Orlando, day 1
Right! Back from vacation, and the first thing I've learned is that I don't care to blog to LJ from my phone, Swype or no Swype. So I'm going to make a series of posts this week about what I did, mostly for my own benefit, and I don't much care if anybody else reads them or not.
On Friday, as I mentioned, we got into Orlando in mid-afternoon, so we were able to see some of Epcot and then eat dinner there. Turns out that in the hottest parts of the year, the Orlando parks empty out a bit in the mid-afternoon, so it really wasn't crowded at all. It was hot, sure, but it wasn't as humid as I was expecting, so as long as you stayed out of the direct sunlight, you were OK. We rode the Spaceship Earth ride, which is the ride contained in the giant geodesic sphere that's Epcot's trademark; the ride itself isn't anything special, just an extra-tame dark ride with a presentation about the history of human communication. The fun things about it in this case were that the line was really short, and the touch-screen in our car rebooted itself just as the ride started, so we missed the first bit of the presentation, but we got to see the BIOS and Windows boot procedure, which was amusing. The narration is by Dame Judi Dench, so you know it's extra-classy.
We also rode "The Sum of All Thrills" motion simulator ride, which Elora and Sparky had known about in advance. It uses a "KUKA arm," which is one of those robot arms used to assemble cars in auto factories, but instead of a big welding torch on the end, it's got a pair of seats with wrap-around video screens. I was unable to resist the urge to call these things "cuckoo arms," especially since they popped up again later in the week. So you go through an educational video about engineering, and then you get a touch-screen console to design your own roller coaster (although you're really not doing much more than picking four elements to build a coaster out of), and then you get escorted to the cuckoo arm to ride what you just built. Naturally, the design portion won't let you build anything that would kill people, or fling you off into space, and the cuckoo arm can't simulate g-forces, but it does a pretty good job of flinging you around. Oh, and at the end of the ride, you get a score of how "thrilling" your ride was (hence the name); mine was around 750, so that was satisfying.
Then we strolled through the "World Showcase" portion of Epcot past all the other simulated countries until we got to Japan, where our dinner reservation was. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of shade in the World Showcase, so we didn't spend much time admiring the exhibits. The restaurant, though, seemed thoroughly Japanese, at least to me. The staff definitely were. I had something called "shibuya," and I was pleased with myself for ordering authentic Japanese, but I later learned that there doesn't seem to be a Japanese dish by that name, so I really just had some tempura shrimp, which is much less exotic. I normally decline chopsticks, but I made a special effort this time, and didn't kill myself, so that counts for something.
On Friday, as I mentioned, we got into Orlando in mid-afternoon, so we were able to see some of Epcot and then eat dinner there. Turns out that in the hottest parts of the year, the Orlando parks empty out a bit in the mid-afternoon, so it really wasn't crowded at all. It was hot, sure, but it wasn't as humid as I was expecting, so as long as you stayed out of the direct sunlight, you were OK. We rode the Spaceship Earth ride, which is the ride contained in the giant geodesic sphere that's Epcot's trademark; the ride itself isn't anything special, just an extra-tame dark ride with a presentation about the history of human communication. The fun things about it in this case were that the line was really short, and the touch-screen in our car rebooted itself just as the ride started, so we missed the first bit of the presentation, but we got to see the BIOS and Windows boot procedure, which was amusing. The narration is by Dame Judi Dench, so you know it's extra-classy.
We also rode "The Sum of All Thrills" motion simulator ride, which Elora and Sparky had known about in advance. It uses a "KUKA arm," which is one of those robot arms used to assemble cars in auto factories, but instead of a big welding torch on the end, it's got a pair of seats with wrap-around video screens. I was unable to resist the urge to call these things "cuckoo arms," especially since they popped up again later in the week. So you go through an educational video about engineering, and then you get a touch-screen console to design your own roller coaster (although you're really not doing much more than picking four elements to build a coaster out of), and then you get escorted to the cuckoo arm to ride what you just built. Naturally, the design portion won't let you build anything that would kill people, or fling you off into space, and the cuckoo arm can't simulate g-forces, but it does a pretty good job of flinging you around. Oh, and at the end of the ride, you get a score of how "thrilling" your ride was (hence the name); mine was around 750, so that was satisfying.
Then we strolled through the "World Showcase" portion of Epcot past all the other simulated countries until we got to Japan, where our dinner reservation was. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of shade in the World Showcase, so we didn't spend much time admiring the exhibits. The restaurant, though, seemed thoroughly Japanese, at least to me. The staff definitely were. I had something called "shibuya," and I was pleased with myself for ordering authentic Japanese, but I later learned that there doesn't seem to be a Japanese dish by that name, so I really just had some tempura shrimp, which is much less exotic. I normally decline chopsticks, but I made a special effort this time, and didn't kill myself, so that counts for something.