Vacation Day 4

June 1st, Day 4
*************
Well it's my turn to write the day's blog, and once again it fell on the day we went to the water park and Busch Gardens. I got an Ace wrap (or some off-brand wrap), which made me somewhat more ambulatory despite my still hurting foot. Now, on to the parks. I won't say the same things again, but both parks are just really great scenery-wise. For example, we were in the lazy river today just floating around to rest up between the more exciting rides. The lazy river is surrounded by what I can only call a forest. It's really great, such tall trees and thick enough you can't see too far in. Now, on one of the laps around the river I found a spot where you could actually see pretty far between the trees - about 50 yards. What did I see? A lake. I don't mean a pool or some sort of fake scenery lake made by the park. We were just on the edge of the park, and there happened to be a lake over there, just like the one we rowed in yesterday. So cool. The other cool thing was that when we were on a coaster today, we noticed again the super cool thing that when you get to the very top of the first lift, all you can see in any direction is the tops of trees and the peaks of the other 4 coasters that are that tall. I just can't get past that, it's so cool. I was gonna give a list comparing Busch Gardens to Six Flags, but there's just no comparison so I'm not gonna bother.

I was going to let Sharayah talk about the shows but she hasn't gotten to be the blogger on a park day yet so you'll have to settle for me. We saw today this Irish dance (we also saw it last time) called Celtic Fyre that was pretty cool. If you're not familiar with Celtic dancing, it's basically like that cool riverdance stuff where their legs move independently from their upper bodies. This one also had a big tap component, I don't know if that's always what they do or not. Dude, these guys' feet move fast. It was pretty cool. Sharayah really loves it, and it's definitely cool enough that I let her watch it twice. We also saw something called Pirates 4D, which was just a short, cheesy pirate movie. The 3D was actually pretty good. I say 3D because that's all I can really call it. They said the 4th D was that there's more than just the visuals. For example, they had fans hidden somewhere so that when it was windy on screen, we felt wind in the theater. Admittedly that was cool, but they had that in another show/ride thing we went on last time so nothing new. I also don't think it counts as a 4th D. The only other thing I can think of is that at one point a flock of birds pooped on one of the pirates, and at the same time sprinkles of water hits us from the ceiling. Funny, but I'm sticking with 3D. Oh, the other thing is the show was way too scary for little kids. There were bees and bats and spiders looking like they were coming right at your face, really close, repeatedly during the show (because at this point, movie makers still think the only point of 3D is to have things come right at your face) and because the 3D was really realistic, and these bugs and bats got so "close" to the viewer, all the kids in the room started crying. So it was too scary for little kids and probably too cheesy for everyone else. At least it was short and had nice cool air conditioning, plus the aforementioned wind. It was a nice 20 minute break from walking around in the heat (if you can call it heat compared to what we walk around in at Six Flags in Texas).

Something I forgot to mention about the water park. This is a problem I have with all water parks. What is the deal with the slides where you don't use tubes? They just can't get the segments to match up properly, so it scrapes your back at every single intersection. Because of this, I usually avoid those slides. However, I've noticed that sometimes it's not so bad on the slides that aren't completely enclosed. I don't know why, I think they're not made of the same fiberglass stuff. Anyway they had a new slide that went almost completely vertical, and I wanted to try it out, so I took my chances. It was pretty fun, and I went ridiculously fast. However, it had the same stupid problem. I have a huge scrape on my back now because it clipped me at every single segment. I guess I'm just done with water slides that don't use tubes.

Just a couple more short things to mention that may not warrant their own paragraph:
- The parks have been super empty this week, which has been really great. It makes for short wait times (about 10 minutes max) so we get to ride all the rides we care to in a given day in only a few hours. The other perk is we get to park in the "preferred" parking lot for free (normally only general parking is included with our pass), since it's big enough for all the guests, so they have no need for the general parking lot.
- The wave pool at Water Country has a big timer so you know when it's going to turn on and off. Super convenient, I wish the wave pools I went in as a kid had that, because over the course of my life I've probably spent a combined 5 hours or so sitting in a wave pool just waiting for the waves to start.
- Kids these days don't try to touch the 3D objects that come at them in a movie. That's strange to me. When I was a kid, if something came at you in a 3D movie, hands all over the theater would reach out at it.
- At Busch Garden's river rapids, the way they load you is through this super cool giant wheel that the boats go around so that your boat is still moving as you load (and when you unload after the ride) so that they can load several at a time and keep everything moving. It's hard to explain but maybe we'll get a video of it later.
- They have a ride called the Griffin, which has only 3 rows, but fits 10 per row. The other cool thing is it's a ridiculously smooth ride, and the drops are completely vertical (not almost, they really are straight down), which is really fun.
- Finally, if you're trying to get to Italy, everyone knows you go until you see Scotland and then turn left.

Ok, the last thing. When we were leaving the water park and had just gotten onto the highway, just at the first exit we saw through the trees these mysterious... um, heads. There were these big heads, maybe 10 feet tall (Sharayah says 20, but she's little so who knows, everything looks bigger to her), I think in a circle looking at each other. I think they were made of some kind of rock. We were baffled. We don't know what they are or exactly how big they are. It was kinda spooky and definitely weird. We will try to figure out what the heck these things were next time we go to the water park. It was weird. Weird.