Day 3, Part 1: The GKTW Villas, Universal Studios, and Donkey Snot

On Thursday, I finally had a chance to get some pictures of the Give Kids the World village. Here’s our villa, complete with the single most common rental car in central Florida, the white Chevy Impala:

The view down our street. Notice the lack of snow and frosted windshields:

The lake in the center of the village. The Gingerbread House, the ice cream shop, and the theater are in the distance:

Here’s the ice cream shop. The bananas on top are replaced daily by 50 foot tall monkeys (I’m told the bananas are grown in Texas. But then again, they claim pretty much everything that’s oversized):

This is the castle, located next to the ice cream shop. And yes, that’s a Texas mushroom:

On the ceiling inside the castle are stars with the names of each child that stays at the village. Aria’s star is in section 6B, Row 25, Star 21, so if you ever have a chance to visit, the kind folks at GKTW will gladly point it out for you.

Then it was time for me to tuck away my alter ego of Daddy, the Rogue Camera Nerd, so we all could head over to Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. When we got there, we were greeted by Scooby Doo:

We moved on and took in a couple of… rides, I suppose you would call them. First up was Nicktoons Blast, where you get in a huge pod that shakes the east bejeezus out of you while you watch a movie screen sized cartoon. It’s a lot cooler than it sounds, because the whole premise is that you’re flying in one of Jimmy Neutron’s thingamacontraptions, chasing some evil alien that looks like the green Jell-o the lunch lady used to slop out for you in third grade. You’re trying to stop the evil alien from taking over the world, which is kinda like trying to keep the lunch lady’s Jell-o from taking over your intestines.

Next was Shrek’s 4D something or other. Similar concept, only with a big rubbery ogre and a pair of 3D glasses I haven’t seen since I was nine. You’re chasing the ghost of Lord Faarquad through some pretty zippy scenery, trying to rescue Princess Fiona once again. The 3D effects were actually pretty cool, not like those lame-o 3D movies from my childhood where you had to by a 6-gallon Mega Slurpee from the local 7-11 to get the glasses, and then all the sugar from the Slurpee shook your brain hard enough that you actually believed you were seeing things in 3D.

Oh yeah… and the Shrek thing had lots of scenes where someone sneezed or squirted something, and every time that happened, you’d get spritzed with water from some unknown source, so you could really feel what it was like to be splattered with donkey mucous.

I’ve always wondered what the 4th dimension really was – I thought it was “time”, but I see I was mistaken.. Now I know all 4 dimensions: Height, Width, Depth, and Snot.

I leave you with this shot of the family with Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey. The donkey is rather lucky I don’t believe in cruelty to animals – he called me “Moby” while we were getting ready for the picture (Carla pointed out that I’ve been told I look like Moby before, so I couldn’t get too worked up about it):

More Day 3 blogging to come…

Lee