Data Dump

It's not that we haven't been having a blast down here in good old Cape Canaveral again.  It's just that the days have blended and mixed themselves up into one indistinguishable lump of downtime, and all of a sudden it's the end of the week and I have to write something.

Let's see...we got here Holy Thursday around 6 and opened up the condo, whose air conditioner wasn't working.  But then that got fixed on Friday, which was spent mostly lying around by the pool and drinking beer, and then a quick trip to the beach.  Or was that what we did on Saturday?   Anyway, one of those days, Erica's cousin Lisa and her family drove up from West Palm Beach.  We colored Easter eggs with the kids, and I wrestled a bunch with their lumbering 9 year-old, Jonathan, whose girth is apparent even in this picture with Uncle Tom.

On Easter Sunday, we just  barely made it to church as it was starting, so we had to sit in the very back with the other stragglers, and the unfortunate SRO crowd.  You could tell the ushers were having a bad day; they would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies anyway, but with so many unchurched about--not knowing when to genuflect, for example, and so people kept bowling over others at the pew entrances--they were finding it difficult to disguise their frustration (I don't really blame them, btw).  The fact that they were to-a-man wearing Florida retiree, 80s-style flephorvescent suit coats of lurid burgundies and teals provided a funny little contrast.  The sermon was quintessentially Easterish: it gently stressed the importance of coming to Church without making everybody feel like they were being bludgeoned with the guilt-crozier.

On Monday, Erica and I left James with his grandparents, rented a car, and headed to Universal Studios in Orlando for two days.  It was kind of weird not having James in tow, but we enjoyed getting to spend time with just the two of us and also walk around someplace without carrying bags and cups and toys and snacks, and wheeling a stroller with other bags stowed in it.   While Universal does have some good coasters, its focus is really on developing hybrid real motion/3D rides based on their movies.  We each sprang for the Express Passes for a day, which cost us a total of $200 on top of the $300 we spend for two days worth of entrance fees, but it was kind of worth it.  This week is second only to last week in park busyness all year long, and whereas most of the wait times for the rides exceeded an hour (and some were 110 minutes!), as very important Express Pass holders, our average wait time was about 10 minutes.  There is a deeper, more insidious, logic at play, however, to these Express Passes, which the Harvard social philosopher Michael Sandel revealed in this latest book, What Money Can't Buy.  Namely, they represent just one more expression of how the wealth gap in this country works to prevent the havers from having to participate with the dirty masses in civic events (in the case, waiting in line for rides) that used to belong to the common patrimony of all people. It would have been anathema in a previous age for something like an Express Pass to be offered on top on an admission fee, but now it's a de rigueur concession to the demands of Capital.  All of that didn't stop us from buying them of course, because I temporarily pretended not to remember that I knew Sandel's thesis just long enough to purchase them online, although I do admit to feeling a bit guilty breezing past the tired, huddled masses of humanity pent up and sweating in their endless switchbacking be-guardrailed rows.

Our main interest was of course on the Harry Potter World side of things, and we reveled in the painstaking detail of Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley.  The reproduction (or, I should say production, since this is in fact fictional stuff we're dealing with that never existed in the first place) closely followed the movie version of these places, which makes sense considering that even ardent fans of the books have had their imaginations colored and expectations tempered by the ways things looked in the movies, and also of course because Universal made the movies and already had a lot of that stuff.  Both of the main rides, Harry Potter and The Forbidden Journey and Harry Potter and the Escape from Gingotts were excellent, although the former kind of lumped in a bunch of mostly unrelated subplots from the books into the plot of the ride.  Most of the rides at Universal do have "plots" of sorts to them, which usually involve some crisis that's about to go down and that you're the only one that can save them/Western civilization/the Earth/ET's home planet (a particularly ludicrous premise), etc.  And the way you resolve the plot (i.e., save the day) is to ride the ride.  As for myself, I mostly just like them for the falling sensations you get, but I admit that I did get a feeling of pride from having stymied Voldemort on that last one.  To the pictures!

Diagon Alley, cum dragon

Weasley's Wizzarding Wheezes

Hogsmeade

The Hogs Head Pub. I had the Witches Brew (a surprisingly sophisticated sweet stout), Erica had a cider w/ a shot of "Firewhiskey" in it (basically a cinnamon bourbon). 

Hogwarts Castle

We came back on Tuesday night to a delighted James, who was pronounced an "absolute angel" by Nana and Papa.  That night, Tom and Erica and I went to an Irish bar in town to watch Notre Dame play UCONN for the national title in womens' basketball, and we lost.  And yesterday, Erica and I took the boy to the beach, while Tom and Cher spent the afternoon on the gambling boat, and Tom won $180!

A kindly man in an Alabama hat took this, and I said nothing about his school's use and abuse of its student-athletes

Later that evening, we had (some truly awful) drinks and apps at the bar on the Cocoa Beach Pier before strolling along the surf to one of our local favorites, the tacky and unimaginatively-named Sandbar Grill for fish tacos.

Strollering on the beach. The Cocoa Beach Pier is in the background.

We leave this afternoon for Philadelphia, where we'll spend a few days with Erica's Aunt Mary Kay before heading home on Saturday.  More to come.