My ideal vacations involve back-country winter hut trips in the Colorado Rockies, backpacking in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, or
sneaking into Mexico in a row boat from some remote outpost in west Texas. I’m
also comfortable with Carissa’s ideal vacations, which center on sun and sand
and impeccable service. What’s not to like about day drinking in Kauai or Cabo while
sprawled in a lounge chair with a good book, pasty white belly slathered in SPF 50 sun and offered to the
sun gods? Well, paying seven dollars for a beer for one thing. But those are
all charged to the room so it only hurts once, at checkout.
What I have strongly resisted for nearly my entire life is a
family vacation at a major theme park. I am not a person who thrives in crowds
and noise. Rather, when confronted with crowds and noise, I vacillate between
dark, powerful impulses to hurt others and dark, powerful impulses to curl up in the fetal position and sob. I am in fact suspicious of people who enjoy
fighting masses of people just to wait in lengthy lines for brief moments of exhilaration. I’m tempted to call these people freaks and weirdos, except my brother and my
sister-in-law fit into this group and they seem to be reasonably well-adjusted
people (but who really knows what secrets they could be hiding?).
This is the long way of saying that I just spent spring
break week with Carissa and our two children in Orlando visiting
the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at the Universal Studios resort.
Emotionally exhausting, psychologically crippling, yes. But nobody got
(seriously) injured. There was also this: watching my twelve-year-old daughter visibly
buzzing with geeky giddiness while her six-year-old sister repeatedly announces
that this is the Best. Trip. Ever. My children’s joy hardly compensates me
for all my inconveniences, but it is something.
This trip would not have happened but for the
twelve-year-old. She is a hard-core Harry Potter zealot. She has read and
re-read the seven novels more times than is probably healthy, rendering each of them tattered and
torn from heavy use. She has watched every movie more times than their
directors. She knows every minor character, every spell, every story line,
every plot twist, every obscure background factoid. She is outraged that in the
movies, the Patil twins are both in Gryffindor house but in the books, one is in Gryffindor and the other in Ravenclaw. She calls me
a muggle because I don’t give a crap about discrepancies involving the Patil
sisters.
In sum, the kid is a smug pain in the ass about all things
Potter. But it is wonderful to see a kid so passionate about something. For more
than a year we had deferred a promised trip to Orlando to see the replica Hogwarts
School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the village of Hogsmeade (as well as mind-blowing
3-D simulation rides and violent, puke-inducing roller-coasters). It’s the most
popular feature at the Universal Studios theme park resort. So we sucked it up knowing that we will be able to hold our act of generosity over our oldest child for months.
A few things that I discovered on this vacation: Long,
snaking lines of people. Everywhere. Hot and crowded conditions. Everywhere. That people
in crowds tend not to walk at even speeds or in directions that can be
anticipated. They stop suddenly. They don’t appear to notice when their
stroller scraps the hide from your ankle when you stop to avoid knocking over a
guy in a Dale Jr. t-shirt with a neck tattoo who stops (suddenly) to scratch
his ass. That our six-year-old daughter will become a 47-inch machine of rage and
fury every time she encounters a ride that requires her to be 48 inches or
taller to board. That it is not possible to find lunch for less than eighty dollars
for a family of four, unless you grab donuts and coffee from a snack kiosk for
a mere forty dollars. That merchandise shops are more common than extra snug denim
shorts on full-figured women. Did I forget to mention long lines and crowds of
people?
A few more things I discovered. We snobs who are too cool
for theme parks probably need to get over ourselves, at least a little bit. In
spite of myself, I enjoyed the family vacation to Harry Potter land, as well as
most of the other Universal attractions. We did homework in advance and limited our
exposure to long lines by staying in a resort hotel that enabled us to enter
the park an hour ahead of the masses and by paying extra for “express” passes
that turned ninety-minute lines on popular rides into a fifteen minute waits. I’ve
spent more time in line buying groceries. While these crowd-avoidance
strategies didn’t come free, when compared with potential legal and medical
costs associated with me freaking out while stuck in a line from hell, the
added expense was prudent. At first I felt guilty as I sped past hot and
grumpy families stuck in long lines without express passes. Then I learned to
avoid eye contact and keep moving and the guilt went away.
Eventually I became sufficiently secure to ventured out on my
own for a few rides on the spine-and-internal-organ-punishing Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit roller coaster when the rest of my family wanted to continue shooting
aliens on the Men in Black ride. And
while I was ultimately forced to rethink my attitude about theme parks, I must
also confess that my best moments came when we took breaks in the middle
of the day and I was able to day drink seven dollar beers by a pool with my pasty white belly offered up to the sun gods. Until
my kids asked me to put my shirt back on because I was embarrassing them.
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