Friday, October 27, 2006

Vacation - Friday

Our last day of vacation (sigh). Today was a lazy, sleep-in day. The kids have made it a fun thing to run up to the resort general store in the morning and get me my Wall Street Journal and some donuts. Yesterday, I got a bonus when they decided I needed one of every paper they had. Maddie and I ran up to Chik-Fil-A to get some Chick-n-Mini's (per my brothers Jon's and Dan's recommendations).

The original forecast was for thunderstorms all day, but it's since changed to sunny and mid-80's. The girls went shopping this morning while Nate and I went to DisneyQuest, a giant interactive arcade, Disney style. Nate was in heaven at DisneyQuest.

The place was a five story arcade with big group games and individual video games, all free. The first thing we did was a design-your-own-roller-coaster ride that allows you to ride it in a 3-axis simulator. I learned that fake roller-coasters make you more nauseous than the real ones. We kept going on it and making nastier and nastier coasters that threw us around worse and worse. Most of the games were 3-D, like the fighting game where you had a 3-D sword and a 3-D helmet.

It was amazingly realistic. We spent almost four hours just running around playing video games, and Nate could have easily spent another four hours there.

Meanwhile, Cathie took the girls shopping. They went over to Disney Marketplace and over the course of 3 hours hit one store: The World of Disney. The girls each had some money to spend, and spend they did. Madeline bought a princess kit and Emily bought a watch and a bank.

You can see from the picture, that Emily got a little annoyed after a while at how long it took Maddie to pick something out. Later on, Emily discovered her new love at the giant Lego store: playing with Legos.

After swimming and shopping, we went swimming at the pool to get one last day in. It topped of at 85 today, so we soaked in the sun before heading out to dinner.

We hit The Cheesecake Factory for dinner in order to enjoy gigantic portions that we could never finish and not even take home with us.

Cheesecake Factory+Palm Trees and eating outside in October. Gotta love it.

On the way home, we hit the Slingshot. The Slingshot is a set of 210 foot towers with a capsule pulled back between them, like a slingshot. You're launched into the air 330 feet at 110 miles per hour, pulling 6Gs as you shoot up in the air. At the vertext, you flip over and free-fall downward 200 feet before rebounding back upwards, bouncing back and fourth until you come back down. It is comparable in thrill to freefalling while parachuting or bunjee jumping off a mountain. The force when you are shot straight up, peak, and then free-fall is second to none. Nate, Maddie and I all went. They were less afraid than I and both said it was the best thing they've ever done.

Tomorrow we wake up at 4:30, load the kids at 5AM to make a 6:30 AM flight.

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