sunday 5.28.2006 (seaworld, pleasure island)

Posted in orlando on June 1st, 2006 by jenni | No Comments »
Tags: disney, family, florida, orlando, pleasure island, seaworld

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.

thu 1.15.2004 (gettin’ there. atlantic coast. pleasure island.)

Posted in florida on January 20th, 2004 by jenni | No Comments »
Tags: beach, dancing, disney, family, florida, ocean, orlando, pleasure island

Heather and I sprung out of bed at 4am, crammed my car full of luggage, and drove out to my parents’ house, where we found my family milling around the kitchen, tired and crabby. We piled into the big purple minivan, left our coats in the car at the airport, and hopped on a plane. Since coffee rates much higher than vacation on my priorities list, Heather and I were almost the last to board the plane, and found ourselves seated in the very back row. I like to make an entrance.

Any extended time spent with my family is always, um, entertaining. My mom seems a little freaked out over the fact that we’re all now adults and she can’t take care of us like she used to, so she overcompensates. She was convinced I was going to starve to death on the 2-1/2 hour flight to Orlando because I couldn’t eat the breakfast sandwich they were giving everyone else, so she brought half the contents of her kitchen along as sustenance. Every time I looked at her, she was pushing a baggie of food in my direction. Halfway through the flight, she started fidgeting, and announced, “I’m bored.” Heather replied, “I’m going to have you sedated.”

Each time the pilot got on the radio to tell us our cruising altitude or arrival time or to apologize for the unexpected turbulence over Kentuckinois, we wondered if maybe there was something wrong. He was slurring a lot. But everything seemed fine until we tried to reach the Earth again, and then almost died. I watched about a hundred miles of runway rush past before the plane even touched down, and then he slammed on the plane-brakes (or whatever) and we all went lurching forward, convinced the plane was going to pitch over its front end and land us all right in a ditch full of alligators. All the passengers were laughing that hysterical laugh you employ to keep from screaming, “Sweet Jesus, we’re all going to die!” At least, that’s what I was doing. But, seriously, it’s really hard to try to convince your girlfriend, who is terrified of flying in the first place, that she has nothing to worry about when you know you just barely got out of that one alive.

The airport in Orlando is top-notch because it prominently features a Starbucks and a monorail. We monorailed, then shuttled our way to Thrifty Rent-A-Car, where the guy behind the counter was so condescending and evil that it was all I could do to not leap the counter and strangle his sorry ass out of its tortured, pleasureless existence. It’s one thing to be an asshole to me, because I’ll give it right back. But my parents? That’s cause for a smackdown.

I ended up driving a Nissan Sentra, which was clearly the better of the two cars, sad as that may seem. My dad was driving a Hyundai Something. Our first stop was my brother’s house (Scott, the Forgotten Ripley), where he lives with my sister-in-law, Ali, my niece, Kaitie, and two cats I can’t tell apart.

i have eye herpes!

proof jenni was here.

After lunch, the rest of the family headed to the Disney resort where we were spending one night before taking up residence in our rental condo, and Heather and I headed to the Atlantic Ocean.

We took the most direct route, which brought us to Cape Canaveral, and then Cocoa Beach. Since we were unprepared for chillin’ on the beach, we stopped to buy a towel at Ron Jon’s, which is apparently the original store, as if we cared. They would have been happy to sell us a towel with the Ron Jon’s logo on it for the rock-bottom price of $22. We declined and went to the crappy beach shop across the street (the kind with the stinky aquarium full of hermit crabs), and bought an ugly blue towel embroidered with ‘Cocoa Beach’ in pastels for $12. It was the beach souvenir we never wanted, but it would do.

I had the good fortune of parking right in front of a natural foods ice-cream shop that wanted to sell me a sugar-free frozen yogurt sundae, which was awesome, because that’s exactly what I wanted to buy. We headed to the beach with our yogurt, laid out the towel, and sat down to watch the ocean. Heather fed the menacing seagulls raisins, and I watched the cruise ships heading out to sea. She presented her plans for Epcot II, which will feature all the countries America doesn’t like, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. We discussed the awesome food they’ll serve there, and arrived at the startling conclusion that we hate all the countries with flatbreads. It’s chilling.

And so was the ocean, dammit. OK, it was January. I picked through shells on the beach, and found myself a whole sand dollar, which later broke apart in my bag. Sigh.

We stopped at a little Cuban cafe for plaintains and Cuban coffee, then headed back to Orlando. We met up with my family having dinner at Disney’s Pop Century resort. The place was bizarre; each of the buildings is named and decorated to correlate with a decade starting with the 1950s. The 1990s building, the one in which we were staying, had giant cellphones on the corners of the building (set to dial 407-W-DISNEY, of course), and huge CDs. The 1980s building had Pac Man across the top. Each of the structures also had various catchphrases from each era in giant letters atop them: ours had ‘You go, girl!’, ‘Y2K’, ‘Yo’, and other such painful reminiscences.

We went up to our room to change. Stephanie noted that even the bathroom wallpaper had a subliminal Mickey pattern hidden in it. Scary. Ali showed up and we piled in the sexymobile to drive over to Pleasure Island, conveniently located near the West End of Downtown Disney. No, I am not joking about Pleasure Island, either. It’s really called that, and I was hoping it would live up to its name. It’s the 21+ section with all the nightclubs, and we were going there to party with Ali’s Disney coworkers.

There wasn’t much going on there at 10pm. We went into one bar and waited fruitlessly for the single functioning air hockey table, listening to a really bad Disney punk cover band. Stephanie ordered a drink that came in a red plastic bucket. The bartender dissed me for ordering a Diet Coke. I know it seems inconceivable for someone to have fun at a Disney nightclub and not be stupid drunk, but, dude. Whatever.

We decided to try another club, so we headed to Mannequin’s. It turned out to be the techno club, complete with rotating dance floor and strobe lights. It was great, and it was crawling with superhot, supergay boys. You can’t have everything, I guess. So we rotated our way slowly around the club about a million times, dancing like a bunch of white girls and having a lot of fun. After a couple drinks, we even managed to lure Heather out onto the floor. Stephanie was in hysterics because every time we got near one of the few obviously un-gay boys in a grey sweater, he would whip out the thumbs-up in our direction.

After a while, Ali’s friends showed up and we decided to go to another club, called Motion. It was pop/hip-hop, packed full of sweaty dancing college students. I was a little disappointed about the lack of rotating floor and dry ice, but it was fun anyway, watching all the girls in the hootchie getup, and the series of about ten different guys I saw staring down Ali’s shirt.

On the way out, a guy came up to bum a cigarette off Heather, and managed to tell us in the first two minutes that he made 100k a year selling timeshares. Ha. We wandered around, and Ali bought a Jello shot in a giant syringe. She was struggling to, uh, inject it, so a girl came up to help, saying, “Suck and push at the same time, that’s how to do it. Suck and push. Teeth aren’t necessary.” So we yelled, “Suck and push!!” to help her along. At one end of Pleasure Island, a cover band called Kabang(!) was playing the greatest hits of the 90s, among others. We stood in the street and danced along with Nirvana, the Violent Femmes, and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. Some kids formed a three-person mosh pit in front of the stage. One of the guys in the band was wearing vinyl pants. It was hard to tear ourselves away from Kabang(!), but somehow we managed to make it back to the resort, and sleep.