Things You Realize at the Top of a 40-Story Ferris Wheel
by Scott Hardie on March 16, 2022

Matthew Preston | March 17, 2022
Scott (and all). Here are the pictures I had from GooCon: Citrus Ridge in October 2009. Take any/all that you want.

Scott Hardie | March 17, 2022
Awesome! Thank you, Matthew! "breeze4.jpg" is the image I was picturing in my head when I mentioned Bahama Breeze.

I was focused on the negative when I wrote the above commentary, so here are some positives:

* Florida has a lot of pirate-themed entertainment, from dinner shows to day cruises to bars to festivals and more, so I was not at all surprised to find a pirate-themed mini-golf course. What surprised me was how good it was: Immaculate theming with great attention to detail, thorough maintenance and cleaning (we saw barely a leaf out of place), and a thoughtfully designed course. We played the best mini-golf we ever had (three holes-in-one between us), but it was also clear that Kelly's artificial shoulder made this painful and it might be our last time playing this beloved old game together. Kelly won the game by two strokes, so she got to sit on the pirate throne at the end and give off some Notorious B.I.G. vibes.

* I mentioned above having a salad while Kelly got steak, but I didn't mean to imply that I was somehow forced to eat something I didn't want. I ordered the salad because it looked like the tastiest thing on the menu. (I'm not a steak person.) Please withhold judgment for us eating at a chain restaurant while on vacation; we were lost and tired and hungry. :-) Anyway, if you like the Wendy's apple pecan salad as much as I do, this is like a heftier, tastier version of the same thing. Best dinner out I've had in a while.

* The upgrade to a suite at our hotel was a mere $10. Considering how pricey everything else was, it was a pleasure to get lots of extra space to spread out and put our feet up for such a small cost. I wake early, so I spent an hour dressed and reading the news on my phone without disturbing a sleeping Kelly in the next room. This makes me wonder, is it unethical to request a disability accommodation room at future hotels if we don't have some kind of doctor's note? Between Kelly's painful frozen shoulder and my girth, it's difficult for us to stay in a normal cramped room and use a normal tub-based shower and so on. We've wound up in disability rooms at hotels before when they've been the last rooms left for the night, and they're far easier on us.

* We have a few little traditions when we travel, like the aforementioned mini-golf. Another is that whenever we visit a video arcade and earn some tickets, we gift them to a kid in the area, because what toys are we going to buy for ourselves with them anyway? Kelly has to do the handing over, because there's a difference between a strange man walking up to a kid to hand over free prize tickets and a strange woman doing the same, but she found a boy wandering the arcade and made his day with the hundreds of tickets we'd racked up. That burst of joy on a kid's face always makes my day.

Scott Hardie | March 25, 2022
I am sickened at the news that a child died at the same park a week later. Kelly and I walked past that drop ride numerous times, stopping to watch people as they plummeted 43 stories in the ride vehicle, and a firm "nope!" was Kelly's refrain every time. Not that I wanted to ride it either: My girth makes it hard for safety harnesses to close over me, and that appears to be exactly what happened to this poor kid. It won't bring him back, but I hope that the ride operator gets sued into oblivion (video shows the workers skipping a safety check and riders trying to get their attention), and I hope that the state enacts stricter ride-safety regulations to stop reckless companies like this.