Becky's Unsolicited Movie Reviews: Beastly

Why did this movie happen?

Disney owns this bitch.  Don't even...

(But if I had to find one, lonely, single redeeming factor then..........................blind Neil Patrick Harris for the motherfucking win.)

To My Brain: Message Received

Last night I dreamt that I lost my car after my Thursday Breakaway run.  I walked all over 38104 trying to find it and then...oh.  There it was.  I'd missed it because it no longer looked like my car.  Someone had torched it, though they'd kindly left my personal belongings behind (all of which, miraculously, were unscathed by the fire).

'At least my phone's still here,' I thought.  'I should call the insurance company and the police.  And maybe my parents...'

My dream self seemed to think that calling my parents was more important than calling anyone else, and thus the stage was set for the rest of the dream:  Becky trying to make a call on her cell phone.

It would lock up, the display wouldn't work, the touchscreen wouldn't register...sometimes strange games or movies would start playing on the screen for no reason and I would have to turn the phone off to get them to stop...sometimes the phone wouldn't turn off...sometimes it wouldn't turn on...  Once, I was actually able to place a call to my mom's cell phone, but the person on the other end wasn't my mom because the phone had dialed a different number than the number I punched in.

Eventually, I wound up walking to my parents' house, which was now located in New York City and a convenient two-minute walk from my car.  Being in New York meant that my brother was there, so the entire family went to look at my car.  None of them seemed too concerned about it.  Then I woke up.

My brain likes to bombard me with overly-simplified symbolism sometimes.  This is what I get for writing, "Why can't I get anything finished?!" in my journal before I went to bed last night.

The night before, I had a dream about Prince William which was so awesome that I woke up feeling happy.  What happened in it?  I have no idea.  What seems like hours of trying and failing to make a phone call is etched in my brain, but give me a good time with royalty and I don't remember a damn thing about it...

On My First New Phone in Five Years...

I know exactly when I bought my hot pink Motorola Razr (May 21, 2006) because (shocker) I put up a blog about it the next day.  (It's worth the effort to click on that link just to read the comment exchange between Susie and me.)

When I walked into the AT&T store yesterday afternoon, the woman who waited on me said, "WOW, a RAZR!" the way an ornithologist might say, "WOW, an IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER!"  Razrs are reportedly extinct, so it is a lucky, lucky cell phone store employee who runs across one in the wild.

Two years ago, a year past my upgrade date, I bought an LG Neon in an attempt to update my image.  Unfortunately, the LG Neon was the shittiest piece of shit phone I'd ever laid hands on, and after a trip back to the store and two hour-long conversations with customer service (which took place on the Razr because the Neon kept dropping calls), the verdict was that AT&T was not going to let me switch to a different phone.

And rather than give them another cent of my money, I said, "Fuck it, I'm going back to my Razr."

That was two years ago. 

Two years of getting crap about still having a Razr.

1.  "Can that phone get text messages?"

2.  "Wow, that's an old phone."

3.  "I haven't seen one of those in years!"

4.  "You weren't kidding about being unemployed, were you?"

(And those are just off the top of my head from the past three months.)

I actually did have an upgrade available about six months ago, but my brother stole it out from under me just because he was "moving to New York" and "needed to communicate with family" or whatever.  Jesus.

Then I thought I was going to get a new phone last month off my mom's upgrade.  But her upgrade was for February 2012, which I only realized the day before I was planning to buy the phone.

But yesterday, stealing my brother's upgrade, which he stole from me, which he really stole from my dad, I purchased a Pentach Laser, which is mostly touchscreen, but also has a full keyboard because the nice saleslady told me that switching from a Razr to a touchscreen keyboard might be overly ambitious of me.  ("Save the touchscreen keyboard until you get used to texting that way," she advised me.) 

So far, my only complaints are that I can't customize ringtones for individual callers and the scrolling is a little awkward.  But what an upgrade, right?

RIGHT?!

I could count on one hand the number of calls my Razr dropped in half a decade.  It still had four to six days' worth of battery life after five years.  And it was pink!

And this is....

...a phone that looks like all the other phones.  Because that what all phones are like nowadays.  Such mixed feelings...

Does Anyone Else Think this is Creepy as Hell?

My Facebook wall looks different than most because I diligently delete every automated message Facebook posts on my behalf.  You'll never find a link to a comment I wrote on someone else's wall and you'll never see that I've just become friends with someone.  I think it's creepy and weird that every move I make is tabulated and published without my permission (the option to opt out of these notifications disappeared many months ago), which is why I delete them as soon as the stories pop up.

Equally important is that a list of links about comments and/or new friends leads to an aesthetically crappy looking wall.  And an uninteresting one, too.  Because I'm a narcissist who finds herself fascinating, sometimes I go down my wall and read through old conversations.  It's so much easier to do that when you don't have to scroll through a bunch of crap to get to the interesting stuff.

Anyway, it's bad enough that everything you do is recorded and that there's no way, except manual removal, to stop it, but I've noticed that Facebook has actually upped the privacy-invasion level lately, so you wind up seeing things like this:

Seriously?  No one at Facebook thought a notification like that might cross some invisible boundary of information sharing?  This is why Mark Zuckerberg should not be in charge of anything.

Becky's Unsolicited Movie Reviews: Red Riding Hood

Who the fuck was the intended demographic for this?  Because for the violence alone, it obviously wasn't me. 

Fail.  Double fail for the theater I saw it in where no one shut up the entire fucking time, COME ON PEOPLE IT WASN'T EXACTLY THE INTELLECTUAL MYSTERY OF OUR TIME.

Total :-/.

The Occasional DanRad Video

Occasionally, one needs to watch a video of Daniel Radcliffe, because he is one crazy mofo.  It will be a new segment here on the B Channel, but not a regular one, just an occasional one, as indicated by the title of this post.

I Am Harry Potter from Daniel Radcliffe

Every time I think about him saying, "I talk to women...tell them that I'm Harry...and see where that gets me," I TOTALLY LOL.  Having thought of that many times today, I have LOLd muchly.

(All of my posts on all of my blogs today are the result of raiding Vanessa's e-mails.  Fact.)

Cheap Beer of the Month Club (The Triumphant Return!)

The best thing I ever did, in my life, was put a picture of a Bud Light can on this blog.  It is the only reason that people visit me here who aren't my close friends, or people from ISJ who get bored when I don't post about Jake, or people looking for information on Justin Bieber's hair.

Technically, last week was to be our second club meeting, what with it being the first Friday of the month and all, but SORRY I WAS ON VACATION, and as Club President, I made the executive decision to push us back a week.  In consolation, this month's beer is going to be one of the MOST AWESOME (read:  "cheapest")  of cheap beers EVER.

CHEAP BEER OF THE MONTH FOR MARCH 2011:  NATURAL LIGHT

Gas station or grocery store?  Buying Natty Light in a grocery store is like buying milk at a gas station.  You can do it, but you lose the vital ambiance that completes your purchasing experience.

Price:  I paid $11.79 for 18 of them, plus tax, so roughly $0.71 a can.

Swill quality:  High.  I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat it.  It's like drinking yeast-flavored water.

Packaging/label:  About as much effort went into making the Natty Light logo as went into making Natty Light.  Which is to say, not much.

Shame factor:  Huge.  Even frat boys will look down on you for drinking this shit.  (I wouldn't, though.)

Overall:  Look, it's beer, alright.  And you could drink five of them for the price of a goddamn cup of coffee at Starbucks.  That alone is enough to cover up a multitude of sins...

Becky Does Orlando: Part Four (The Thrilling Conclusion!)

Day Four (pedometer count:  11,688 steps)

It was Megan who suggested that I wear my pedometer on this trip.  Truth be told, our step counts weren't as impressive as I thought they'd be, but step counts don't take into account long minutes of standing in line.  By Day Four, I was ready to sit down for a while.

***

(And now for something completely different...)

It was just Sam and me at breakfast the next morning, Alex having safely made it back to Tampa to go back to work.  We had a bus to catch and it wasn't picking us up at our hotel, so we made the half mile or so walk down the street to the Quality Inn and managed to walk around the entire perimeter of the hotel before finding the lobby and our bus in front of it.  A few more hotel stops later, we were cruising down the highway watching a video on the Kennedy Space Center.

The tour had been advertised as an all-day adventure to the Everglades and Cape Canaveral.  We were supposed to leave at 6:30 that morning, but when Sam called to confirm the day before and our departure time was changed to 8:20, I had a feeling we weren't actually going to make it to the Everglades.

Sure enough, when we stopped only 45 minutes down the road, we were nowhere near the Everglades.  Instead, we were at a river, the name of which escapes me, and about to get on an airboat driven by a guy named Chuck who looked every ounce the Florida native that he was.

Chuck pointed out an alligator within five minutes of us climbing into the boat, but that was the first and last that we would see during our half-hour ride.  Because I'm occasionally dense, it took me a while to catch on that the point of the tour was to see alligators.  But personally, I just enjoyed the boat ride.  It was a nice change of pace after three successive theme park days. 

Back on the bus, we drove another 45 minutes or so before arriving at the Astronaut Hall of Fame.  At first we couldn't get in because the tickets our guide had given to us were actually tickets for a shuttle launch the week before.  But he cleared things up and soon enough we were walking around looking at all sorts of interesting space-related memorabilia...

And then it was time for our primary destination of the day, the Kennedy Space Center.

It was past noon already, so Sam and I headed straight for food at the Orbit Cafe, ate quickly, and then jumped on a bus tour of the facility.  The bus stopped twice, once at an observation gallery where we saw a crawler, the largest land vehicle in the world, creeping its way back to the Vehicle Assembly Building after the aforementioned launch that we missed the week before ("This is VERY RARE!  You're really lucky to see this!" our bus driver told us)...

...and once at the Apollo/Saturn V Center, where we watched several sequential videos on the space program, including one from the actual mission control room where the Apollo missions were launched.  Ah, history...

The only "ride" at the Space Center was the Shuttle Launch Experience which, unlike the rides at the theme parks, had an extensive introduction and many, many, many opportunities to back out.  "This is the most realistic shuttle launch simulator I've ever been in," a real-life astronaut confidently told us while we were standing in line.  There weren't many of us there, but of those who were, more than one decided not to go through with it.

When it was over, Sam and I decided that it wasn't nearly violent enough to be like a real shuttle launch.  (After all we'd done that week, we had high standards for simulated rides.)

Just outside the launch simulator building was the Shuttle Explorer (double meaning intended), which was advertised as a chance to walk through a real space shuttle.  We were both a little disappointed, though, that only two "rooms" were open to the public and, all and all, we didn't get a good feel for what it would really be like living in cramped quarters in space.

We had an IMAX movie to catch at 4:30, but with a half an hour to kill, we went to the Meet-an-Astronaut room where an astronaut talked to us about solar flares and, er, some other things that were maybe a little too technical for the general public but fairly interesting nonetheless.  But we ducked out a couple of minutes early to rush across the complex to catch one of two 3D IMAX movies that were playing.  We chose not based on subject, but rather on who was narrating the film (Leonardo DiCaprio beat out Tom Cruise) and that worked out well for me because the movie was on the Hubble Space Telescope, and I'm a bit of a Hubble whore anyway.

3D IMAX-sized images of space?  Two very enthusiastic thumbs up.

The last major attraction was the Rocket Garden, where rockets of times past come to rest.  Our aimless wandering was narrated by a man standing in the middle of the garden, whom we originally thought was a recording.

After swinging through the gift shop so Sam could expand her magnet collection, we got back on the bus for the two hour (two hour!) ride back.  The bulk of the journey was filled by watching Old Dogs - a movie I had never seen but was surprisingly hilarious - but when the movie ended and we were still on the bus, we started to get a little restless.

And we still had to walk back to our hotel once we were dropped off, so we stopped at IHOP along the way and grabbed some dinner.  And then it was time to pack.

***

We took a shuttle to the airport the next morning and by pure coincidence, a fellow passenger happened to be from Brisbane and had lost her house in the recent floods.  She told us awful stories for most of the ride to the airport, which created a strange bond in the van, such that when Sam was dropped off first, and me second, the remaining passengers called out for us to "take care!" and "have a wonderful flight!" and "nice to meet you!"  I can honestly say I've never had that happen while riding an airport shuttle...

Sam and I didn't say goodbye because we both assumed that I would be able to make my way back to her gate once I got through security at my terminal.  Her flight left four hours before mine and the plan was for me to meet up with her and wait for her flight with her.  Except I couldn't.  On complete opposite sides of the airport, I couldn't get back to where she was without going back through security and explaining why I was going to wrong gate while I was at it.  So instead of a leisurely farewell, we had a two minute phone conversation and a text exchange once she got on her plane.

It was a pretty lackluster ending to an otherwise awesome trip.

And then I came home.  To the real world.  Where there is no butterbeer and even my blogs are woefully boring in comparison.  (No, for real, these blogs have been pretty grueling to read, I know.)  But it was a really good trip.  A true escape.  No running, no writing, no deep thinking...Orlando's powers of distraction surprised me.  And hats off to two of the best travel companions ever. :)

Becky Does Orlando: Part Three

Day Three (pedometer count:  13,172 steps)

It's always been something of a point of pride for me to be able to say I'd never been to Disney World.  So when this trip was being planned, I had to make a decision:  should I see Disney World just to see it?  Or should I refuse to go so I could remain that anomaly who had never been?

I decided to see Disney World.

***

Every other day, Sam and I went down the hall and knocked on Alex's door a few minutes before our pre-decided morning meet-up time.  Today, Alex didn't wait for us.  He was at our door thirteen minutes early.

I've spent a lot of time over the years teasing Alex about certain people he's dated in the past (really, it's a wonder he still talks to me) and since one ex-girlfriend of his is a big Disney fan, I knew he'd been to Disney World more than once before.  But it wasn't until he showed up early, backpack on and sunscreen already applied, that it clicked:  Alex had not been dragged to Disney World in the past.  Alex liked Disney World.  In fact, Alex had probably been whiling away the first two days of this trip specifically so he could get to our Disney day.

After a quick breakfast at the hotel, we piled into his car and to Disney we went.  We had one day and a ticket for one park, so it was communally decided we should see the Magic Kingdom.

It was like a pilgrimage from the parking lot.  We piled out of Alex's car and joined a growing line of people marching toward the shuttle that took us from the parking lot to the monorail, which took us to security and the gates, and finally, after the obligatory fingerprinting and ticket swiping, we were solidly inside the grounds of Disney World.

 

And what do you do when you first step foot inside Disney's Magic Kingdom?  Why, you gawk at Cinderella's castle, of course, and take multiple pictures of yourself in front of it.

"It's pretty impressive," I said.  "Not as cool as Hogwarts, but as far as fake castles go, it definitely ranks up there."  The look of death that Alex gave me in return was enough to cease all further Harry Potter-related comments from me for the rest of the day.

Disney World was more crowded than Universal, and larger.  Though we'd gotten an early start to the day, it was already around 10:00 and we had a whole park to get through and a show to catch at 6:00 that evening.

"Let's just pick a direction and start going," said Alex.  So we did.

We started in Tomorrowland and the first ride of the day was Space Mountain.  I'd learned early in the trip that a ride that required you to put your belongings in a locker beforehand was a more serious ride than one that didn't.  Alex was mum on what Space Mountain was like but Sam reminded me that it didn't require a locker and so it shouldn't be that bad...

HO-LEE SHIT.

"At least you're smiling in this one; that's progress," said Alex, while inspecting the obligatory mid-ride photo after we got off.  Indeed I was smiling.  I was smiling because I was laughing at how horrifically I had misjudged the ride and I was pretty sure that I was going to be the first person in history to die in the middle of Space Mountain.  Jesus Christ.  All around me, kids no taller than my waist were skipping around like they'd just had the time of their lives.  I was a hundred percent positive that if I'd gone on that ride as a child, I would have freaked the fuck out and screamed bloody murder until the ride came to a stop.

And that might just be why I never went to Disney World when I was younger...

Sam was thirsty so we hit up a soda fountain where she tasted root beer for the first time.  Then Alex, with the glee of someone who's about to do something he really likes doing, informed us that our next stop would be one of his all-timer favorite rides:  Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin.

Personally, I didn't find it to be as great as the Men in Black ride.  I did not tell Alex this.

Stitch's Great Escape was next and it was...long and confusing and not actually a ride.

In Fantasyland we had a specific goal in mind:  It's a Small World.  I noticed that - mercifully - the song was not audible to any of the workers who were loading people into and out of boats.

In Liberty Square, I suggested we see the Hall of Presidents because it was something I'd heard a lot about.  And leave it up to me to want to do the one Disney attraction that even the hardcore Disney fan had never heard of.

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"I really don't know," I said.  I refrained from telling him that I'd generally heard the words "weird" and "creepy" associated with the Hall of Presidents, and after watching eerily lifelike (and life-sized) animatronic replicas of all 44 U.S. presidents shift in their seats as Morgan Freeman's booming voice introduced them one by one, I'd have to say those would be the words I'd use too.  But I'd also use the word "cool" because seeing a robotic Abraham Lincoln stand up from his chair and deliver the entire Gettysburg Address is just not something one sees every day.

Switching to a different kind of creepy, we hit up the Haunted Mansion, which I was interested in because of the failed Eddie Murphy movie it inspired (in the post-Pirates of the Caribbean days when Disney was thinking it had hit the jackpot in turning rides into films).  And when I say "failed," I mean it, because I haven't seen it personally and Sam and Alex didn't even know what I was talking about.  The ride was fun, though, even if I was expecting it to be a lot scarier...

We all three had chicken nuggets at Columbia Harbor House before heading to Frontierland where we had the longest wait of our entire week:  forty minutes to ride Splash Mountain.

God, the anticipation.  Forty minutes of knowing that at the end of the ride is a fifty-foot drop.  Forty minutes of signs warning about steep drops and sudden stops.  Forty minutes of looking at the family in front of us and the little girl who couldn't have been more than three years old who was oblivious to it all.  'She'll handle this better than I will,' I thought.

I was right.  She was in our boat and she did just fine.  I actually did alright too, and was more unnerved by the strange vignettes we floated through between steep drops than the fifty-foot plunge at the end.  Sometimes life-sized plastic animals are interesting.  Sometimes they're a little weird.

The one final must-do of the day was in Adventureland, and that was Pirates of the Caribbean.  Fiercely loyal to the Pirates brand after seeing the first movie five times in the theater (the most I have ever seen any movie in a theater...and yes that includes Brokeback Mountain where I topped out at four), I was really curious to see the scenes that had been taken directly from the ride and inserted into the movie.

"No, the third movie really isn't that bad!" I said, as we walked in.  "It's the second one that's terrible."  (Though, yes, I own well-worn copies of all three films and can't help but be excited about the fourth one even though it's going to be a train wreck; I don't care, it's Pirates.)

So imagine my disappointment when I suspected and then Alex confirmed that the ride has been changed.  Now there are all sorts of Jack Sparrows popping up all over the place and I only saw a handful of things that were related to the first movie at all.  :(

From there, we did a little shopping back near Cinderella's castle and meant to leave before the daily parade made its way through the grounds but...oops...we didn't quite make it out in time...

Someone once told me that her favorite line in my book was one in the first chapter, where I said that Disney had "instilled in me an unnatural bias toward men who look like Prince Eric" from The Little Mermaid.  "I like that," this person told me.  "Looking for your Prince Eric..."

I meant it in the literal sense, as in Prince Eric has played a prominent role in determining what I find physically attractive about the opposite sex (see my Jake Gyllenhaal period for evidence of its lingering affects into adulthood).  However, I must say...

...seeing him in the flesh wasn't quite the thrill I'd hoped it would be.  Ariel really wasn't all that inspiring either.  :-/

After taking the monorail and then the shuttle back to the parking lot, Alex drove us to Downtown Disney where we had tickets to see the Cirque du Soleil show La Nouba.  We had a couple of hours to kill and still needed to eat, so we walked the length of Downtown Disney, decided to eat at Planet Hollywood (at my request, since I'd never eaten at one before), and then got to our seats just in time for the show to start.

Five out of five stars for La Nouba.

Alex had to leave us then to go back to the "real world."  He dropped us off at our hotel and headed back to Tampa.

But losing one of our travel companions did not stop us!  NEXT TIME...alligators, moon rocks, and the top-notch narrating skills of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Stay tuned...

Becky Does Orlando: Part Two

Day Two (pedometer count:  12,813+ steps)

Day Two we decided to try the shuttle.

A benefit of Alex being close enough to drive in (he's in Tampa) was that he had a car and could act as our chauffeur.  But the hotel had a free shuttle to all the nearby parks and in the interest of saving gas - and parking money - we decided to try it.

It was a short-lived experiment.  By later that afternoon, we were back to Alex and his car.

***

The difference between Universal Studios and Universal Islands of Adventure was palpable from a distance.

Not that we spent much time wandering through the various portions of the park, mind you.  No, we made a beeline to the furthest corner of the park, where the holy grail was waiting for us.  The mother of all theme park experiences.  The reason the three of us had decided that Orlando was the place to meet up:  The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

The thing about the Wizarding World is that you can see it from most other places in the park.  Look up while you're in Jurassic Park and there's Hogwarts.  But when you're in the Wizarding World, you can't see anything else.  You are completely ensconced in the illusion, and what an incredible illusion it is...

...or rather, an incredible illusion for those of us who are Harry Potter fans.  I think most of the nuance was lost on Alex, who had only read the books once, years ago, and who thought Sam and I were out of our minds to be as excited as we were.

I will say that the one thing that (stupidly) didn't occur to me before we got there was that this is a Universal attraction, and Universal is in the business of making movies.  Ergo, the basis for everything in the park was the Harry Potter movies and not the Harry Potter books.  Not that this made any large difference one way or the other, but I'm not entirely sure that a book purist who hadn't seen the movies would have been as enthralled as the general public seemed to be.

After gawking for several minutes, we headed to Ollivander's wand shop where we stood in line for close to half an hour before being taken into a dark room straight out of Sorcerer's Stone.  It was there that we met Ollivander (or at least someone who looked, er, actually nothing like him...but he was old) standing amidst shelves and shelves of wands.

Ollivander chose a boy from the twenty-five of us or so in the room and went through the process of having a wand "choose" the boy.  The kid was first given a wand that wouldn't Lumos for him, then a wand that "wilted" some flowers when he tried to Aguamenti them ("Oh, I'm sorry!" the boy said, comically genuinely, when the flowers flopped over), and then finally, after a pensive, "I wonder..." from Ollivander, the boy was given a wand that caused him to be bathed in light and the Harry Potter soundtrack to blast from surround sound speakers.  It was, in a word, awesome.

"But that's the wand that chose him!" the boy's mother said as we were ushered out of the room and into Dervish and Banges...

...where all of us could buy a wand, just like the boy's, for the bargain price of $30.

"Yeah, and it's $30!" said some other relative in return.  Blinded by the staggering array of Harry Potter-themed merchandise, I tuned out their conversation at that point, although I did later see them at the check-out, buying the wand.

When we left Dervish and Banges, Sam having bought a replica of Snape's wand which she would later trade out for an original wand in its own Ollivander's-brand box, we headed to the main ride of the Wizarding World:  Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey.  On the walk to Hogwarts, we caught the tail end of the Triwizard Spirit Rally and agreed we should come back later in the day to catch the whole thing.

Though Hogwarts isn't as large as its creative construction and tricks of perspective make it out to be, it's still an impressive sight to behold as you walk up to it.

Our wait was estimated at 30 minutes, but for a ride that anticipates lines as long as 5 hours, our "wait" was little more than the amount of time it took us to walk through Hogwarts castle to get to the ride itself.  Along the way we saw the Mirror of Erised...

...walked through one of Professor Sprout's Herbology greenhouses (Mandrakes seen below)...

...sauntered past the house points system (to the right)...

...stopped in front of Dumbledore's office...

...walked through a talking portrait gallery, where the four founders argued amongst themselves about Quidditch...

...saw Dumbledore in his office (in hologram form, which was infinitely more impressive in real life than in this picture, unfortunately)...

...hit up the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom...

...where the trio, who didn't turn out well in photographs, played around with Harry's invisibility cloak...and after a stop by the Fat Lady's portrait and a glimpse of the Sorting Hat...

...we wound up in a room where candles appeared to be floating in midair around us and - quickly, quickly, it's all moving very fast now - into the ride we went.

After all that, you'd think the ride itself would be just a footnote, but it was incredible.  All Dementors and Quidditch pitches and only moderate motion sickness...

Which became serious motion sickness once we were back outside and rode the Flight of the Hippogriff, a "kiddie" rollercoaster that I wasn't a huge fan of.

At that point, we caught up with the Triwizard Spirit Rally again and this time caught the whole show, three Durmstrang students and four Beauxbatons ones parading around in an entertaining fashion for five minutes or so.  Sam and Alex then decided to ride the one other Harry Potter-themed ride in the park, a monstrous rollercoaster called the Dragon Challenge, which thrills two sets of riders by repeatedly creating the illusion mid-ride that they're going to crash into each other.  I decided to sit that one out.

And then it was time for lunch at The Three Broomsticks.

We all had butterbeer (DELICIOUS) and I had fish and chips.  While we were eating, Alex pointed out that high above us, the shadow of a broom was skipping along, sweeping itself across the second story, which we couldn't get to.  Everywhere you looked, details like that made the whole experience seem a little more "real."

After lunch, it was Honeyduke's and Zonkos, which were slightly more terrestrial than the rest of the park, though I'm not sure I can explain exactly why that was.  Maybe because they seemed more like generic candy and joke shops than anything truly unique to the Wizarding World.

At that point, we had seen pretty much everything there was to see, and Alex was looking to expand our theme park experience for the day, so we went to Jurassic Park.

"You WILL get wet.  Possibly soaked," was the message we got over and over as we stood in line for the River Adventure ride.  This was not an understatement:

We walked through Toon Lagoon...

...and Marvel Super Hero Island...

...where we rode The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man (a.k.a. The Ride that Feels Like a 3-Minute Car Wreck).  

Where to next?  "Um, I kinda want to go back to Hogwarts," I said. 

Through Seuss Landing and the Lost Continent we went and then we were back.  Only gone an hour, but how I had missed it.

After taking a picture with the conductor of the Hogwarts Express, we hit up the Hog's Head where Alex and I tried some of the Hog's Head Ale, a beer sold only at the Hog's Head.  It was delicious and the alcohol content was just high enough that after watching the frog choir...

...and then riding the Forbidden Journey a second time, and finally making a quick swing through Filch's Emporium to buy some souvenirs, my inhibitions were still lowered enough that Sam and Alex managed to talk me into riding the Dragon Challenge (note:  this is a random video I pulled off YouTube; I do not know these people):




It was actually significantly more fun (and less vomit-inducing) than most of the simulated rides we'd done.

Or maybe that was just the Hog's Head Ale talking.

It was then, at long last, time to leave the Wizarding World and go back to reality. :(

BUT OUR DAY WAS NOT OVER.  Oh no, my friends.  We took a cab back to the hotel and changed (at which point I ditched the pedometer, thus negating the accuracy of the day's total step count) before going to dinner at T.G.I.Friday's and from there we hit up the Icebar, a bar made entirely of ice in the middle of Orlando.  We'd made reservations in advance but it being somewhat early (8:45) and in the middle of the week (Tuesday) the place was pretty dead.  We had a drink in the main lobby of the bar and then were given shawls and gloves before going into the Icebar itself.

Though we'd paid for our reservations, and paid top price for a drink in the main bar earlier ("Yeah, we don't really have any whiskey that's, like, well, so you're gonna have to pay, like, $7.50 no matter what I pour you," our very blonde bartender told me, finger twirling in her hair), it was strongly implied that we were to buy another drink once we were inside the Icebar.

(Yes, our glasses were made out of ice!)  I could see how on a busier night this could be the place to be.  But it was pretty much just Sam and Alex and me in the room...

...along with a few other couples who wandered in and out but, er, let's be honest here, mostly out...

After that, it was back to the hotel for our now-traditional nightcap of rum and YouTube videos.

Oh, and I almost forgot, there was a tape loop of Moaning Myrtle playing in the bathroom at the Wizarding World.

NEXT TIME...Disney World, the wonders of small children riding terrifying rides, and my very first Cirque du Soleil!  Stay tuned...

HUGE thank you to Sam for providing many of the pictures AND the Hogsmeade video in this post. :)