the real robp
Trip Reporter Extraordinaire
- Joined
- May 13, 2003
- Messages
- 22
I'm Rob. She's Aimee. Our first romantic trip together. Aww.
Day Two -- In Which Aimee and Rob Are Foiled By Saddam
Saturday morning we woke up really early and got ready to go.. I packed the car with our combined 14-weeks worth of clothes and hair-care supplies while Aimee took care of some last minute things around the house. We both did a last-minute check of our respective coifs and then we ran (as much as one actually "runs" at 6:30am) out the door, ready for what would surely be 8 fabulous nights at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge resort. Woo! The AKL is a deluxe African-themed resort, complete with animals roaming around a simulated African savannah, and you just don't get that sort of thing at the Days Inn for $39.95/night (I checked). It's also apparently one of the top ten great honeymoon destinations according to some list that tracks these things. Now I should probably point out that we weren't actually on a honeymoon, but it's fair to say I was totally willing to act like we were (you know, if it were going to enhance the overall AKL experience). Anyway. Aimee drove the first leg -- a little over an hour to South of the Border where we stopped to use the bathroom facilities, which were just as reliably disgusting as usual despite the obnoxiously early hour and the lack of the usual touristy hordes. I took over and drove the next leg, to somewhere in East-Nowhere, Georgia, where we stopped for gas and a hearty meal of fries and Coke at a local McDonalds. I drove the next leg as well, which turned out to be the rest of the trip... it was fairly uneventful if you don't count the tour bus full of children that had flipped over and burned up in the oncoming lane just a short way out of DisneyWorld, causing a 2-mile traffic jam headed the other way. Cool! But we didn't care... they were travelling the other direction, i.e. away from DisneyWorld, so we figured that a) it's not slowing down traffic in our lane and b) if they're leaving Disney then at least they died happy, baby (oh stop it -- we learned on the news that evening that nobody was actually hurt in the accident). Anyway we finally pulled into the Animal Kingdom Lodge around 4:00pm on Saturday, left the car (and a healthy tip) with the valet, left our mountain of bags (and a healthy tip) with the bellhop and went to check in. A bored-looking female Disney employee (uh, "cast member") with the angriest hair I've ever seen finally deigned to pay us some attention after making us wait pointlessly in the fabulous gigantic lobby while she stared importantly into space, and we checked ourselves in. After verifying that my credit card didn't explode under the strain of paying for the room, the angry-haired girl became much friendlier, handed us a map of the lodge and, with a stern admonishment not to feed the animals, helpfully circled the location of our room. Which, as luck would have it, turned out to be almost the exact opposite of what we'd requested -- wrong floor, wrong savannah, wrong everything. Bear in mind that we'd done everything right... we'd spent hours and hours meticulously researching a hundred web sites, read message boards frequented by the most freakish of the hardcore Disney afficionados, even signed up for something gay called TourGuide Mike... we knew exactly what we wanted, baby, and we'd even faxed them a politely-worded plea (complete with sappy cover story), exactly 4 days in advance as per accepted protocol, asking for the type of room we coveted so dearly. So when the angry-haired girl circled a room on the totally wrong wing of the hotel I cringed, expecting all manner of unpleasantness to ensue. Sigh. Resigned to 8 nights of bitter disappointment and sadness we took our stupid map and our stupid room keys and turned around, and standing there was another stupid bellhop with all our stupid bags. Woo, I guess. He walked us to our stupid room on the second (i.e. lowest) stupid floor (we'd asked for the 4th or 5th) while telling us all about the stupid resort and the stupid animals and a bunch of stupid stuff that I promptly forgot because of all the mounting bitterness and disappointment. Surprisingly when we got there our room was great, as it turns out -- the second floor was a lot better for viewing the animals on the savannah, and they also gave us the non-smoking room and the faux-honeymoon sized bed I'd requested. Woo! I gave the bellhop the requisite healthy tip and thanked him, then went out on the balcony with Aimee to check out the animals. It was pretty awesome... right outside our window was the savannah, and we watched zebras, giraffes, antelopes, wildebeests, ankole cattle and various other african animals frolic and play right in front of us. OK, they mostly stood around and occasionally kind of ate some grass and stuff, but there was the occasional bit of minor frolic too. We paused to quietly laugh at the people who got stuck way up on the 4th floor, far, far away from all the grazing action. Suckers.
We already had dinner arrangements set for 6:00 at Boma, one of the resort's two restaurants, so we decided to fix our hair and take a look around the hotel before then. We checked out the gigantic lobby and the Zawadi Marketplace, where we could buy overpriced Disney trinkets and memorabilia. We checked out the pool, which had lots of pasty white people and their children... and we made a solemn vow to avoid it for the rest of our trip. We stopped by the Victoria Falls bar/lounge, home of the $8 mudslides (plus healthy tip). Finally we stopped by the two restaurants, Boma and Jiko. Over the course of our exploration we'd both been immediately struck by the large number of people everywhere, which was a little disconcerting. Aimee and I both lean towards the sociopathic end of the "normal" bell curve -- I mean we'd obviously resigned ourselves to the fact that there would probably be other people around if we went to freaking DisneyWorld, but we'd carefully targetted the first week of May on the theory that a) it's supposedly a non-peak time, and b) there was a big ol' war going on to rid the world of the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass of destruction. Er, to liberate those nice Iraqi people. Either way, we figured it would keep all the annoying "people-who-aren't-us" locked in their bomb shelters at home with their eyes firmly glued to their TVs. Unfortunately the war ended early because it turned out the Iraqis were pretty much unarmed or something, and the ensuing rush to celebrate the conquest of another country at DisneyWorld threatened to totally screw up our plan. Thanks a lot, Saddam Hussein. Our bellhop had told me that the resort was actually running at over 90% capacity, which was almost enough to make us cry... especially when we went down to Boma at the designated time and ran into hordes of famished people as far as the eye could see. We nearly decided to blow off our priority seating to get away from the unpleasant crush of unwashed humanity and go commune with the animals while enjoying a bit of room service on our balcony instead, but in the end we decided to just gut it out and feast with the rest of the pack. After a few minutes we were shown to our table, where our waiter expressed some fairly un-Disneylike disappointment that we'd never been to Boma before (since it meant he'd have to take time out of his busy shift to explain how the buffet works). I made sure to ask him lots of idiotic questions on buffet protocol, because I figured if he was going to go to all the trouble of explaining the concept of an all-you-can-eat buffet to a couple of people who are clearly over the age of 12 then I should probably do my best to humor him and play along. Boma works just like a conventional buffet, as it turns out, except that dinner for two costs around $60 instead of $12.95. But the food was tasty and interesting, and this is where we discovered lots of African delicacies like "pap". Pap is some kind of thick, tasteless, undigestible, cornmeal-like paste with a density akin to stellar matter... Aimee had just a little but I ate like a mountain of the stuff for some idiotic reason, and it sat there festering in the pit of my stomach for the next 48 hours or so. But the desserts were excellent, and between the two of us we partook of all of them before staggering back to our room, all bloated and uncomfortable. A quick check out on the balcony verified that the animals were still roaming around out there (aww!), although now they were "basking in simulated moonlight", or what I like to call "lit by spotlights on the roof". Before turning in for the night, we briefly went over the following day's carefully-researched and computer-optimized commando plan for maximum fun at the Magic Kingdom. We arranged a wake-up call for 6:00am, set the alarm, synchronized our watches and eventually went to sleep, hoping that by the time the sun finally rose our digestive systems would have made a bit of progress in breaking down the pap. Unnngh.
Part Three coming soon!
verbosely,
robp
Day Two -- In Which Aimee and Rob Are Foiled By Saddam
Saturday morning we woke up really early and got ready to go.. I packed the car with our combined 14-weeks worth of clothes and hair-care supplies while Aimee took care of some last minute things around the house. We both did a last-minute check of our respective coifs and then we ran (as much as one actually "runs" at 6:30am) out the door, ready for what would surely be 8 fabulous nights at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge resort. Woo! The AKL is a deluxe African-themed resort, complete with animals roaming around a simulated African savannah, and you just don't get that sort of thing at the Days Inn for $39.95/night (I checked). It's also apparently one of the top ten great honeymoon destinations according to some list that tracks these things. Now I should probably point out that we weren't actually on a honeymoon, but it's fair to say I was totally willing to act like we were (you know, if it were going to enhance the overall AKL experience). Anyway. Aimee drove the first leg -- a little over an hour to South of the Border where we stopped to use the bathroom facilities, which were just as reliably disgusting as usual despite the obnoxiously early hour and the lack of the usual touristy hordes. I took over and drove the next leg, to somewhere in East-Nowhere, Georgia, where we stopped for gas and a hearty meal of fries and Coke at a local McDonalds. I drove the next leg as well, which turned out to be the rest of the trip... it was fairly uneventful if you don't count the tour bus full of children that had flipped over and burned up in the oncoming lane just a short way out of DisneyWorld, causing a 2-mile traffic jam headed the other way. Cool! But we didn't care... they were travelling the other direction, i.e. away from DisneyWorld, so we figured that a) it's not slowing down traffic in our lane and b) if they're leaving Disney then at least they died happy, baby (oh stop it -- we learned on the news that evening that nobody was actually hurt in the accident). Anyway we finally pulled into the Animal Kingdom Lodge around 4:00pm on Saturday, left the car (and a healthy tip) with the valet, left our mountain of bags (and a healthy tip) with the bellhop and went to check in. A bored-looking female Disney employee (uh, "cast member") with the angriest hair I've ever seen finally deigned to pay us some attention after making us wait pointlessly in the fabulous gigantic lobby while she stared importantly into space, and we checked ourselves in. After verifying that my credit card didn't explode under the strain of paying for the room, the angry-haired girl became much friendlier, handed us a map of the lodge and, with a stern admonishment not to feed the animals, helpfully circled the location of our room. Which, as luck would have it, turned out to be almost the exact opposite of what we'd requested -- wrong floor, wrong savannah, wrong everything. Bear in mind that we'd done everything right... we'd spent hours and hours meticulously researching a hundred web sites, read message boards frequented by the most freakish of the hardcore Disney afficionados, even signed up for something gay called TourGuide Mike... we knew exactly what we wanted, baby, and we'd even faxed them a politely-worded plea (complete with sappy cover story), exactly 4 days in advance as per accepted protocol, asking for the type of room we coveted so dearly. So when the angry-haired girl circled a room on the totally wrong wing of the hotel I cringed, expecting all manner of unpleasantness to ensue. Sigh. Resigned to 8 nights of bitter disappointment and sadness we took our stupid map and our stupid room keys and turned around, and standing there was another stupid bellhop with all our stupid bags. Woo, I guess. He walked us to our stupid room on the second (i.e. lowest) stupid floor (we'd asked for the 4th or 5th) while telling us all about the stupid resort and the stupid animals and a bunch of stupid stuff that I promptly forgot because of all the mounting bitterness and disappointment. Surprisingly when we got there our room was great, as it turns out -- the second floor was a lot better for viewing the animals on the savannah, and they also gave us the non-smoking room and the faux-honeymoon sized bed I'd requested. Woo! I gave the bellhop the requisite healthy tip and thanked him, then went out on the balcony with Aimee to check out the animals. It was pretty awesome... right outside our window was the savannah, and we watched zebras, giraffes, antelopes, wildebeests, ankole cattle and various other african animals frolic and play right in front of us. OK, they mostly stood around and occasionally kind of ate some grass and stuff, but there was the occasional bit of minor frolic too. We paused to quietly laugh at the people who got stuck way up on the 4th floor, far, far away from all the grazing action. Suckers.
We already had dinner arrangements set for 6:00 at Boma, one of the resort's two restaurants, so we decided to fix our hair and take a look around the hotel before then. We checked out the gigantic lobby and the Zawadi Marketplace, where we could buy overpriced Disney trinkets and memorabilia. We checked out the pool, which had lots of pasty white people and their children... and we made a solemn vow to avoid it for the rest of our trip. We stopped by the Victoria Falls bar/lounge, home of the $8 mudslides (plus healthy tip). Finally we stopped by the two restaurants, Boma and Jiko. Over the course of our exploration we'd both been immediately struck by the large number of people everywhere, which was a little disconcerting. Aimee and I both lean towards the sociopathic end of the "normal" bell curve -- I mean we'd obviously resigned ourselves to the fact that there would probably be other people around if we went to freaking DisneyWorld, but we'd carefully targetted the first week of May on the theory that a) it's supposedly a non-peak time, and b) there was a big ol' war going on to rid the world of the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass of destruction. Er, to liberate those nice Iraqi people. Either way, we figured it would keep all the annoying "people-who-aren't-us" locked in their bomb shelters at home with their eyes firmly glued to their TVs. Unfortunately the war ended early because it turned out the Iraqis were pretty much unarmed or something, and the ensuing rush to celebrate the conquest of another country at DisneyWorld threatened to totally screw up our plan. Thanks a lot, Saddam Hussein. Our bellhop had told me that the resort was actually running at over 90% capacity, which was almost enough to make us cry... especially when we went down to Boma at the designated time and ran into hordes of famished people as far as the eye could see. We nearly decided to blow off our priority seating to get away from the unpleasant crush of unwashed humanity and go commune with the animals while enjoying a bit of room service on our balcony instead, but in the end we decided to just gut it out and feast with the rest of the pack. After a few minutes we were shown to our table, where our waiter expressed some fairly un-Disneylike disappointment that we'd never been to Boma before (since it meant he'd have to take time out of his busy shift to explain how the buffet works). I made sure to ask him lots of idiotic questions on buffet protocol, because I figured if he was going to go to all the trouble of explaining the concept of an all-you-can-eat buffet to a couple of people who are clearly over the age of 12 then I should probably do my best to humor him and play along. Boma works just like a conventional buffet, as it turns out, except that dinner for two costs around $60 instead of $12.95. But the food was tasty and interesting, and this is where we discovered lots of African delicacies like "pap". Pap is some kind of thick, tasteless, undigestible, cornmeal-like paste with a density akin to stellar matter... Aimee had just a little but I ate like a mountain of the stuff for some idiotic reason, and it sat there festering in the pit of my stomach for the next 48 hours or so. But the desserts were excellent, and between the two of us we partook of all of them before staggering back to our room, all bloated and uncomfortable. A quick check out on the balcony verified that the animals were still roaming around out there (aww!), although now they were "basking in simulated moonlight", or what I like to call "lit by spotlights on the roof". Before turning in for the night, we briefly went over the following day's carefully-researched and computer-optimized commando plan for maximum fun at the Magic Kingdom. We arranged a wake-up call for 6:00am, set the alarm, synchronized our watches and eventually went to sleep, hoping that by the time the sun finally rose our digestive systems would have made a bit of progress in breaking down the pap. Unnngh.
Part Three coming soon!
verbosely,
robp
but this is the ONLY trip report I have actually read out loud to my husband, who tolerates Disney once or twice a year. 
