A scant 5 days after being in Orlando last, we were once again on our way in that general direction. We had passes to get into parks thanks to our Discovery Cove admission, my wife was closing in on elite status with Delta, so why not use this as an opportunity for a super cheap trip, right? Instead of flying into Orlando, we’d travel into Tampa to visit Busch Gardens, and we’d exchange points and use Priceline to make out arrangements. And it worked pretty splendidly.
The flights down to Orlando were on Delta, but we ended up essentially beta testing their new Economy Basic class of travel for them to save a few bucks. Economy Basic works like this: You pay about $50 less round trip, you get your seat assignment no earlier than 24 hours to the flight. Since Delta cut to the bone after the NWA merger, you’re probably not getting the seat until after you’ve arrived at the gate. In spite of this and the distinct possibility of overbooks ruining our professional lives, we actually got to sit together both on the way to and back from Tampa, and still managed Zone 1. So, success! The rental was a Fiat 500 through Enterprise, which is a zippy little go-kart car that we actually had a blast driving, though it would have no practical value for me at home, and that took us to the hotel we spent a few hours at; the Sheraton Tampa East. It was clean and had a balcony we couldn’t figure out how to access. No worries. And there was the bonus of a Vietnam Helicopter Club meeting and helicopters being parked in the lot. Strange. Different. New to me.
After an hour and change of driving, we arrived back to the general Sea World area and pulled into Aquatica.
-AQUATICA (and Sea World)-
At the risk of making this a Central Florida-centric blog, I present a trip report, my second of the year, of this place. The first time we came, we got a cabana, it was quiet, it was magical for whatever reason. This time: Less quiet. Still a cabana. Not quite as magical. Like was the case with our trip over to Aquatica, we hit crowds and, look, we don’t like crowds. They’re gonna affect our day because, at a water park, you’re bound to physically bump into them or deal with the effect of water slides being an inherently low capacity attraction; lines.
We’ve done most of the slides before in our last visit in January, so that wasn’t gonna be something we dedicated crazy amounts of time to. We did go on Omaka Rocka (Proslide Tantrum) and Dolphin Plunge (body slides w/acrylic tubing as it passes through dolphin area), and that was basically if for us with those. Omaka Rocka is pretty fantastic and I’d love to see more water parks out this way buy something like that. But with other slides, lines developed quickly after opening and we just weren’t going to bother waiting 20 minutes for a Proslide Bowl when there’s several within driving distance.
The star attraction of the park for us will always be Roa’s Rapids, the “active river”. This alone is probably gonna bring me to Water Country USA now knowing they have one. Most of our “active” time was spent in there being dragged by the current. However, when it is busy, like any lazy river, you end up with traffic, people bumping into you, and instead of feeling like some sort of wonderful experience, I’m left feeling like I’ve paid money to wait in line…in water. We still had fun, just not as much fun.
“Just not as much fun” really sums up a lot of things here compared to our previous visit. We got another cabana, and the cabanas are nice, but we were positioned behind a construction wall because the wave pool we were next to was down for refurbishment. That’s not terribly attractive, but you know, I can ignore it. We got some naps, drank a lot of water, and relaxed a bit. It fulfilled what we wanted it to be. I think having had this experience before and doing so somewhat unplanned when we did have it gave it a different feeling than now, where I think we both felt like we were trying to relive something rather than do something new and fresh.
Another decision we regretted was to try the Banana Beach Buffet for our food at Aquatica. Before, we got the cashless wristbands and just waived them whenever we wanted something without a second care. The Buffet is theoretically a good deal – $15 gets you in all day for pop and food – but the food is absolutely horrific. You eat it because you are hungry and it is there, but you wouldn’t go up and get one plate of, I dunno, salad, and then come back and get an entree item. That just wasn’t gonna happen. The salad items were paltry, the pizza was not good, pasta was limited to a viscous, artificial cheese sauce, hot dogs and dry drumsticks were available for protein, and dessert was a choice of pudding, yogurt with crushed up granola bar and strawberry fruit topping mixed in, or this mashed up marble cake-like bread thing that was thrown into a buffet container. At at fairly busy water park with a fairly busy buffet, there was only one drink station with a working ice dispenser. I hate to be the guy who says, “I expect more from this company!,” but I seriously would expect a little more from Sea World/Busch Gardens.
So the park was busier, the capacity of the park wasn’t much different from our visit in January, the weather was hotter so that was more tropical feeling…uhh, what else to mention? Oh, one thing that we noticed and weren’t hot about; music for most of the day was some sort of Hawaiian/Pacific Islander cycle of jams. Then, suddenly, jarringly, we got pop hits of the 1980s. This was interspersed throughout the day with reminders about the lost children area, the announcements for which were loud and kinda jarring. Just thought that was strange.
By about 2:45PM or so during our day at the park, we both agreed that we were, I dunno, not feeling it as much as we did earlier in the year. I think during the first visit we had to Aquatica, the newness of everything and the overall surprise that we had going to a park that we really didn’t know that much about was a huge factor in how much we liked it. It is really difficult these days to go into a park that blind when I plot our adventures out. I still think it is a higher end than average facility, sure, but there’s some stuff there that is at mean or below, and that’s troublesome. Back to the whip, and back to Sea World.
-SEA WORLD-
Take two: we were short on time and not about to ride till we died or anything like that. I’d liked to have gone on Kraken, but it broke down while we were in the station, and once maintenance people emptied the trains and started working on sensors, we knew it was gonna be awhile. Since we were wearing our bathing suits, we grabbed a couple rides on Journey To Atlantis (which I still love, warts and all), and we also popped into Shamu’s Happy Harbor to look around and even ride the Carousel there. That is a strange carousel – the pieces are made by, I dunno, someone and probably not out of wood, and there’s a lot of jagged edges to the art rather than rounded forms. I rode on this otter figure and it looked pretty amateurish next to the one that’s on the Silver Beach Carousel here in Michigan. Not that it matters. It is still cute and I didn’t see any children really complaining that it wasn’t a Looff or Carousel Works.
We spent about as much time looking at the animal areas as we did rides. We had skipped the area where the dolphins are, and the manatee/turtles over by TurtleTrek. We also visited the Killer Whale tank, because, hey, orcas. I ended up on a tangent about keeping of animals in zoological exhibits when I just reviewed Sea World in a more in depth fashion last post, but I want to be clear that I really do like the park. I can’t sit there and run off a ranking of parks in Central Florida because they each offer something different, and there is something about seeing actual animals over animatronics simulating animals or projections of people that is more fulfilling to me than how detailed the queue line for such and such is. I hope I never become so disaffected or jaded that the wonderment of actual nature and its creatures becomes old to me. That would be tragic.
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Our hotel this evening was the Westin Imagine…or Westin Orlando Universal Boulevard. Whatever they call it this week. I used Priceline to grab it for $64/nt. Awesome! When I checked in, I asked if I could get free parking instead of bonus points. Yes. Awesome! I asked if maybe I could use my elite status for an upgrade. We got a one bedroom suite with a convention center view and balcony. Awesome! If I’ve learned anything from the St. Regis experience of Rome, it is to ask for things when you hit status. You won’t get anything special unless you ask. You ask, only good things can happen.
In fact, our major money sink activity of the night would be at the hotel: dinner. I had talked a big game about not wanting to eat a sit down meal that was gonna cost actual money, and here we were dropping $90 at Fiorella’s in the lobby. It is well done Italian food with very lovely ambiance. We were both really happy with our respective soups and entrees, which I naturally took no pictures of, but man, the dessert was out of this world. Fiorella’s signature is the Globo; a pastry chef created sphere of white and dark chocolate surrounding fresh berries and sweet mascarpone, with chocolate and caramel sauces to drench the whole business in. You’re gonna spend money in Orlando to eat a decent meal, so why not make it really good? Why not make it special? Even dropping this much money, that’s about what it would have cost for a couple wristbands at Fun Spot, or for us to go hit Wonderworks and Magical Midway.
But I still have urges and needs as a theme park nerd to do something in Orlando at night, so we returned to the Fiat and headed a short distance away to play at Hawaiian Rumble. Home to a massive volcano, Hawaiian Rumble plays a very short loop of Hawaiian music which will bore itself into your brain no matter how fast you play your 18 holes. The water features and volcano themselves barely work. Actually, the volcano doesn’t work at all and probably hasn’t for years. The greens are beat to hell and my sense is that they’re just trying to vacuum in money from suckers like us. If there’s a golden lining, it is that a lot of mini golf facilities in Orlando are terrible and at least this one gives you buy one, get half off the second coupons online. Then it ends up being priced like a normal mini golf facility.
Rather than get stuck on I-Drive, we found our way back taking side roads to Universal Boulevard and remarked that there is no good reason to ever be in that backup. This was the conclusion of going to Orlando for us for awhile, and while I love the parks there, there’s so much underlying mediocrity and tourist traps that I sometimes feel dirty being there. The palatial hotels that dot the landscapes end up being fortresses that I am compelled to leave against my better judgement in search of new thrills, or worse than new thrills, merely OK rides to analyze endlessly in asinine fashion. It was time to go, and time to ride some stuff that was more, how should I put this…substantial? Sure. Let’s go with that.
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