In the interest of maintaining myself as someone who will admit when I've made a mistake, I want to own up to one now so I'm not misleading anyone considering travel to the Orlando area, my current locale. (Interesting side note as I jot this from my hotel room: I'm subjected to listening to a future virtuoso practicing very wobbly scales on some type of brass instrument...over and over and over and over. What a perk!)
My previous entry was a big old rant about the outrageous cost to get into one of Disney's water parks. I discovered this price through the Disney website and found that it was $75/adult (of which 10 year olds and up were considered adults--that's still ridiculous). However, I have learned that I was incorrect. While this steep fare is accurate for the standard parks--Epcot, Magic Kingdom, etc--the cost for the water parks is actually $45/adult. I didn't realize the water parks had different pricing so I just wanted to say, in all fairness, that I misrepresented the water park cost. So while still not cheap, and still not any lower than it was when times were booming, it is $30 less than I'd have had you believe. If you're thinking of going to the non-water variety parks, still plan to shell out a portion of your life savings.
Anyway, we did go to Typhoon Lagoon yesterday and had a good time. It's a very neat water park and one of the most unique aspects of it is a gigantic wave pool that sends the most enormous wave throughout the pool every 5 minutes or so. I've seen many a wave pool but they consist of rolling waves that go on for a few minutes every 20 minutes or so. Not so here. This wave takes the cake. Starting from perfectly calm water, you hear a buzzer and then everyone in the pool screams their fool heads off. And from nowhere, you see a mass of water created that's about six feet high and comes marching through masses of people who are all screaming and losing their minds in general.
Folks body surf on this water monster and that part is pretty cool to watch except that they're body surfing into hordes of other people. Not so cool whether you're the surfer or the obstacle. Lots of chaos going on.
So in the interest of protecting life and limb, we chose not to venture out farther than about waist deep. (My cousin actually just tore her rotator cuff in said-wave-pool.) And what do you know...later in the afternoon, Chase was playing in the pool at the shallow end, body surfing in the wave that's left at about 2-3 feet deep and the thing still had so much power, it flipped him over and proceeded to drag him along the extremely rough bottom of the pool. Next thing I know, he's stumbling toward me, crying, his back covered in "road rash," bleeding in the worst spot. He also received a terrible scrape on his knee and his elbow. He looked like he'd tangled with a stretch of asphalt and most decidedly lost.
After some Anti-Sting Bactine and bandaids and a very pricey cup of ice cream, I snapped this picture, although it doesn't do the damage justice:
You can see I bribed a smile out of him with some ice cream. Ah well...what's a trip to an amusement park without also stopping into the First Aid stand? If you visit the Happiest Place on Earth and check out the monster wave, wear body armor.
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