Disney, Day 5

April 12, 2009

Last Monday was our final day at Disney. We had a wake-up call around 6:30 or so. Buses were loading at 7:30, but we needed everybody out of their rooms--checked out--so the chaperones also had to do room checks to make sure they didn't leave anything behind (we found a variety of things, actually, like shoes and underwear).

Once we got that out of the way we took the bus to the Animal Kingdom, where we all went to Tusker House for a character breakfast. This was by far the best meal of the trip, an awesome buffet (Disney character meals have terrific food and the characters come around and you get pictures taken with them. Donald and I had a fist-bump thing going on.)

Then we were off for the rest of the day. The Group 1 left early, so they only had a couple hours. I was in Group 2, so we were to meet at 4:00 PM, load the buses back to the airport and head for Detroit.

Until then we rode the Everest Ride and the Safari ride and we went to Rafiki's Jungle thing, which was really lame, except I got into a conversation with the animal behaviorist. He's standing there was a variety of animal chow, which was boring, but he's got this huge skullnext to him, sort of behind the scenes. Turned out it was a black rhino skull. He also had a hippo skull and an elephant skull, so I talked to him about them for a while.

The Orlando airport was where we had a girl hauled out without warning for having a snow globe; one guy was wearing pants with rivets and zippers, so he got special attention, and one girl dropped her boarding pass, but luckily my youngest son spotted it on the floor and picked it up, saying, "What's this?" I read it, knew right who she was--one of the chaperone's kids, no less--and saved us all a major trauma. Our DQ had a panic attack, apparently because he wasn't there for the snow globe girl "in her time of need." The band directors got him calmed down.

The trip was fairly uneventful until we got to Detroit Metro Airport. One, it had been in the 80s in Florida, but Detroit had gotten about 10 inches of snow. Second, for some reason our luggage didn't start on the carousel for nearly an hour after we got off the plane. And third, as we were walking to the bus, the 82-year-old woman who had been traveling with us stepped off the curb bad, fell and broke her nose. Most of the chaperones and band directors helped her while I got the kids herded onto the bus, luggage loaded, and kids re-accounted for. It took about an hour to get her taken care of. The tour director and one of the chaperones took her to the hospital to get an x-ray. She's fine. I've talked to her son a couple times since. Embarrassed, but fine.

Then back to the school, where we damn near got stuck in the driveway because the 10 inches of snow hadn't been plowed terribly well, then home.

Overall a good trip.

Cheers,

Mark