Day 6

Saturday, June 7th

Jon and I are out of underwear. Multiple showers and wardrobe changes have impacted our stores. Or drawers. Ha ha! I rolled out, gathered up a few things and headed to the laundry room. It was pleasant, actually, reading my book and enjoying my iced coffee while waiting for the dryer to ding. After getting a few things clean, we packed up our bags a bit and then headed out to MGM.

Our first stop? Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, at Jon's insistent request. But wait - what's going on? There are Star Wars signs everywhere and everyone is dressed in a Star Wars costume. It's one of 6 Star Wars weekends! Cast members are making appearances and signing books and autographs, characters are having picture opps, kids are getting lessons in how to be effective Jedi warriors with their lightsabers, Disney characters are wandering around in Star Wars costumes (imagine Donald as a storm trooper) . . . it was insane and a lot of fun! We saw Darth Mal stare down a 6 year old boy and lots of lightsaber battles. R2D2 even rolled by. And could not forget about his lightsaber. We grabbed lunch and then walked over to the Star Tours gift shop and checked out the line. No, Jon didn't want to make a lightsaber. Are you sure? Yes.

So we checked out the Back Lot Tour. Big disappointment. The line winds through a big prop warehouse that was actually really cool, but there was no one in line and they just ushered us right through. We were seated in literally the very last seat of the loooong tram. They've big time cut out stuff from the ride. You used to go through a neighborhood of house fronts from TV shows. That's no more. And the narrator was about a 1/4 mile ahead of us so we were never looking at what he was talking about. Then we went into Catastrophe Canyon where things blow up and there's a flash flood. The water splashing at us wasn't bad. But because we were in the last seat, the water that had collected on the roof rolled down into the seat as they were rocking us back and forth. Result? Soaked, and I mean soaked, butt. Jon called it swamp butt. Completely. I spent the next two hours waddling, trying to keep my wet butt cheeks from rubbing together. I was pissed. Won't be doing that ride again. Try as we might to find some shorts to buy for me to replace my wet capris, the only thing available was sweatpants shorts. In 95 degree heat, it wasn't appealing. I'd rather be wet. But a run punch with an LED ice cube and a pretzel made me feel much better.

We did learn, however, a cool thing about Davy Jones in the Pirates trilogy. The guy who plays him, Bill Nye (from Shawn of the Dead and Love Actually fame) didn't have to wear insane make-up with tentacles all over. Little sensors were placed on various places on his face to measure his movements and then the entire tentacle face was created later through computer imaging. Cool.

We trudged our wet butts over to the new 4D Toy Story ride. The line was 60 minutes long and no Fast Passes are available on Star Wars weekends. But the area was pretty cool. Barrels of monkeys hanging over the street, the cute little Pixar lamp on top of the lamp posts, you get the idea. I guess you get 3D glasses and shoot at enemy invaders. Could be fun. So instead we headed to check out the car show. It's all stunt driving and was actually amazing. There was a lot of backward driving and stunts - and it turns out they had rebuilt the interior of one of the cars so that the driver was actually sitting in the trunk facing out the back. After another walk-by of the lightsaber line (Jon passed, again) we went to the Brown Derby for our dinner reservations. Sadly, the pretzels had put us over the top and we weren't too hungry. But we choked down some of the great food and got our tickets to Fantasmic. Our three course meal came with preferred seating for the water and laser show at sunset. I've seen it, though Jon hasn't, and it's a pretty cool show. But we were both exhausted and ambivalent.

We decided to wander a bit, try to kill some time (we still had about 3 hours before the show started) and see if we'd get a second wind. Another walk by the Toy Story ride gave similar results. So we walked to the Star Tours store one last time. During dinner, Jon had decided a self-built lightsaber would be cooler than an Indiana Jones hat. Especially since they don't sell whips. So we hopped on line with a million obnoxious little boys and their parents. Two poor girls were patiently helping each kid individually decide which handle, which color, which everything as he put his weapon together. Finally it was Jon's turn. And some short chubby lady grabbed her three boys and shoved them in front of Jon and grabbed one of the women by the arm and told her they were next. I spoke up and said, no, I think you're wrong. So Jon got some one on one attention, which I stuck my camera in short chubbo's face to take pictures of Jon. I couldn't stop laughing! And boy was he pleased.

After a little more wandering around, we finally decided we had to go. We were tired and not excited about hanging around the park for another 2 hours. On the way out, we stopped a young couple from Great Britain and handed off our preferred tickets. They were pretty excited and we were ready to end out trip. Our ridiculously ghetto bus showed up a few minutes later and after a change to bathing suits, we went down to the pool for a dip and a beer. Ah, the perfect ending.

While I was in the shower rinsing off, I heard some odd noises coming from the bedroom. When I walked out there, Jon was in his pjs swinging his noise-making lightsaber around "fighting the bad guys." Yup, it's time to go home.