Spring Break @ Orlando, Florida

Friday 11 March

Yong Gen, Yann Chong and I left on the early flight to Orlando. I’m kinda glad I took the flight at this time or I wouldn’t have seen such a beautiful nightscape. It’s like time has frozen and to the west, the sun hasn’t set yet although over here, it is night time. Actually the photo would look much better if the crescent moon were bigger but that is very difficult to take such photo.

sunset in the distance
Since the flight with the other travel members was delayed we spent 2h playing cards at the airport :( and when we finally checked in at our hotel, it was midnight. The hotel check in process was a bit the scary because the people ahead in line were turned away by the hotel even though they had an online reservation from a credible website. We were so afraid that we’d have to sleep in the cold (which is not that cold anyway).


Saturday 12 March
We decided to take advantage of the fairly good weather (a bit windy) to go to Wet n Wild water theme park. It wasn’t half as crowded as expected and we managed to get a student rate for park entrance. Rides were quite fun but then we had to climb up the stairs really really high and it was so windy and cold up there. So far, the most thrilling ride was “der Stukka”, a water slide that’s REALLY high and almost vertical so that you’ll probably fall at grav acceleration. Maybe the rides would have been more fun if I wasn’t so afraid that my contact lenses would drop into the water. We also chilled out at the wave pool that generates waves ever 5min and if you don’t have a rubber float you’re sure to end up drinking lots of water cuz the waves can be unexpectedly high. The rest of the afternoon was spent sunbathing, waterskiing and retaking the rides we liked most.


@ Wet n Wild

We left Wet n Wild pretty early to catch the Duke bball game and then proceeded to Belz Factory Outlet. It’s crazily big and spread out and almost impossible to get around by foot. However, I managed to cover all the shops in Belz Premium Outlets… didn’t buy much, just a pair of pink pants for an unbelievably cheap price of $10. At 9pm, we headed off to dinner and decided to eat at this pseudo (or so we thought) Chinese food place on International Drive, the food turned out to be quite tasty and the owner is from Hong Kong.

Dinner @ Cui Yuan

Sunday 13 March
What a great day to go to Islands of Adventure! It was not as crowded as expected. Well, Islands of Adventure is the thrill theme park opened by Universal Studios. We were supposed to go to Busch Gardens but it’s a one hour shuttle ride away and extremely not worth the time. For starters, I realize we took the most thrilling ride – the Incredible Hulk Roller Coaster. The most unexpected thing is in the beginning when the roller coaster is going upwards and then it suddenly accelerates you up and then down. It was REALLY funny to see the photo shots, especially that of Dominic who was screaming and cringing. He said that he felt giddy after the ride and that was not a good first ride for him because he avoided all other roller coaster rides from then on (even the kiddy ones). After that we zig-zagged our way using the fast-pass on Spiderman, while going for the lift freefall ride. I must say that that particular ride is very lousy….anticlimactic one…it accelerates you upward damn fast then when coming down, it is not faster than gravitational acceleration so the thrill factor is minimized. I still like the lift ride at Knott’s Berry farm.


Islands of Adventure features - the Incredible Hulk Roller Coaster
We tramped our way through toon town and took really hilarious photos with thought/voice bubbles above our heads.

WAHHAHA get the joke?
Dominic, Chiat, Shiling and I took the big splash ride afterwards. There were a few fake drops, of which Dominic screamed and the rest of us screamed because we thought he could see us going down. Luckily I had my trustworthy raincoat in my bag so I didn’t get as wet as the rest.


After very wet ride ARGHHHHH

The next ride was the popeye rapids and this is real ironic cuz the people who refused to take the big splash ride got wet anyway. HA HA Ha. Throughout the cruise through the rapids, can hear people saying all sorts of swear words, especially when water splashes into the raft or when the raft goes under the mini waterfall (poor yann chong got totally wet). I was still reasonably dry after the ride waist upwards but totally soaked otherwise. Stupid yq had to go wring his wet shirt on top of my head. The last wet ride was the Jurassic Park big splash. It is a really good ride but since I was really miserably wet and had already taken the ride in LA Universal Studios, I decided not to go. YQ and I just spent 20min suntanning but we were really careless and nearly lost yann’s wallet and camera. Luckily a woman at the Jurassic Park café was honest enough to leave the stuff at the counter.
The Spiderman ride was great! It’s a 3-D ride with lots of props, villains and special effects, extremely thrilling! Wanna see Spiderman jump right in your face?
Then came more roller coaster rides…the flying unicorn right was really kiddyish roller coaster but Dom didn’t take it either (hehe he must be freaked out by the first ride). We fast passed Duelling dragons. It’s a really great roller coaster where the tracks are above your head so your feet are hanging in the air and there are two dragons so two different rides. Well…actually the rides are the same except the roller coaster is a different colour. I like the idea of having 2 dragon roller coasters because in operation, it resembles two dragons fighting and yes, you do see the other roller coaster coming towards you when you’re taking the ride!
Since there wasn’t much time left, we kinda chilled out at Seuss Land and even took the carousel! So cute right?


Dom and Gen on carousel reliving childhood days

On our way back to the exit, we passed by numerous candy and fudge shops and took really funny photos using giant candy softtoys:

YQ & Dom engage in Tootsie pop fight


I kiss the hershey's kiss

Since we got back pretty early at about 8pm, we decided to go eat buffet at a nearby place call Bill Wong’s Buffett. It is mostly oriental food with a bit of Jap, Ang Moh and BBQ American. The whole meal was kinda funny because of the scallops incident. Us being Singaporeans…we attacked the scallops with fervor. The problem is that the scallops don’t come as a separate dish. It is fried with snow peas and prawns. However, we noted that ever since our arrival, the scallops would disappear first, leaving the tray with snow peas and prawns. Yahyah…my fault lah..I easily ate more than 10 scallops that day and another funny thing was that Yong Gen said that he was full and wanted to stop eating but when Chiat came over with a full plate of scallops, Gen suddenly said he wanted to eat. Hee Hee heee. We also kopped the remaining cheesecake (3 slices at one go) but it wasn’t very tasty. I stuffed myself silly with every conceivable thing on the food tray and had one scoop of every flavour of icecream (8 flavours you know). However, I was extremely surprised when Shiling came back with 4 ice cream glasses with each flavour on it…Ok someone has a greater sweeter tooth than me. Basically I was stuffed to the brim so Chiat and I went off for a walk on I-drive. Too bad I wasn’t there to hear Dominic’s really hilarious jokes. Even YQ laughed so hard that he lost his appetite soon after.
Post-dinner entertainment back in the room was really interesting. We stopped by Walgreens to get copper hair dye for Chiat since he volunteered to be my guinea pig in highlighting then YQ and Yann Chong also wanted to do it. It was really funny highlighting Chiat’s and Yq’s hair cuz the highlighting kit is SOOOooo inadequate. By the time Yann’s turn came, I was too tired and let Gen take over the highlighting job.



One hair-dye victim


Monday 14 March
The shuttle took more than half an hour to get to DisneyWorld and it dropped us at MGM (of all places). ARGGHHHHHH…we had to take a cramped shuttle to Magic Kingdom Ferry terminal. When we were on the ferry, the skies became overcast and it started raining. Not only that, the ferry also started flooding on the top deck, where we were standing on. Did you know that DisneyWorld was previously a worthless marshland? Developers drained the swamps and made it into a theme park! Good use of resources.
Totally miserable, shivering from the rain, we ran out of the ferry and into the canopy and had to wait there for 15min.

Forcing a smile at Disneyland...rainy day :(
It didn’t rain after that, luckily. Our first stop was the haunted mansion. This is my 3rd haunted mansion ride, it’s almost the same as the rest but I think the atmosphere would be better if you went at night. We fast passed space mountain and then went go-carting. It is truly lousy go-cart lor, can’t even overtake because the cars are all on a track. It was difficult to control the cars and my car (as usual) would swerve from right to left. HAHA
Right after that, we lined up for more than an hour for the Thundermountain Railroad ride. It is really a rollercoaster lah, very cute, plus Dominic screamed all the way. We watched the Disney parade right after that and it’s really nice to feel like a kid again.

Cinderella float display @ disney characters parade

We were hungry and had turkey legs for lunch, two people share one turkey legs. I wonder how turkeys grow so fat!

What's the fascination with turkey legs
After lunch was space mountain ride. It was really fascinating. I realize that the previous few times I took the ride in the other disneylands, I didn’t truly get to appreciate the space landscape because I was prob too afraid of the ride. The best part is it’s dark so you don’t know whether you’re going up or down and if you look upwards at the “sky”, it is full of stars. It’s like you’re an astronaut on an expedition!
Splashmountain was fun cuz the boat could take all seven of us. We saboed YQ into sitting in the first row hehehe and my I could hear him cursing under his breath. The funny part was the ride got stuck halfway and we were in the same place for all of 5 min, can u imagine the poor people just going to fall on the big splash and waiting there anticipating the fall for 5min? Must be ultimate torture! This is where we (being cheapskate) took a photo of the photo, it’s blur but you can see the expressions of everyone. As usual, Dom was screaming even during the miniest of falls.

photo of the photo @ Splashmountain look at YQ and Dom's expression
The jungle cruise was next. Apparently the HK Disneyland people were there on training and we ended up with a HK siao woman as our jungle cruise guide. She said the funiest of things on the ride and I bet the ang mohs found it incoherent. Maybe she was trying too hard. We also went for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, that supposedly inspired the production of the movie, it’s just a display ride with a mini splash, could be a bit scary with those gun shots. Our last show of the day was the Lilo and Stitch show at Tommorowland, it was interactive 3-D with spurts of water and smell coming out from the chair behind us.
It was already about 8pm by the time we were done so we just browsed around the shops and took photos of the Disney castle.

who is pooh bear?

There was another float display at 8.30pm and fireworks at 10pm. The fireworks were absolutely beautiful, Singapore’s ones could pale in comparison. It was particularly crowded at that time since fireworks are only every Saturday, Sunday and Monday night.

Fireworks @ Disney Magic Kingdom

We rushed back to the bus bay but it was apparently the wrong one and we had to go back and we missed the bus by 2 minutes. Sigh… Luckily 7 of us could take a cab for $5 each back to our place, pretty reasonable. We had dinner at IHOP, it was great…crepes are yummy and we spent most of our dinner figuring out how to solve this puzzle that they put on each table. Dinnertime was almost absolutely quiet, with everyone intent on solving their puzzles. I was unfortunate enuff to be stuck in between the brainy Chiat and the brainy YQ so they had to keep telling me that my moves were not feasible.

Tuesday 15 March
Since no one else bought the Universal Studios two day pass, Chiat and I went ahead to visit Universal while the rest went free and easy back to Belz Factory Outlet.
We fast passed the Incredible Hulk ride (thinking we could get first row seats) and rushed to take Dueling dragons roller coaster again but not without passing by Seussland and taking a few more photos.

Me @ Seussland
Then, we kind of alternated between universal and islands of adventure. @ Universal, we took quite a lot of rides, starting with Twister, then Men in Black (I suck at shooting), Jaws, Back to the Future (super turbulent ride do you wanna see my bruise?) then we ran back to islands of adventure to take the Incredible Hulk but couldn’t get front row seats :( . Some lines at Universal were really long like the Mummy ride which was really GREAT! It happened to be a mini indoor roller coaster that even went backwards and dropped at the most unexpected places. You’d never imagine a roller coaster concealed inside the building! Earthquake was not that great but it interesting to see how the props were made and made to be demolished.

This is for you, Hoon.
Before we knew it, we were taking our very last ride, Shrek. It’s a bit like Lilo and Stitch, interactive 3-d with water and all (they call it 4d) and we spent forever lining up for it!

Shrek ears
Didn’t know Universal Studios closed so early. By the time we were done with Shrek, most of the attractions had closed so we indulged ourselves in a piece of cheesecake from a café that closed right after we left. It was raining and absolutely miserable because the bus was late (again) and people were shoving their way up the bus. Oh well, I admit being one of them, if not how? Wait stupidly for the next shuttle to come in 20 min?

Universal Studios by night
We decided to go check out Festival Bay Mall which is beside Belz Factory Outlet and there was a surf shop with a really really really really nice Aaron Chang bikini. Oh well, I shall banish that thought…they didn’t even have my size left. I guess I’ll have to go drool at the design online :P. After exiting the surf shop, we banged into YQ and Yann Chong who had done A LOT of shopping at the factory outlet and everyone did supper at Angus Steak House. I promised to go dye black the back of Chiat’s hair but I was simply too tired from the whole day of running around that I concussed until 1am when I had to bathe and crawl back into bed…

Wednesday 17 March
Woke up quite early to check out of hotel and had crepes again @ IHOPS yumyumyum. Their banana split was lousy though, only got one flavour. Today was filled with shopping at Orland Premium Outlets, which is about 30min busride away, it was just our luck that we missed the bus. It was fun doing shopping again, planning out a route to take and trying on tons of clothes. I bought one fcuk top (argggghhhh I only just found out what fairy muff is ) and an a/x sleeveless top. Was too exhausted to go walk another round so I ended up sleeping on the bench. Dominic nearly left his credit card at Timberland and we had to wait for him to get it. It was raining then and quite miserable. Fortunately, we got to the airport in time but not without being traumatized by the evangelistic cab driver who felt like a millionaire. Oh well…
I spent most of the flight sleeping and that was also how I spent most of the other days of Spring Break.