Yes, I visited Orlando in 2010 but jotting it down in April of 2012. A test to my memory but better do it now before it vanishes completely into thin air...
After struggling through my Masters and not having stepped out of Texas, I was eager to visit some darn place and was just waiting for an invitation from someone to tag along. During these moments, Sharath, my friend from CBIT, asked me to join him for a trip to Orlando during the memorial day weekend. I was excited but all the excitement was shortlived looking at the ticket fares. It was just two days before memorial day and the price of the air fare was more than half the fare to India. It took him some convincing from my friend and finally I chose happiness over $$$.
The plan was laid out and the places to visit were discussed. I must say, Sharath did a good job digging out craigslist to find entry tickets to theme parks for half the price and with zero risk as we had the option of paying the vendor after the entry into the themepark.
Now its time to go!!! Yay!!! But......
Nothing unusual, god always tests my patience, the flight was delayed by close to five hours which means one day out of the 2.5 days trip is already lost :-(
Accepting the fate, I took the flight and reached at about 6:30 PM in Orlando. Sharath along with his room mate drove from Jacksonville in Florida. They picked me up at Orlando and we all drove to the Sea World. The first place, they took me was to a roller coaster known as "Manta". If you speak Telugu then you know what it means :D. The closest I've been to a roller coaster till date was the 'Merry Columbus' ship in India. It sways up and down along its center to emulate riding on huge waves. Anyway, back to 'Manta', this one is in a completely different league. It overturns the chairs into a 90 degree angle such that your face faces the floor and then rides along the loopy, curvy and topsy-turvy path. After successfully finishing the ride, we moved along to a Shamu show. The killer whale is a show stealer. Calling it a day, we moved to a restaurant and had a sumptuous meal and there is the first surprise in store for me.
As I haven't traveled much, its imperative that I am a bad planner. I just learnt that we did not have a place to stay. So, after some inquiries in the restaurant, we were given an address which supposedly would be our place to stay. However, the GPS asks us to take an exit left of the freeway where there isn't one and we tried and tried to fish the address resulting in going through the same path for six times before giving up and then moved to a different place and parked our car and started doing Market Research at 1 AM in the night to find the cheapest and decent place which can accommodate three of us.
We found one and our hero Sharath started driving on the left side of a road with a huge median. Luckily, since it was mid-night we escaped unscathed. He just drove into the nearest driveway when I mentioned it to him coolly that he was driving on the left side of the road.
We slept, got up a little late and then had to go to Walmart and buy few things and then had a quick breakfast. It was already 12 noon and my impatience was rising by the minute as the money paid at the theme park was not being optimized/utilized to the maximum. It started raining and we also realized that we did not have print outs of the entry tickets but have them in the email. After trying and trying, and the nearest fedex being few miles away, we decided to try it with the barcode numbers.
We parked our car and went in with the barcode numbers and they were accepted. Finally, it was 2PM by the time we entered the "Island of Adeventure", a theme park of universal. It was a day of exotic rides. We pretty much tried every single scary ride after buying the gold pass we could skip most of the lines. After having fun, we returned to our parking space thinking about the plans for the night. We then realized the 2nd surprise in store for us.
We forgot the place where we parked our car in the confusion and anxiousness of working the tickets with barcode numbers instead of the print outs. After trying to fish around for more than 30 minutes, we asked a parking attendant and he was kind enough to help us by asking the time when we entered the park and then directing us to the lot where we have parked the car.
We then watched a movie and returned to our base after another sumptuous dinner. Now at about 11 PM, Sharath wanted to go to a Beach which is about 80 miles away from Orlando. His room-mate nicely scrapped the idea and returned to bed. However, the typical me who wants to extract the maximum out of anything nodded but then was skeptical looking at the secondary plans he had. However, looking at his reaction, I agreed and after driving for about 40 miles, we realized it would be stupid to try this out and our plans next day would be ruined on executing this impromptu. Hence, we decided to turn back.
As usual, we woke up late and Sharath always makes sure he would be last to wake up such that he can get the maximum amount of sleep. I knew him from the college days, he was my roomie during our North India tour.
It was about 12:30 PM by the time we entered 'EPCOT', a theme park in Disney. I was really furious by this time as I have a flight to catch at 4:30 PM and the entry ticket is close to $100, which means I just had close to three hours. This invigorated a petty argument between me and Sharath and it was kind of him to ask me what he needs to do now even amidst the argument. Not knowing what to ask, I asked him to reduce the time on photography and try to cover the utmost possible. He agreed and we tried out our best to cover the majority of the theme park but definitely not the entire park.
He then dropped me at the airport and I flew back to Austin with some good memories and an unforgivable argument being the scar of the tour.
The lesson learnt is that we were people of two different attitudes, one carefree and the other always looking for 'bang for the buck'. It takes just a moment of uncontrollable emotion to scar a beautiful and memorable trip.
After struggling through my Masters and not having stepped out of Texas, I was eager to visit some darn place and was just waiting for an invitation from someone to tag along. During these moments, Sharath, my friend from CBIT, asked me to join him for a trip to Orlando during the memorial day weekend. I was excited but all the excitement was shortlived looking at the ticket fares. It was just two days before memorial day and the price of the air fare was more than half the fare to India. It took him some convincing from my friend and finally I chose happiness over $$$.
The plan was laid out and the places to visit were discussed. I must say, Sharath did a good job digging out craigslist to find entry tickets to theme parks for half the price and with zero risk as we had the option of paying the vendor after the entry into the themepark.
Now its time to go!!! Yay!!! But......
Nothing unusual, god always tests my patience, the flight was delayed by close to five hours which means one day out of the 2.5 days trip is already lost :-(
Accepting the fate, I took the flight and reached at about 6:30 PM in Orlando. Sharath along with his room mate drove from Jacksonville in Florida. They picked me up at Orlando and we all drove to the Sea World. The first place, they took me was to a roller coaster known as "Manta". If you speak Telugu then you know what it means :D. The closest I've been to a roller coaster till date was the 'Merry Columbus' ship in India. It sways up and down along its center to emulate riding on huge waves. Anyway, back to 'Manta', this one is in a completely different league. It overturns the chairs into a 90 degree angle such that your face faces the floor and then rides along the loopy, curvy and topsy-turvy path. After successfully finishing the ride, we moved along to a Shamu show. The killer whale is a show stealer. Calling it a day, we moved to a restaurant and had a sumptuous meal and there is the first surprise in store for me.
As I haven't traveled much, its imperative that I am a bad planner. I just learnt that we did not have a place to stay. So, after some inquiries in the restaurant, we were given an address which supposedly would be our place to stay. However, the GPS asks us to take an exit left of the freeway where there isn't one and we tried and tried to fish the address resulting in going through the same path for six times before giving up and then moved to a different place and parked our car and started doing Market Research at 1 AM in the night to find the cheapest and decent place which can accommodate three of us.
We found one and our hero Sharath started driving on the left side of a road with a huge median. Luckily, since it was mid-night we escaped unscathed. He just drove into the nearest driveway when I mentioned it to him coolly that he was driving on the left side of the road.
We slept, got up a little late and then had to go to Walmart and buy few things and then had a quick breakfast. It was already 12 noon and my impatience was rising by the minute as the money paid at the theme park was not being optimized/utilized to the maximum. It started raining and we also realized that we did not have print outs of the entry tickets but have them in the email. After trying and trying, and the nearest fedex being few miles away, we decided to try it with the barcode numbers.
We parked our car and went in with the barcode numbers and they were accepted. Finally, it was 2PM by the time we entered the "Island of Adeventure", a theme park of universal. It was a day of exotic rides. We pretty much tried every single scary ride after buying the gold pass we could skip most of the lines. After having fun, we returned to our parking space thinking about the plans for the night. We then realized the 2nd surprise in store for us.
We forgot the place where we parked our car in the confusion and anxiousness of working the tickets with barcode numbers instead of the print outs. After trying to fish around for more than 30 minutes, we asked a parking attendant and he was kind enough to help us by asking the time when we entered the park and then directing us to the lot where we have parked the car.
We then watched a movie and returned to our base after another sumptuous dinner. Now at about 11 PM, Sharath wanted to go to a Beach which is about 80 miles away from Orlando. His room-mate nicely scrapped the idea and returned to bed. However, the typical me who wants to extract the maximum out of anything nodded but then was skeptical looking at the secondary plans he had. However, looking at his reaction, I agreed and after driving for about 40 miles, we realized it would be stupid to try this out and our plans next day would be ruined on executing this impromptu. Hence, we decided to turn back.
As usual, we woke up late and Sharath always makes sure he would be last to wake up such that he can get the maximum amount of sleep. I knew him from the college days, he was my roomie during our North India tour.
It was about 12:30 PM by the time we entered 'EPCOT', a theme park in Disney. I was really furious by this time as I have a flight to catch at 4:30 PM and the entry ticket is close to $100, which means I just had close to three hours. This invigorated a petty argument between me and Sharath and it was kind of him to ask me what he needs to do now even amidst the argument. Not knowing what to ask, I asked him to reduce the time on photography and try to cover the utmost possible. He agreed and we tried out our best to cover the majority of the theme park but definitely not the entire park.
He then dropped me at the airport and I flew back to Austin with some good memories and an unforgivable argument being the scar of the tour.
The lesson learnt is that we were people of two different attitudes, one carefree and the other always looking for 'bang for the buck'. It takes just a moment of uncontrollable emotion to scar a beautiful and memorable trip.
