Volume 5: Pete in the USA Part 10. A young balding mans journey through 20 something states and back
Day 19 – Orlando
What do you get when a member of the Nazi party is able to fulfil a grand vision? Disney’s Magical Kingdom (if you said 1,000 years of the 3rd Reich in power you’re thinking of the wrong Nazi party member). I haven’t done much reading on Walt, but I’d heard he was a Nazi party member once and then had that confirmed when John Safran did a short film on “Race around the world” in which he did amusing things at Disneyland with gold plaque’s under pictures of Walt telling people he was a member of the Nazi party. The fact that Walt made it policy to ban moustaches on his employees despite the fact he got around with one is clearly signs of a Nazi regime (it’s also no coincidence that Walt was such a big fan of Snow White).
A group of us headed off to see this grand vision, with some going to the Epcot centre, while a group including me went to the Magical Kingdom. The Magical Kingdom bills itself as being “the happiest place on earth”, something that they failed to tell the Splash Mountain fast pass attendant. Never before have I encountered a more angry man working in a theme park. The bloke was barking instructions at everyone, I can only imagine how angry he would’ve been if he’d had to actually endure any of the lines in the park that day. Never before have I been to such a large venue, only to have people packed into every inch. The crowds were huge. I managed to get on all of 5 rides that day; Splash Mountain (the theme park legally obligated flume/log ride), Space Mountain, Walt Disney World Rail road (Nazi’s and rail roads go hand in hand), the famous teacups, and of course America’s favourite “the line”.
Some time after getting off the teacups the happiest place on earth became the wettest place on earth as light bulb sized raindrops bombarded the park for half an hour. Naturally when you jam that many people into the one area shelter is something that about 70% of the people miss out on. We were initially one of the 70% before finding some room in a gift shop but not before the large raindrops had had enough time to hit every available bit of surface area on our bodies. It was during this storm lightning hit the monorail that gets the punters out of the park, so everyone was forced to cram into the Ferryboats at the end of the day as that was the only way out. It was on that Ferryboat ride I had time to reflect on the day. The thing again that struck me was the massive sized turkey legs, the huge number of fat bastards in the park eating those massive turkey legs (although when compared to their morbidly obese fat guts they just look like chicken nuggets), and the large number of fat bastards who needed oxygen getting around on the scooters that are supposed to be used by handicapped people (newsflash: being a fat bastard is not a handicap). I also was thankful that I’d been to the Magical Kingdom on the West Coast when I was a kid so the disappointment about only getting to enjoy about 5% of the rides wasn’t so great, was really more a sense of annoyance. It also meant each ride probably cost me about $10 a go. Of interest is the fact there are Kennels located near the Transportation and Ticket Center. Who the hell brings their dog to an amusement park? Just because Fido likes to travel with his head out of the car doesn’t mean he’s going to love flying down a roller coaster or spinning really fast in the teacups. I also would have thought that it was common sense to assume that roller coasters don’t come standard with dog seat belts and even if you knew that, thinking that you could hold your dog while you’re pulling 5 g’s in a corner on a roller-coaster is possibly the most retarded thing ever thought of.
Once off the boat, it was a bus owned by Town & Country that took us back to the hotel. It was a bus that looked like it had been purchased in the 70s, and hadn’t been washed since. Back at the hotel Gav, Big Sam and I decided to use some free coupons we had to eat in Old Town. It was over dinner that Big Sam spilled his guts over conversations he and aussie Victoria had had. Apparently he wasn’t too happy with the fact that I had told aussie Victoria on that pleasant evening in Pensacola I though he was only in it for the sex, claiming it was bad form to hurt the chances of another player. I told him it was my last gasped attempt to keep my game alive, he admitted I was right anyway, and we both had a good laugh about it and for the rest of the tour continually informed each other to “don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
After dinner a group of us rode possibly the lamest go-karts on earth, and possibly the least maintained go-karts on earth. When you have to hit the accelerator pedal multiple times with the force of a sledgehammer then there’s a fair chance there is no routine service being performed on these vehicles.
With the beer running out there was little reason to stay awake so I had an early night.
Day 20 – Orlando to St Augustine
Today’s first stop was the Kennedy Space Center. I almost let out a big “HOORAY!” as this was finally a stop that lasted more than the standard eat, piss, zip approach. The Center prides itself on being entirely publicly funded purely by charging for entry and the sale of food inside. Given the Center is in the process of a $120 million upgrade I suspect future patrons can look forward to purchasing hamburgers that cost $30 and soft drink vending machines that only take $10 bills. At the entrance to the center was another check your guns sign, which appears to now be standard with anything associated with the name Kennedy (a bit late now, the horse has already bolted).
Once inside the Kennedy Space Center we got to see the massive building that is used to build the rockets. It needs to be so big because they roll the rockets straight out to the launch pad, where they are launched (surprise! surprise!), hopefully don’t explode 70 seconds into flight, orbit the earth a few times, maybe release a new satellite and then hopefully return to earth without exploding on re-entry. The road from the factory to the launch pad is 4 miles long, with the vehicle used to carry the space shuttle travelling at 1 mile an hour to the launch pad, before steaming back to the factory at 2 miles an hour. Maybe next time I get stuck behind a tractor on the road doing 20 miles an hour I won’t get so angry, being thankful that I’m not stuck behind the space shuttle in traffic.
Also as part of the tour is an IMAX 3D show narrated by Tom Cruise (you just know someone got sacked for hiring him instead of Tom Hanks). To cap off the tour in style I got a photo of myself mooning the moon rock. Classy.
From there it was back on the bus where new coach introductions were required as some people finished the tour in Orlando, while others begun the tour in Orlando. It was another stupid part of the tour as the people getting on the bus had the tough task of breaking into the cliques that had already been formed in the last 2 weeks. What was also disappointing was the number of chicks who got on the bus that said they were “red lights”. Essentially the scale was:
Green light: up for it with anyone on the bus
Yellow light: didn’t come looking for love, but welcome to any situation that sees me naked
Red light: not up for it because I have a boyfriend/girlfriend/I’m a nun
Naturally most of the blokes said they were green (I believe I said I was so green you could see it from outer space), while the single chicks said they were yellow in an attempt to not come across as too slutty. Europa informed everyone she was a red light, I would’ve quite happily informed her that would’ve been imposed on her anyway and the only chance of any physical contact she would have had with any bloke on the bus is if they were dragged in by her gravitational pull generated by her great mass (yes fat jokes are cruel, but she gave me the shits all tour so she’s fair game). That angry last statement pretty much summed up my mindset. I was pissed off with how the tour was going and by now couldn’t wait to get to New York and get off the bus. This tour just wasn’t bringing the bounty of weird shit that the European tour had.
We checked into the Howard Johnson hotel late in the afternoon, which immediately triggered off the thought “who the f#%k is Howard Johnson?” I’d seen his name on all sorts of stuff across the country since the West Coast. Hanging just below the Howard Johnson sign were the words “Welcome Contiki”, which I read as “You are welcome to trash our hotel”.
After dinner in the hotel we headed off on a Ghost tour of St Augustine, the oldest established city in the US. Our guide for the tour was a “jolly” (read fat) bloke with a grey beard, wearing a straw hat, with braces used to hold up his amble pants. The tour was a bit of a John Denver moment as we didn’t see any ghosts. Never again will I trust a fat a beardo in a hat and braces. That said, the big fellow had quite a few stories to tell. Apparently they used to be big fans of burning people alive in St Augustine, and it seems also burying people alive. The big fellow told of stories where a number of caskets that had been re-dug up which had contained scratch marks inside the casket. A similar story was of a man about to bury his young bride accidentally hitting her head on a tree as he carried his “dead” wife to her final burial place. The hit had enough force to cause her head to start to bleed. Now, in the majority of cases, say 100%, dead people don’t bleed as their heart is not pumping blood as it tends to be stopped. The bloke burying her must have had a creative excuse, because a short while later they still went ahead and buried her, this time making sure to avoid the tree. My favourite story of the tour was of the burial of a priest on a hot day. He was being buried in a steel casket which had a small glass window, which then became a bunch of smaller little windows after it exploded in the heat, leaving all present covered in pieces of dead priest (nothing gets dead priest out of your clothes, except maybe soda water). They wisely filled the small window with concrete on the 2nd attempt, which was a lot more cleaner burial. A common theme for the ghosts was they seem to come back smelling like funeral flowers, so if you’re ever going to bury anyone choose the flowers you like over the ones they like as you’re the one whose going to have to put up with the smell.
After the tour we had a massive pool party at the hotel. As the sign to the pool said the pool was closed at 10pm, I don’t know why I was surprised when hotel management asked us to leave the pool at 10:15pm. It wasn’t until he came across at 10:30pm to ask us again that we figured he must have been serious the first time, so we headed off to our respective rooms. A few people came back to our room, at which time I had the unfortunate chance to meet some 58 year old looking trucker named “Pepe” (for the rest of the tour I called him “Pepsi”) who must’ve used a fake id to get on the Contiki tour as the company bills itself as being for 18-35 year olds. My first chance encounter with him was when I saw this 58 year old looking freak in a VB shirt making a call on our hotel room phone. As I didn’t know he was on the tour due to the fact he looked older than 35, I spared the pleasantries and went straight to “What the fuck are you doing?!?”. Turns out he couldn’t get in his room so was calling his room mate. He then succeeded in freaking out all the girls that night by going out of his drunken way to kiss them all before he went to bed.
As for Gav, he pretended to lock himself in the bathroom after hiding from Ang who had ripped the bathroom doorknob off in an attempt to drag Gav out of the bathroom and hit him. Ang then proceeded to freak out and it wasn’t until she called a locksmith in the wee hours of the morning to get him out that Gav finally admitted he was pretending. We danced on the beds for a while, wrestled some chicks, then went to sleep.
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