After 2 high-speed days at Disney, we headed out to the Gulf to our usual beach in Siesta Key. We stayed in a new place that turned out to be really nice. Empty beach, good weather, and nothing to do.
This was our walk to the beach. The end of this is the ocean.
This was one of our pools, right on the inter-coastal. It had a giant hot tub with a giant bird that liked to drink scalding hot chlorinated water.
Florida style on a phallic statue / obelisk.
The best restaurant in Florida is the Waffle House. Everything about it is so good. 20 minute magic, as they say.
We got a deal on some Disney tickets through the World Cup, so we made the rounds there. Instead of having 2 three-day tickets ready for us, they screwed up and had two give us two sets of two-day tickets. As our luck kept rolling on this trip we ended up selling two of them for $200 and almost covered the whole thing. We covered 3 parks in one day just hitting the good stuff and building up some huge toe blisters from all the walking.
Whenever we’re down there we make sure to go to the Polynesian to eat, because it’s non-stop food that keeps coming out on skewers until you can’t eat anymore.
We also hit the Sci-Fi drive in diner where all the tables are cars and they run clups from old sci-fi movies. Awesome restaurant concept.
Animal Kingdom has some ridiculously huge bats. These two were all fired up and mating, as you can see by the state the dude bat is in. Check the before and after pics.
Great makeup job on our neighbor at a Cuban restaurant.
So this was the main reason for the trip – to go watch World Cup that took place at Disney’s World of Sports. It was a great event to watch, with 10 or so fields plus the main grandstands. Even better, the team I was backing (LA Ironmen) opened up a can of whoop ass on the team Tara was backing (Russian Legion) which made it all that much better. Finals were a best of three and a close game at the end of the third round kept things exciting.
At one point there was a one on one standoff between both teams. The Russian was running out of paint, and picking up paintballs off the ground wherever he could find them. He ended up bumping to another bunker that had a pod of paint on the ground and kept things going. Check the 10 or so refs standing around for the 5 minutes or so waiting for it to end. LA made it happen and finished the game.
At one point, this guy sitting by us puts on a dick suit and starts chanting "USA, USA!!!" It didn’t really have much effect on the crowd so he ran down in front of the main stands and ran back and forth. People loved it, security did nothing but just look at him, and eventually he just came back and sat down because there was no-where else to take it. This is something the US Open lost a long time ago – no backpack checks, no problems with booze, and if you want to run around in a dick suit, no problem. Check the video…
The parking was so bad that they ended up sending people 6 miles away to Animal Kingdom and taking a shuttle back to the event. Instead of doing that, we parked a mile or two away at the ABA BMX Nationals and walked. We got to watch some of that too, but it was mostly little kids when we were around.
There were two brothers rocking this haircut and drinking Red Bulls…
This is the lot when we got back to our car, the only one around.
This is the first of some back-dated updates since I was on vacation all last week and not online. We kicked off vacation right by driving to NYC to see Down. Because of chaos at work gearing up for the CES show, I hadn’t slept in about 2 weeks. We got home from the show at 2:00am and got back up at 4:30 to head for the airport to Florida. This was the kick off of an unusually lucky chain of events for our vacation, starting with finding a parking spot about 50 feet from the front door of the venue without even doing a lap around the block. The show itself was fucking unbelievable – one of the best shows around right now. Instead of having an opening band they kicked it off with an hour video of a mix of Down footage and 70’s bands like Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Kiss. They then went into 2 hours of straight rock that felt much like the videos they had just shown. There aren’t many bands like this you can go see right now, and to see Phil Anselmo play in a small general admission venue instead of an arena with Pantera is as good as it gets.
I just did a quick trip to LA to meet with Schematic for a day, staying in Santa Monica. I may need to drop the term "Dirty Jersey," since I’ve never seen Jersey come close to this dirty (although you can’t ignore the needles washing up on the beaches this summer.) At first glance this could pass for Casino Pier, but it’s Santa Monica Pier…
The Birch Army rolled into town on Friday night, with Alex and Jennifer getting out of Nashville for a weekend of Philly bliss. They’ve got the best kids ever to hang out with, and we made the most of their short time here. The trip kicked off with this text message from Jennifer:
We kicked things off with a trip to the Camden aquarium:
Then shot back into Philly to Old City, including the Betsy Ross house. Not quite the same type of tributes to leaders like they do in Nashville, but we do have some history.
After the city we went to a pumpkin picking place that had an unbelievable amount of people there to do fall stuff like take hayrides and walk through hay mazes. There were thousands of people here and complete chaos.
These two were at this same place. It’s a stiff battle for dominance between the massive afro or the skull face paint. Philly style.
I don’t think I’ve been on a swing since about 5th grade. This was just before my loop.
October 31, 2007 7:37 pm | 
