I suppose I should write a bit about my vacation. Really, there's not much to tell. Friday - Monday morning was mostly driving, stopping to sleep in Memphis, New Orleans, and Gainesville, with a stop-off at Graceland in Memphis on Saturday morning. Graceland was impressive in it's tackiness but disappointing in it's size and lack of grandeur.

New Orleans wasn't planned, we just decided at the last minute that it would be cool to take I-55 all the way to I-10 and drive across Lake Ponchartrain (or however you spell it) instead of taking I-12 through Louisiana. I'd planned to get through it that night but it was raining pretty hard and that and all that driving across the swamps made us sleepy. Partiers that we are, when we got to New Orleans we grabbed a motel room, ordered pizza, and then went to sleep. Yep, that was our big night in the Big Easy.

Monday morning it took us about two hours to get from Gainesville to Orlando, then another two hours to find our hotel once inside the Disney compound. Okay, not really that long, but it took us a while at any rate. The hotel was actually pretty nice, considering it was of their mid-priced stock. It was the Port Orleans, so of course it had a Mardis Gras theme, or at least, Mardis Gras as watered down by the Disney Imagineers.

Monday afternoon - Wednesday night was a typical stay at Disney World. Tess was pretty unimpressed by the whole thing, and as it was my fifth time there (yes, really), I found it a little hard to get too excited over anything. I was actually pretty disappointed in a couple of changes that were made at Epcot. They changed the Imagination ride and got rid of both Figment (that little purple dragon) and the Imagination song (I loved that song) and replaced both with Eric Idle (one of the guys from Monty Python). They also changed the closing laser & fireworks show from a pretty nifty celebration of classical music from around the world to this new agey One World millenium thing that projected motion pictures on a metal globe in the middle of the lake to the whiney singing of some Celine Dion wannabe. Or maybe it actually was Celine Dion. I don't know.

Tuesday was Magic Kingdom by day and Downtown Disney (but not Pleasure Island) by night, where we got complimentary burgers at Planet Hollywood and ate them at a table next to a couple of petite foreign girls who were splitting a salad and who stared at us the entire time. I don't know what their deal was.

After dinner we went to see "Watcher" at the AMC. I love James Spader. I love him in everything he's ever been in, even "Supernova." So that made it worth the discounted admission price for me. Keanu is, of course, always fun to watch, but I didn't really buy him as a scarey serial killer. It was like, "Oh no, Ted's gonna get that girl! Bogus!" At the beginning, when he was moving around (dancing, I think, but I couldn't be sure), all I could think was, "I know Kung Fu!" Anyway. It was a wait-for-the-video kind of movie, which seems to pretty well describe all of the movies I've seen since X-Men, which was an I-can't-freaking-WAIT-for-the-video kind of movie.

Wednesday was Animal Kingdom. Animal Kingdom sucks.

Wednesday was also MGM, but that was when I started having the mini-breakdowns I mentioned yesterday, so we were only there long enough to see the Muppets 3D movie.

Thursday was probably the most pleasant day of the entire trip. We checked out that morning and drove over to Cocoa Beach, where we shopped at Ron Jon's and Tess saw the ocean for the first time, and we contemplated getting tattoos at the tattoo parlor across from RJ's, but Tess still doesn't know for sure what she wants to get a tattoo of, and I didn't have enough money.

After that we went to tour the Kennedy Space Center, where we got to see the launch pads. We didn't get as close to them as I'd have liked, but the Discovery was already loaded on one of them, being prepped for an October launch. From the observation tower you could only see the tip of the orange fuselage sticking up over the launch tower, but that was still pretty cool. At the Apollo/Saturn building I bought my youngest nephew a set of the emblems from each Apollo mission that the astronauts wore on their uniforms, which he thought was pretty cool, as well as a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo that looked like the moon, which he also thought was pretty cool, so I scored some major "Cool Aunt" points there.

After the Apollo tour we were both pretty tired so we cut our tour short and left. We made it all the way to Tallahassee before stopping for sleep. The next morning was when I woke up with the cold I mentioned yesterday, but even though I felt like hell we were both eager to get home, so we pushed and made it all the way to Memphis that night. Saturday was a straight shot form Memphis to home that only took about 6 hours. We were so, SO happy to get home.

So here are the highlights/lessons learned:

• Graceland isn't worth the price of admission, especially if you're not an Elvis fanatic.
• On a road trip you can subsist entirely on Funyuns, beef jerkey, and Halloween candy.
• The entire South is covered with these nasty little mating bugs this time of year. They're everywhere. They're doing it everywhere. Given a chance, they'll do it on you. I took out a lot of them with the van, both directions, but they got their revenge by having guts that refuse to be washed off.
• If you spray the front of your vehicle with WD-40 before driving through the South this time of year, the bugs won't stick to it. Unfortunately nobody told me this until after the trip.
• Days Inn sucks. La Quinta Inn is about the same price as Days Inn but is much more pleasant. Their free continental breakfast consists mainly of individually wrapped bagels and pastries which are easy to shove in your pockets and take with you. Hampton Inn costs about $20 more than La Quinta, and you certainly get your extra $20 worth, but it's all in unnecessary extras (i.e. a writing desk and a refrigerator in your room). They have a better breakfast spread, but as everything is fresh and catered you can't load up and take it with you.
• It's hard to get a room in a University town on a football weekend.
• The week after Labor Day, Disney World's hours are shorter, but so are their lines. Our longest wait for a ride was about 20 - 25 minutes.
• Florida was very hot and humid and muggy, and combined with the bugs, it was hard to maintain a good mood.
• NASA stuff is cool.
• I was mauled by Winnie the Pooh.
• Tess was mauled by Eyore.
• The food at the Crystal Palace is really good.
• The food at virtually every other place inside the Disney theme parks is not really very good at all.
• If I never go to Disney World again, that will be fine with me.