hadn’t visited since I was a little kid. Aquariums have never interested me much, but I loved SeaWorld, probably because you can get up close to the animals. We even got to pet a bunch of stingrays (they’re slimy and bumpier than one would expect).

In the dolphin exhibit, we saw a very excited boy-dolphin swimming around with his schlong out for all to see, and then we saw manatees doing dirty dirty things, which has left me scarred for life as regards sea creatures.

Scott and I went to ride the Kraken, which I’m pretty sure is the most awesome rollercoaster I’ve ever been on. I rode the whole way with my arms in the air, screaming my head off, and I was hoarse afterwards. My mom called right as we were exiting the ride to excitedly inform me that they were flipping through the newspaper that morning and found a picture of me making a feather-angel at pillow fight club occupying the top half of the front page of the outdoor section in the St Paul Pioneer Press. Holy crap.

We spent most of the day there, and were all drenched in sweat and overheated in the low-90s humidity. Scott took the kids home around seven, and Stephanie and Ali and I headed right over to Downtown Disney without so much as a reapplication of deodorant. We were stinky, and we were fine with it.

We had dinner at the bar in the Rainforest Cafe, one of the very few restaurants there that knew the word ‘vegetarian’. The wait was an hour and a half, but we were lucky enough to sneak into the bar right at the time that a couple people were leaving. As we were sitting there eating, a dude and his girlfriend came up behind me more than once to order drinks; he’d order a Jack and coke or something similar, slam it while he was standing there, then order another. I finally turned around and said, “Dude! You’re hardcore!” He replied, “That’s how we roll in Tennessee!” I told him of my love for Nashville, and we talked about Tennessee for a while. As they walked away, his girlfriend said in a horrible drawl that my sister and I imitated for the rest of the night: “Ah think she likes you.” Hahaha. I LOVE SOUTHERNERS.

After dinner, we headed over to the location of the evening’s main event: PLEASURE ISLAND, or ‘PI’ to those in the know. Now, I have trouble explaining just how funny a Disney-sponsored group of nightclubs is, but it seriously amuses me. It’s Disney, and yet there’s nothing Disney about them, except for the fact that drinks are served in plastic buckets and jello shots arrive in big plastic syringes, and that for most of the night I was carrying around drinks with a big blue-flashing ice cube in them, which enhanced the dancing at least 125%. SO FUNNY. We started at Mannequins, the ‘gay club’ with the rotating dance floor, but it was only 9:30, and the place was nearly empty. We checked out the top 40 club and the BET club and found that the only one with people dancing in it was the 80s club, because that’s where all the old people hung out. Ali and I didn’t care; we went in and started flailing to Wild Cherry and Run-DMC. After twenty minutes or so, Stephanie had rolled her eyes so far back into her skull that we decided to go elsewhere, and by then the other clubs were filling up.

We spent a lot of time at Motion (I am not ashamed to admit that top-40 dance and hiphop is my preferred shakin’-it medium, and the funniest moment of the night was when they played ‘We Like to Party’, the song my sister always sings when she’s imitating dancing on the rotating dance floor), more time at Mannequins on the rotating dance floor (I had one of those beautiful back-home moments when they filled the room with fog while playing Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’, a song you’re guaranteed to hear at least four times every time you go dancing at the 90’s), and ended the evening at the BET club, where we met a guy who told us he’d worked as a sous-chef at one of the restaurants in the Contemporary Resort for 9 days, working 30-hour days (yep!), and that one of his jobs was to go out and meet people as an ambassador of magic, or some such crap. We figured hitting on every chick in a club probably wouldn’t count towards his magical-ambassador award as far as Disney was concerned, but it was pretty funny. He kept welcoming me to Minneapolis. I told him I was glad to be there.

The next morning, Alison was moaning about her hips and thighs, and I realized that I no longer get sore after dancing all night. Clearly, this means I must go even more often, ALL THE TIME.

Monday morning, we were up bright and painfully early, because we had a convertible to pick up and take to the beach. I had reserved a Sebring, but when the guy told me there was a Mustang available, how could I resist? I had even considered buying one at one point, but realized a RWD car is kind of retarded in Minnesota.

Anyway, I loved driving that car. It wasn’t as fast as Miguel, but it was powerful, sounded awesome, and was heavy like a muscle car. We spent the day driving along the coast with the top down and laying on the beach at Melbourne. I wore very little clothing, which is something I’m rarely brave enough to do, but holy shit! I was in a hot convertible driving along the ocean. It was the right thing to do.

And oh, we were sunburnt. We reapplied sunscreen several times, but I think the sun there is just too much. I had the awesome raccoon-like mask from my sunglasses, and parts of my body that rarely see daylight, like halfway down my cleavage, were pink. But, man, it was great.

We drove back to Orlando and I called Alina for dinner. It was so awesome to see her again; I can’t believe how long we’ve known each other. She reminded me of the time we saw a midget riding a Segway in Celebration. I hate how I can spend an hour or two with someone and feel like they’re part of my life on a regular basis, and then realize I don’t get to hang out with them all the time. That’s so strange to me. However, the really funny thing? The condo she just moved into is three blocks away from my brother’s house. AWESOME.

Taking the car back to the rental agency, my sister was driving Scott’s car, so I was alone. It was dark and had cooled off quite a bit; I was blasting the radio with the top down and the wind in my hair and it was so fucking perfect. And then I drove by the creepy sheriff’s car with the coconut head in it and freaked out just a little. What the hell??

It was sad to say goodbye to everybody, especially my brother, because he’s so great and I only see him maybe twice a year. Stephanie was staying for the rest of the week, so she took me to the airport, where I discovered I’d been bumped up to first class again. SCORE.

The return was uneventful except for the fact that we landed on the new runway, and I realized it doesn’t actually go directly over the mall (more like over 24th Ave), which means we’re unlikely to see an A330 go plummeting into the Mall of America anytime soon (still undecided about whether that’s a good or bad thing). Also, right as we landed, a woman across the aisle started yelling, ‘NAVY! NAVY!’ to our massive confusion, until she excitedly began to proclaim that she could always tell the difference between pilots who came from the Navy vs the Air Force, because Navy pilots stopped short as if they were landing on an aircraft carriers. And here I was thinking they just had to get to the right taxiway because that’s what the control tower told them to do.

Huh.