2000
Just Plain Fun
Colonel Mustard on a rollercoaster with a plastic fork

In August of 2000, Cool Daddy and I decided to go on a vacation to Orlando, FL to visit my paternal grandparents. Unfortunately my grandpa ended up going into the hospital before we got there, so we stayed with my aunt and uncle. The last time I had visited Florida was 3 years prior, after my graduation from high school. Although I’ve never lived in FL, I’ve visited so often throughout my life that I certainly consider myself a veteran of the theme parks. In the 3 years since my last visit Disney had opened Animal Kingdom and Universal had opened Islands of Adventure, so there were a few parks that were new to me. I’ll spare you the details of all of our various trips to the parks (including a story about a man yelling at us for thinking we were cutting in line, me making Cool Daddy practically run from attraction to attraction, and getting lost for hours (yes, hours) trying to find our way back home from “The World”). Instead I’ll tell you about one park in particular.

Universal’s Islands of Adventure was having a special. I don’t remember the details of it now 10 years later, but basically you go to the park much earlier than it’s normally open, you buy a ticket (at a discounted price?), they give you a pass to go on certain rides, once you go on the ride they mark your pass and you can’t go on it again until the park opens. I don’t remember how early we had to be there…but I am not a morning person so any time before 10am is early to me. I think that they opened it at 7am which means we had to get up around 6am. Now that all of that nonsense is out of the way, here’s how our trip went.

I’m pretty sure that the first ride that we went on was The Incredible Hulk. It’s a big ‘ol scary rollercoaster. I am scared to death of heights and therefore never go on a rollercoaster if I can help it. This was Cool Daddy’s first trip to FL and there was only the two of us and he really wanted to go on the ride. I told him that I would go on it just this one time and never again. I was terrified throughout the entire line. I wanted to throw up or pee my pants or both…but I didn’t want to go on that ride. But I did and I hated every.single.second. Now I was a tiny little thing so there’s a lot of room between me and the shoulder bars. Throughout the ride I was flopping all over the place and being thrown towards the bars. I kept feeling like the bars would just swing open and I would plummet to my death (I’m not dramatic at all). I kept my eyes shut tight and prayed through the entire ride. And I’ve never went on it again.

For your viewing enjoyment, here I am having a near death experience on The Incredible Hulk.

After riding The Hulk and Spiderman we decided to walk past the water rides to the Jurassic Park ride. We didn’t want to be soaking wet when we went on the other rides so we figured we’d save those water rides for later. The only people on The Jurassic Park ride were us and a family of four who sat in front of us. The ride is on a boat and at the end of the ride there’s a drop and you can get wet. Now I’ve been on Splash Mountain (Disney World: Magic Kingdom) before and I’ve hardly gotten wet on that ride, so I wasn’t expecting much from this ride either. The boat dropped and we got absolutely soaked and for whatever reason, I got the worst of it.

Here we are on the ride. This is one of me and Cool Daddy’s favorite photos, but it has nothing to do with us. Take a close look at the face of the kid in the front row.

Here I tried to crop it so that you can see the kid better.

This picture just cracked us up. His face is hysterical. LOVE. IT.

So now we leave the ride and I am completely soaked. I was wearing a tank top with spaghetti straps and my shirt was just hanging off of me. My hair was soaked and at the time it was too short for me to pull back into a pony tail. I walked over to one of the (closed) outdoor food stations and grabbed a plastic fork and started combing my hair with it (hey, if Ariel can do it, why can’t I? Maybe because I was at Universal and not at Disney). This embarrassed Cool Daddy who begged me to throw the fork away. There was no one around so I’m not really sure why he cared so much. Maybe it was because I was singing songs from The Little Mermaid while I was combing my hair with the plastic fork. Nah…that couldn’t be it.

After The Jurassic Park ride we were heading over to the water-ride portion of the park (why?! I was already soaked!). On our way there a group of people were coming towards us but they were no where near us. Somehow my equilibrium was off and I started walking in a diagonal directly towards them and walked smack dab into some guy. And Cool Daddy laughed. This ended up happening two other times before we left the park that day. Next we went on Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls which is a Log Jammer kind of ride. The line is inside of a building and the floors sloped down hill at times and turned many corners. Because there weren’t many people in the park, the line was moving pretty fast. At one point I turned a corner (apparently a little too fast) and walked right into the wall. And Cool Daddy laughed.

It was almost time for the park to officially open and we had been on almost every ride. For the special early opening they didn’t open any of the gift shops or restaurants. At the Port of Entry there was a deli called Croissant Moon Bakery that was open. We decided to stop there and grab a quick bite before heading over to the Studios. Since it was the only place open it was really busy in there.

We walked through the line and we each had a tray with a sandwich on it. I took my tray over to the condiment counter. I grabbed some napkins and straws and then applied mayonnaise to my sandwich. Then I wanted some mustard. The mustard was in one of the pump-type dispenser thingys. I pumped the mustard and applied how much I wanted and then attempted to “turn off” the pump. But it was stuck…and the mustard kept coming. At one point I had enough good sense to move my sandwich out from under the stream of mustard. I couldn’t figure out how to shut the stupid thing off. I called Cool Daddy over who was both amused and horrified. He likes to keep a low profile so the fact that the whole restaurant was watching me scramble to turn off the pump while mustard went everywhere and a line was building up behind us was more attention then he cared to get. Finally Cool Daddy managed to make the mustard stop. Now there was a gigantic pool of mustard covering my tray. It was all over the tray station as well. Mustard was everywhere. I asked Cool Daddy to help me clean it up but he has some strange hatred for mustard and didn’t want to touch it (Yeah, who’s laughing now, buddy? Well, actually, neither of us…but still…that’s what you get for laughing at me.) I think I used a whole box of napkins trying to clean up my tray with little success. I truly don’t remember what happened after that, but I have my suspicions that we told one of the workers about their malfunctioning mustard dispenser and left the mess for them to clean. I wasn’t getting anywhere with the napkins.

By the time we left Islands of Adventure and got to Universal Studios my shirt was completely stretched out from the weight of the water pulling on it for hours. It was just hanging off of me in the front showing all my bits and pieces. If I pulled it up and back to cover up it would show the band of my bra and almost my entire back. We tried knotting up the straps but it was uncomfortable and looked ridiculous. We went to the gift shop and I bought a Back to the Future tank top and wore that the rest of the day.

I don’t remember much else about the rest of our day at The Studios since things must’ve went uphill from there. I do remember that for some reason Cool Daddy and I got into a tiff after getting some slushies and I just walked away from him. He had no idea where he was since he’d never been to the park before. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t cry, but it was still kinda mean of me. I didn’t leave him alone for long and the rest of our day was lovely, near as I can remember.

So for those of you keeping score: I got up at 6am, was scarred for life on a rollercoaster, was drenched on a boat ride resulting in stretching out my shirt which in turn resulted in me nearly flashing my goodies to innocent families, walked into 3 people and a wall, formed The Great Lake of Mustard in a crowded restaurant, ate a mustard-drenched sandwich, and abandoned my boyfriend in an unfamiliar theme park.

I’ve really enjoyed writing about my young adult years…and I hardly scratched the surface! I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it and I hope that you’ll read the rest of my Piggy Tales (birth-12th Grade).

My Piggy Tales:
*My Birth Story: I’m always late!
*Ages 3-5: Dancing in a box
*Age 6 First Grade: There’s a bra in my lunchbox!
*Age 7 Second Grade: Bossy Wheels and Shady Deals
*Age 8 Third Grade: I will not talk in class
*Age 9 Fourth Grade: I didn’t really need those fingers anyway!
*Age 10 5th Grade: Nothing’s Scary in the Fifth Grade
*Age 11 6th Grade: Jenny Got Ran Over by her Grandma
*Age 12 7th Grade: Youth Camp Stinks
*Age 13 8th Grade: “Talent” Show
*Age 14 9th Grade: (N)O Christmas Tree
*Age 15 10th Grade: The Newsboys Wouldn’t Ditch Their Friends
*Age 16 11th Grade: Acrophobia Gets You the Good Seats
*Age 17 12th Grade: In School Suspension

My Young Adult Years
*Dreams and Aspirations: The Long Road There
*Friends and Fellowship: Friends Don’t Get Friends Grounded
*My First Job
*How I Met Cool Daddy Part 1
*How I Met Cool Daddy Part 2
*Colonel Mustard on a Rollercoaster with a Plastic Fork

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