Where Are We Sleeping Tonight: Monumental Movieland Hotel, Orlando, Florida
After a brief visit to the hotel DIY laundry, we set off to Titanic: The Experience. Our first tour guide, who had a thick Irish accent, showed us around a recreation of the dock and explained the differences between how passengers in the different classes were treated. Standing in front of a replica of one of Titanic's smaller propellers (aka screw), he made us feel like we had stepped back in time to 1912. Walking around a recreation of the ship, we saw the dinning rooms from the different classes, the radio (Marconi) room, a recreation of one of the first class rooms, as well as the grand staircase.
Our second guide showed through the storage hold, the boiler room, and showed us a true recreation of the gates used to separate the third class passengers from the rest of the ship - in an emergency (such as flooding corridors) people could easily climb over the gate! I also never knew that the third class passengers got cooked meals and that third class on Titanic was better than second class on most other ships of the day. So much misinformation has been presented as fact over the years that it is amazing to to get an accurate 'first hand' perspective.
One of the highlights for me personally was to see the items recovered from the actual Titanic, including one of the deck chairs that someone had used as a raft. There was also a section on the various books and films that have been made on the ship, obviously including the james Cameron film (one of Clare's all time favourites). It was such an educational and memorable experience... I wonder how much it would cost to recreate a large portion of the ship...
Originally we had planned to visit Disney's Hollywood Studios today but venturing outside we saw the huge weather system that was rapidly approaching which unfortunately meant that we weren't going to enjoy the newly relaunched Star Tours, Disney's Star Wars experience. I guess we will just have to come back another time :
We checked out a Chuck-E-Cheese which we thought would be like a McDonalds that had some arcade games, but turns out to be a huge Timezone and laser-tag hall that just happens to serve food as well. Time for lunch, we returned to the wonderful CiCi's Pizza Buffet, before doing a little bit of shopping while trying to not get too wet. As the amount of things we are buying just keeps getting bigger and bigger, we bought a large spotty suitcase so we can get everything we have bought home. Don't ask me what we will do if we buy too much more!
With Clare appropriately dressed, we drove to the Universal Citywalk to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, or as the ticket says, Harry Potter 7B. It was a fantastic film and an awesome experience watching it with a huge cinema full of Americans :)
We did a little shopping in the Citywalk, mainly for gifts for people back home, before returning to our car. We were walking to where we had parked the car when suddenly the car wasn't where we had parked it. We thought maybe we were in the wrong row, so we retraced our steps, and still no sign of our car. With most other people leaving the multi story carpark, we got to a point where there were only a dozen cars left - and ours was not one of them! But wait, is that our car way over the other side of the carpark? It doesn't look right...
Pointing the alarm thingy at this strange car in the distance, I pushed the button and waited to see the car's lights flash. The strange car did nothing. No, it was not our car. I had to check again. Again, the lights didn't flash. But wait, did I hear the alarm beep? I pushed it again - yes, I could hear our car... but where was it?! We searched everywhere looking for it but to no avail. Then it hit me - we are walking on "Level ET" but we parked on "Level King Kong"! Walking up some stairs we found our car, sitting where we had parked it, waiting for us on an otherwise empty level. Feeling a little silly, I wondered if there had been people on this level watching our car randomly arm and disarm itself over and over again as we had been searching for it!
Back at the hotel, we started packing our new spotty suitcase with all the crap, ah, I mean quality merchandise that we have bought. As we were packing it all into the suitcase that will definitely stand out on a baggage carousel, I was finding stuff that I had forgotten that we had bought. When we get home and unpack it all, it will be like Christmas :)
I am having the most awesome time ever!
No comments:
Post a Comment