Keane's August 2011 Trip, Part 5
"It Was Hot, Then It Rained, Repeat Tomorrow"
Please see Part 1 for cast and plot summary...
Day 4, August 19th. Downtown Disney,
and my first venture into a water park...
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I'm driving again. It just seems to work out better when going to Downtown Disney, and we won't have to mess with buses at the water park. Karen takes us to Downtown Disney without any problems, and we park in a relatively close spot in Lot 2.
Our first stop is at Guest Services, where I'm going to pick up Mom's Sports MYW pass, and a couple of MNSSHP tickets for my September/October trip. Hey, I'm here, right? Let's get 'em now. Jenny has to check the number of days on a number of MYW tickets.
My CM can't quite figure out my Sports/ESPN MYW ticket voucher. He can't extend the expiration date beyond October 8th, 2011. I explain to him that it's a special reduced price ticket for the Marathon weekend, and it should only be good for a week on either side of October 1st. He then understands, and prints the ticket. It's actually good from the day I redeemed the voucher (August 19, if you didn't read the top of this page) to October 8th, 2011. That means you could potentially get steeply reduced price tickets for now until October 8th. Of course, I have an annual pass, so expirable tickets are meaningless to me...
I wander down to the spice store, and buy a couple of bags of Super Duper Triple Strength catnip for Figaro, and there's a three pack of flavored sugars I thought I'd try. (This bag would later mysteriously disappear. I have no idea where I left it. Figaro was disappointed.)
We split up, I go into World of Disney, Cathy goes into Lego, and Jenny stays outside and enjoys the 90+ degree weather. Enjoys. I get the new MSEP CD, which is actually the Disneyland Electrical Parade CD, the new Park Music CD (I haven't picked one up in years, and there's a lot of new music on it), and a Grumpy window sticker. You know those outline dad, mom, kids and pets you see on the windows of minivans? Disney makes one of Grumpy, but not of Dopey, my two closely identified dwarves.
In any event, they have one of those buy $40 of stuff and you can buy something else specials, and one the two somethings is a Mickey Beach towel. Hmmm... I'm going to a water park, and the two towels I have with me are in use so the front seat passengers don't stick to the seats. :-) Sold!
We're going to go to Raglan Road for lunch. Sadly, I did no food porn during this trip. The restriction I had on photographing people may have had something to do with it. Our waiter brought out the soda bread and the Guinness reduction that everybody thinks tastes like Guinness until they actually taste it... I had the Fish and Chips, and Jenny and Cathy had... something green. Alas, I failed the green food test yet again at WDW.
It's really hot, so instead of getting chocolate now and have little Ghirardelli chocolate soup squares, I'm going to wait until after we get back from the water park and run in and get the chocolate.
We decide on Typhoon Lagoon (TL), since it's sorta right across the street. Makes sense. Especially since this place doesn't have that insane Summit Plummet. But it has a wave pool. More on that later.
A note on the pictures:
Rewind a few weeks. PiC is going on a weekend canoe trip with her bowling buddies down the Wisconsin River. She buys a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS10 Waterproof and Shockproof 14 megapixel camera, which is probably a superior camera compared to her current G5, and in case she/they dump the canoe... She uses it on her trip, but it doesn't get wet.
At the time she bought it, I don't think I knew I was going to Disney World, much less a water park. On the other hand, when I realized I was probably going to be going to a Water Park, I knew someone with a waterproof camera! Hmmm....
It's a pretty basic camera (basic for any decent camera released in the past few years), and easy to use and understand. At least compared to my Canon G12. So, I essentially going to be taking it on its virgin shoot in combat conditions.
I am happy to report it worked well, both in picture and video mode in wet conditions. It has a wrist strap that has a sliding lock, so you won't lose the camera when say, you get smacked by a wave in the wave pool. But I digress.
The battery life was okay. (It uses a proprietary lithium battery.) I took 126 photos and a few minutes of video, with a comfortable amount of power left on the battery. A 4GB SD card has space for something like 800 pictures. The camera only saves images in jpg, and an oddball quicktime video format that really isn't quicktime.
This particular camera has the lens in the corner of the camera, and it's remarkably easy to get some finger in the frame. I'm sure I'd get used to it in practice...
Less specific to the camera, is water droplets on the lens. There's plenty of examples in the pictures. You'd think they'd be able to coat the protective glass to reduce the surface tension so the droplets wouldn't form. You can't wipe it with your finger, since that smears some oils and/or sunscreen on the lens. Maybe a small piece of chamois attached to the wrist strap might work as a droplet remover.
End note on the pictures.
We turn right out of the DD parking lot, and a quarter mile later turn into TL's parking lot. TL has already been open for a few hours, so I have to park waaaay at the far end. This doesn't surprise me, when Disney CM's dictate where I have to park, I am always parked at the far end at Disney parking lots. At theme parks, it's at the far end of the row from the trams. Here, since there are no trams, I am parked in one of the furthest rows from the entrance. Soon after we arrive, they start directing incoming cars to the auxiliary parking up the hill. Hmmm... Might be crowded, or there are plenty of Stupid Guests who are using TL's parking lot to avoid the parking fee at the parks. They should do something about that...
We get to the entrance, and I get my AP discount for my ticket. Something like $4. I feel special. We rent a locker and I pick up a couple of bottles of water, squandering that $4 almost immediately. After a debate, I ultimately decide just to go barefoot, and by the time we're going to leave, I've never thought socks and shoes would feel so good. But I digress. Again. I have a pocket that zippers, so I am in charge of the locker key.
We went halfway around the wave pool and found seats, and eventually settled on a lap around the park on Castaway Creek, the lazy river. It's a easy place to cool off, but the density of people made for some bottlenecks. As a complete newbie to this place, I noted there were several exits from the river, but I had no idea where I was. Cathy is going back to our chairs, Jenny and I continue on a little further to where Crush 'n' Gusher is. Not that we planned that, but we just happened to get out near the coasters.
I need water, so I get a bottle and pay for it with a very wet $20 bill. I'm sure they're used to that here. :-)
We get in line for Crush 'n' Gusher, and there's a split for 2 and 3 riders. The line for the two person rafts is always longer, but there are fewer three person rafts, so their line moves slower. Once you get a raft, you chose one of three coasters here: Coconut, Pineapple and Banana. Now, if I could remember which was which, I'd refer to them by name, but since I can't, let me say that the coasters get more intense from left to right. As a matter of fact, they don't even allow three person rafts on the one to the right.
Then you climb some stairs. I've noticed there's a lot of stairs at this park. Bummer. At the top, we're informed we can't take our bottle of water with us (they could have told us earlier), and we down it and throw out the bottle in seconds. The mantra of this ride is butt in first, then swing your legs around. You hear it from all three CM's, all the time.
Our light turns green, and there's a fastpass photographer at the bottom. Of course...
Anyway, we go on all three coasters, and you start to get airtime on the middle one, and the one on the right is definitely the best of the three.
We wander back to our seats, and then wade into the wave pool. I've never been in one. I'm in somewhat shallow water, and I'm too dense to realize much of the energy of the wave is gone. So we go into deeper water, and a wave completely knocks me over ensuring my floppy green hat will get rinsed out at least once, this year...
Our last act before leaving was to go on the family raft ride, where no only do you have to climb stairs, but you have to roll your raft up the stairs as well. It's on this ride that something in my back cried out in pain. It was either the bouncing around the of raft, or the constant twisting trying to see where you're going, but... Well, it was already late afternoon.
We pack up, get dressed, and much to my surprise, I still have skin on the bottom of my feet, even though they feel like raw, bloody stumps. We leave Typhoon Lagoon, and head back to Downtown Disney to pick up my chocolate. A quick stop, and we're headed back to CSR.
We rest for a couple of hours, then make reservations at Maya Grill. Cathy's not going to join us, she's leaving tomorrow morning to get home an see her son play in a football game. Ah, parental duties...
We get to Maya Grill about 7pm, and while sitting there, I get an odd sense of deja-vous. I have been here before. It slowly dawns on me that I ate there in 2005, when I was here with Bruce. The more I stare at the decor, the more I'm sure that dinner happened.
The food is decent, I would eat here again. I had the Pork Chop, and I believe Jenny had the Tilapia. Of course, I had the Flan for desert... Mmmmm...
We call it an early evening. It's been a long day, and we're going to open DHS tomorrow morning...
End August 2011 Trip Report - Part 5.
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