MCO - The Orlando Airport is setup kinda weird-like, when we landed, there was nobody in the terminal.  Spooky almost.  So everybody walks down this hallway to what looked like elevator doors, except when they opened it was a train that went to the baggage claim and parking lot.  While I’m walking towards the tram, I called Amanda to let her know I got there okay, and found out she was running a few minutes late.

On the tram, this girl asked me if I could take a picture of her and her friends with her camera.  I thought she meant like 3-4 people, but EVERY FREAKIN’ PERSON ON THE TRAM got in the shot.  I felt left out of the group picture.  I mean, we’d been through a lot on that two minute ride.

So I get to the baggage claim, find my bags, and head out to the pickup area just past the baggage claim.  And I wait.  And wait.  And wait.  And finally Amanda calls me and asks where I am.  “I’m here waiting to be picked up.”  “Where at?”  “Here where it says ‘pickup’.” “Ummm, okay.  We’ll be there in just a minute.”

And I wait a couple more minutes.  Then my phone rings again and we talk for a minute or so and I start hearing a bit of an echo, turn, and its some wacko staring at me sideways.  A non-seedy hug is exchanged.  A manly, hearty, heterosexual handshake with her roommate is exchanged.  Then we head back inside and towards some other part of the airport that I would have never gone to in a million guesses.

I learned something very quickly; Florida’s highways are made up almost entirely of toll-roads.  You can drive in a straight line, and over the course of 10 miles have to pay $1.50 or more.  This concept is foreign to me as the few toll-roads in Texas are barely used, but the ones here are as busy as any regular highway here.

Amanda’s apartment - Oh, first, on the way to the apartment we passed a cult place which was really cool.  Anyway, her apartment is on the second floor, has a netted-off balcony, washer/dryer, and was really quite nice.  Only thing it was missing was a fireplace.  Amanda’s bathroom is made for a 40 year old housewife.  She’s got potpourri, a CD player of instrumental music, and a giant garden tub.  I think she also uses every available inch of counter space for girly products.

When we got to the apartment Matt had made it from Tampa and was playing Mario Kart.  It was about 10:30, and I hadn’t eaten since before I got to the airport so I was kinda hungry.  Amanda ordered a pizza from…Donatos (?).

Before the trip was even planned, I was informed I’d be playing Mario Party, which is fine except I had no idea what Mario Party was besides “a bunch of mini-games”, whatever that is.  Once the pizza was finished, Amanda, Matt, Michael, and I settled in to play this evil, evil game.  The key to being really good at the game is to press ‘A’ really fast.  In a bid to keep Michael from winning, on her last turn Amanda gave me the chance to steal one of her stars.  I stole that thing, and thanks to some crazy tie-breaker, I won.  For those keeping score, that’s Chaz 1, Amanda 0.

I immediately retired as the Mario Party player with the all-time highest winning percentage.
By the time the game was over, it was after 1am and we all got to bed.  Because I’m a passive little pussy, I brought an inflatable mattress and let Matt have the sofa.

Monday

In a normal week, I’m up between 6:30 and 7am every day so I can get to school.  My internal clock was still on that stupid schedule so I was up early.  I woke up to a cat staring me in the face.  Lemme tell ya, few things in life are more shocking than waking up in a strange bed with a strange pussy staring you in the face.  Had to get a line like that in this thing somewhere.  So I sat around and read for a while, watched some Sportscenter, dozed in and out for a few hours.  Finally around 11:00 the rest of the house started to wake up.

For lunch, we went to Froggers.  As strange as it sounds, it’s a Pittsburgh Steelers sports bar located in Oviedo, FL…go figure.  The place is about 45 seconds from Amanda’s office, and apparently she’s been there a few times.  As we walked up, the waitress said “You’re a little late today aren’t you?  Three sweet teas?”  This became a source of my constant amusement for the rest of the trip.

After lunch, we went back to the apartment, picked up Michael, and went bowling.  The alley we went to seemed like it had about 400 lanes.  I had one real goal--beat Amanda’s score-- and I was ruthless in my strategy to achieve that goal.  Yelling Noonan just about every time she went towards the lane, to psychological (“it’s just those two pins, that should be SIMPLE”), to giving bad shot advice.

Michael was the ringer of the group, as he was taking a bowling class at UCF.  He beat all of us by about 50 pins the first game, and came back to win the second one in the final frame.  I believe Amanda won our grudge match by 4 pins the first game, and I won the second game by 8 pins the second game.  For the sake of fairness, we’ll call it Chaz 2, Amanda 1.

On the way out of the alley, we passed the arcade…that had DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION.  I think we almost convinced Matt to play, but none of the rest of us was willing to humiliate ourselves.

That evening, we went to Kobe Steakhouse for dinner.  It’s apparently Amanda and Michael’s favorite place on Earth--with good reason, as it was delicious.  I believe if more restaurants gave out warm lemon scented towels, this world would be a better place.

After dinner, Matt had to get going back to Tampa because he had work the next day.  I’m pretty sure I was not the person he was expecting me to be.  “Really quiet” I think is the impression he came away with.  I opened up later in the vacation;  I just needed to get my bearings down.

Ironically enough, the rest of us went home to play poker with Amanda’s brother Jeff and his girlfriend.  Michael’s mom buys him stuff from crazy door-to-door salesmen.  I include that tidbit because one of those neat presents was a poker chip set.  She’s also the only person I’ve ever heard of that bought something from a door-to-door salesman.

Having never played poker and not watching on TV for more than about 3 minutes at a time, all the rules for every game had to be explained to me.  By far my favorite game was Anaconda.  In it, you get dealt 7 cards and build your best 5 card hand.  Then you turn one card over at a time and bet on who’ll have the best hand overall.  I liked it because you could bluff your way to the fifth card and other people would invariably back out at the end.  Unfortunately, that was about the only game I was any good at.  I ended up losing pretty much everything to Michael when I had a King high flush only to lose to his Ace high flush.

After everyone’d had enough poker for one night, we sat down for some Mario Kart.  Since she’s logged around 8000 hours on the game, Amanda was by far the best at it.  I held my own against everyone else and even managed to steal a race or two away.

Tuesday

Having stayed up well after my bedtime two straight days, I finally slept in like a normal person.  It was probably 10:30 or so by the time I even thought about getting up.

The plan for Wednesday was a trip to Universal Studios!  Keeping in mind that this was my first ever trip to Orlando, I was giddy as a 7 year-old.  When I first planned the trip, Amanda told me she got free tickets from her mom to Universal, and offered to take me.  Sooooo FREE UNIVERSAL~~~~.  (As an aside, if I’d known ahead of time she was planning to go back Thursday with her boyfriend, I would have insisted she use her tickets to go with him.)  

As we were leaving the parking lot talking about making sure we remembered where the car was, my horoscope got text messaged to my phone.  “Both of you are responsible for this problem.  You’ll both need to work on a solution.”  Spooky, right?

The park was surprisingly not that busy.  The longest wait was about 30 minutes, but other than that, 10 minutes or so was the longest we stood in line.  My favorite was by far the Back to the Future ride.  Maybe it was just that I loved the movies or that THE RIDE I associate with Universal, but it was the highlight of the day.

Other highlights included the Jaws tour guide making fun of the ride (WHERE IS THAT MUSIC COMING FROM!?!?~~~~), lunch at the Hard Rock where I couldn’t tell if the waiter thought we were newlyweds or not, Amanda closing her eyes for the whole Mummy Returns ride because she’s a big scaredy cat, and the Men in Black ride where I smoked Amanda by 280,000 points despite not listening to the instructions that could have gotten me an extra 100K points at the end (Amanda 1, Chaz 3).

The walk out of the park was the longest trek ever.  I’m fairly certain somehow the parking garage was moved 2 miles from where it was when we first got there.  Watching little kids run around while I stood dog tired on the moving sidewalk made me feel quite old.  We found the car with little to no trouble.  

Traffic was awful going back to the apartment, and it wasn’t even for an accident--it was just stupid Floridians not knowing how to drive.  Somebody whose name rhymes with Bamanda hates driving, and would rather put her life in the hands of someone she met for the first time two days earlier than get behind the wheel.  I made sure she regretted ever inviting me by singing and dancing along to
EVERY.
SINGLE.
SONG.
on the radio…something I do if I’m the only one in the car.  I also shot “What are you doing?!?!” looks at her anytime she’d start to bob her head or sing along.  THIS ISN’T A DUET.

That evening, we worked on her website project for school (one she scored an A+ on BTW).  After all the excitement, I was exhausted and went to bed early.  

This was the best vacation day I’ve ever had.  Seriously.

Wednesday

After sleeping in again (I could get used to that), we finished up the project, and went to lunch with some of Amanda’s friends.  One of these friends was none too enthused when he found out I was coming to visit.  Apparently I was only coming because I was “trying to get in her pants.”  No open hostility towards me, but I was outnumbered so I was kinda quiet again.  I did learn a couple things about Amanda’s friends though.

1)  They’re all a bunch of NERDS.

2) They used (?) to be a bunch of HOODLUMS.

After lunch, we came back to the apartment for…more Mario Kart.  That game is animated crack.  We thought about going out to the movies, but there wasn’t anything worth seeing.  Instead we just watched Drop Dead Gorgeous.

The final outing of the vacation was across the street to McDonalds for a McFlurry at 10:00pm.  Some idiot scheduled his plane flight for 8:30 in the morning so we had to call it an early night so we’d be sure to get up in time.

Thursday

Something in my head told me to get up early again as I was awake before my alarm went off.  We had to steal some change out of Michael’s room (he left for Washington D.C. back on Tuesday) for the toll roads.

The flight home was pretty uneventful.  Some high school kids that just sat wherever they wanted delayed the takeoff by about 15 minutes.

When I got back to DFW I realized that I should have gotten my brother to drive me and pick me up again because my parking charge ended up being $52 dollars…exactly how much I’d left budgeted for parking.

Ummmm, that’s all I can remember/want to write.  I’d do it again in a heartbeat.  The End.

(Feel free to write horrible things to the author.)