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Day 9

I think I'm pretty good at blogging, and pretty good at taking pictures.  What I'm not good at is sitting down and uploading my pictures and publishing my blog.  Not sure why you'd care about that, since I sure don't.

I haven't really gone into the amount of money Jeff has been spending on this trip.  It boggles the mind, really.  If I had to guess, he's spent on these two weeks approximately what I make in six months.  Maybe that's an exaggeration, so let's say it's what I make in 150 days.  For example, we went to the Chicago Steakhouse to eat dinner yesterday, and Jeff said, "This is our only meal today, so order whatever you want."  I looked for something cheap, but the cheapest meal on the menu cost abount what I typically spend on food in a week.  And Jeff paid for all three of us.*  Does food taste better when paid for by someone else?  Maybe, but I always feel guilty about it, and each day, something new (like him buying me a five dollar Coke Zero) makes me feel guilty.

Sunrise outside the window of our hotel room.

This was main Disneyland Paris day for us, where he told me to go on as many rides as I can, because tomorrow we'll be back in Paris.  Jeff's favorite ride at Disneyland is the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, which I believe no longer exists anywhere else (I had gone on it once, back in 2002 or so, when the California Adventure still had it).  It's one of those Take You Up In The Air And Then Drop You rides, which scare the ever-lovin' crap out of me, but Jeff was determined to go, and I was just as determined not to be a spoilsport.

The line was very twisty, but since it was first thing in the morning, we didn't have to wait long.  Rod Serling's speech was all in French, but I vaguely remembered the English version two decades back (which feels more like four years, by the way).  We got on the elevator, and . . . basically, my body thought that it was dying the whole three or four minutes it was in it.  My brain knew it was supposed to be a fun ride, but the rest of my body didn't buy the pitch.  Jeff loves it, but I preferred waking up in London with a sore throat a couple of days before.

The second ride we lined up for was the Avengers one, a roller coaster they put in just recently (actually, it used to be an Aerosmith ride, but they refitted).  And it was fun, a roller coaster in the dark with projected videos of Iron Man and Captain Marvel in it, but I'd have liked it better with only a half hour wait.  

After that, it was my idea to get in the line for the Spider-man ride, which is only a couple of months old, because I mis-read the sign out front as only having a forty minute wait time** (it turned out to be a forty minute wait for single riders, but an interminable one for everybody else).  There was a maze, as usual, that hardly ever moved, and a couple of posters to look at (exactly half in French and half in English), but nothing else.  So, not to bury the lead, but we spent the whole morning and into the afternoon in line for it.  I've heard people talk about a two or three hour line at Disneyland before, but never experienced it before today.  They played Michael Giacchino's Spidey theme from speakers all around us, but after an hour or two, we were in Hell.  I used to call Giacchino the John Williams of Tomorrow, but now I frankly have to assassinate him.  Sorry, Mike.

The Spidey ride, when we finally rode on it in early 2024, wasn't a ride at all.  It was a video game on a moving vehicle.  But since I'd not been on one of those before, I thought it was rad.  There was a man in the group before us who was pulled away from his family and forced to sit with us (there wasn't room in the previous car), and as protest, he sat there scowling the whole ride.  After each level/room, the screen would flash our individual scores, and then our team score, and he consistently got zero, even at the end, because he was unwilling to play the game.  Can you imagine waiting nearly three hours to go on a ride, and then deliberately ignoring it when you finally got on it?

After that, all the other lines were bearable, if only by comparison.  We went on Pirates of the Carribean, which was very different from how I remembered it in Anaheim (the layout is different, beyond how they recently Depped it up), Star Tours (our planet was Naboo, and I gladly would've gone a few more times to see which other worlds we got, but was outvoted), Phantom Manor again (the ride shut down on us again--like it did last night--but this time, it was right in front of one of the big setpieces, and we were able to take more of it in), Buzz Lightyear, Indiana Jones during the day (not so impressive, really), and Hyperspace Mountain, which was just Space Mountain retrofitted to be Star Warsy (actually, it was worse than that, as this used to be a Jules Verne-inspired retro sci-fi flight to the moon ride before it got homogenized).  There was a malfunction on Hyperspace Mountain and it slammed to a stop right before the end, bashing my head pretty good in the process.  I didn't hear anybody else complaining, but overall, I noticed the rides were a bit more potentially-deadly here than back home (heck, everything was, from giant drop-offs beside trains to boats where you were expected to simply jump across to dry land).  The only ride (except for the kiddie ones) we didn't manage to get on was Big Thunder Mountain, but the line was always too long every time we made our way over there.

Can't really blame 'em, though.

I had heard about the Droid Factory they have at Disney parks outside Star Tours, and put together my own astromech droid.  Despite them not having the matching color for the legs (something that should've been a deal-breaker, now that I think about it), I bought one each day, despite the fact that they let kids and adults build them for free, and then an employee comes by and separates all the pieces again if you're not going to buy it.  Huh.

We ate at yet another overpriced restaurant, this one inside Disneyland, and I discovered that they had renamed their menu items in honor of Halloween.  One of the items they were selling was called Evil Burger (Burger Des Tenebres).  This pleased me to no end, and I even took two pictures of the sign (neither one coming out well) to remember it by.

Y'know, any hamburger can be an evil burger with enough jalapeños on it.

I wish I were better at this blogging, but man, it's hard to remember every little funny or interesting, moving or surprising thing from each day.  A clue to the difficulty of this might be that we're weeks later in real time and I'm still working on it.  Sigh.

Toward the end of the night, a group of teens was cutting in line ahead of us, and Jeff shouted, "Oy!  Get to the back of the line!"  They turned to tell him off, but saw he was walking with a cane, and decided that if he could walk all the way to the ride's entrance, then they could too (or they worried he would whack them with it . . . I know I would).

We stayed as late as we could stand it, but it's tiring to stand in lines, ride rides, and walk around the second-largest Disney park in the world.  Jeff and Emily are on different time schedules than I am, so nine o'clock is pretty late to them.  We'd have an hour or so the next morning to buy whatever we still hadn't gotten yet before it was time to check out of the hotel, hit the bus to the train station, and go back to Paris, before going back to Germany.

Emily took this picture while we were in line for Phantom Manor, and it's really rad.

*He told me today, "I keep forgetting that when I retire in a year and a half, you're not also retiring."  In fact, I'll still have to work until the day I die, or shortly thereafter.

**English I can read and understand, French I can read but not understand the language, but German I can neither read nor make sense of.  I wonder how useful I will be when we go to Italy, since I've been pretty useless throughout this trip.  God, did I talk about this earlier?  I have been so dependant on Jeff and Emily to get me around and communicate for me, that I have pretty much reverted to childhood, just following them and hoping they will book train rides and make decisions and take me by the hand and explain anything I might need to know on my own.  More on that later, if I remember.