My alarm: Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! [Translation: Jiri! It's! 5:15! Up! Now!]
That's what would've happened at 5:15 if I didn't have a body clock that consistently wakes me up at least a half hour before my alarm goes off. But I do have a body clock that yada yada, so at 5:15 I'd already finished my shower and was going through a last-minute mental packing check.
Sling bag that will serve as day bag for the parks and also purse for airport (Note the lovingly made DIS tag so that my fellow DISers could recognize me. Lest I get your hopes up, let me say now that, aside from scrapbooking posterity, the tag proved worthless.):
Check!
Trip paraphernalia, including maps,
The Unofficial Guide, the trip packet with directions to various places, and touring plans cut from the UG:
Check! (And no, it wasn't still spread out on my living room floor. I would have spontaneously combusted if I didn't have all that stuff packed the night before. But the above is a prettier picture.)
Suitcase crammed with clothes for a week, a couple of books, my Bible, first aid supplies, snacks to take to the parks, lots of other junk I felt I would need, and three pairs of shoes, including these ones, which are about my fav summer shoes, which were once mistaken for Pumas, and which had to go even though they weren't the actual park shoes:
Check!
(Trust me, the shoe pic is much better than the suitcase pic would have been, had I bothered to take the suitcase pic. Even as it is, the shoe pic was taken after the trip was over. Sorry to disillusion.)
And of course, the T-shirts, which you can view again in
this post and which at the time were in my carry-on just in case something evil happened to the checked luggage:
Check!
So after eating breakfast and making myself presentable, I was off about 15 minutes before my goal departure time. Which turned out to be a good thing, because my chosen route to the Park 'n' Ride where I planned to park my car before riding to the airport (MUCH cheaper to get a coupla one-way bus passes and park in the free Park 'n' Ride lot than to pay for airport parking) had construction that delayed me close to a half-hour.
But I made it to the airport in time and got through security quickly. At my gate, I amused myself with people-watching, being too giddy to focus on reading my book. And people-watching was really child-watching, which induced the first of a series of recurring thought processes, which I will summarize here as:
1. Kids are cute!
2. I want kids!
3. ... Stupid biological clock.
Now, assuming I remember this later on, if "123" appears in the TR after the description of a child, you may assume that said thoughts just ran through my mind, and we can move on to the good stuff more quickly. Deal?
Nevi, Melneth, and I had tried to time our arrival at MCO to more-or-less coincide; my flight was to get in about 20 minutes before theirs, or 3:30pm. In reality, my Southwest flight arrive 40 minutes ahead of schedule, and their American Airlines flight was about 10 minutes late. We played quite a bit of phone tag before concluding we would meet by this character:
(No, that's not the real Spiderman by which we met. Sadly I took no pictures on arrival day. You are left with simulacra.)
But if we were dancing fruit, this is what we would've looked like upon seeing each other:
is on the wall, massive and . . . red. Me:
Nevi:
Melneth:
After not-pretending we were dancing fruit, we went to collect Nevi and Melneth's luggage, since I'd gotten mine already due to Southwest's superiority at arriving early. Once luggage was collected, we headed to the Hertz shuttle to take to the Hertz station to pick up our rental car.
At the Hertz station, Melneth went to the desk to claim our car while Nevi and I amused ourselves by looking at the brochures for things we wouldn't be doing. Disney or nothing, baby.*
Melneth returned and we towed our stuff out to meet our car. The simulacrum of our car, which we eventually named Pearl:
You will note that Simulacrum-Pearl looks more silver than pearl-like. Rest assured, Pearl was Pearl-colored and not silver. Actually, "Marshmallow" was briefly in the running, name-wise, but I don't think any of us really liked the idea of driving around in a confection made from horse hooves.
We found Pearl, and after Nevi insisted that I ride in the Death Seat (front passenger seat), Melneth introduced me to Gus.
Let me explain Gus.
Gus.
Gus, our (well, Melneth's) beloved GPS that used an Australian accent to give us directions and sported Karl Urban's picture on the standby screen. Gus told us how to get to our hotel, and didn't discriminate against us because we stayed off-site. Gus showed us how to get to the health food store and the grocery store. Dear Gus, who told us how to get to all the parks, and could have even helped us navigate within the parks, if we hadn't able to find the Dole Whip stand on our own. Sweet, darling Gus.
The major benefit of sitting in the death seat was that I got to hold him while he murmured sweet nothings such as, "In twenty feet, turn left on World Drive." In an Australian accent.
All right, we technically haven't even arrived at the hotel yet; I've just alluded to it. But I'm all twitterpated. I'll have to return after I've regained my composure. Toodles for now.
*Well, I'm sure we would've done
something had we been denied the joy of Disney, but we might have been grumpy while doing it.
That made me laugh...out loud.
Drop a line! Boost my ego by helping to up my post count! I'm a reciprocator, so I do my best to visit the threads of all who come.
<-- NOT a ninja on a bicycle. this situation would only prove to be noisy and would probably get the ninja killed.
], but then decided we probably wouldn't have time. My vast powers of foresight proved correct. 
