Wet and Wild Weekend

So for those of you who are not part of the Florida Group, the title of this post may make things sound more exciting than they were ;). Wet and Wild is indeed the name of a water park in Orlando. It was Beth's birthday on Friday, so she, Daniel, Justin, Phil, and I all packed into Beth's Civic and drove to Orlando for a day of sunburn and water slides. Well, thanks to Beth's 70 spf spray-on sunblock it was far less of the first and far more of the second, but you all know what I'm talking about.

Of all the water parks I've been to, Wet and Wild was pretty decent. We ended up hitting seven rides, not counting the lazy river, because no one can reasonably say that a lazy river is a ride. The thing that made this park stand out for me was the large number of rides where you rode a tube down into some sort of enclosed whirlpool or giant funnel. Normally water park rides are the standard "ride a tube down a chute" type, but adding the giant spiny rooms definitely added fun. The best, or at least craziest, was one called "The Storm", or as Daniel calls it "The Toilet". Or "The Flusher", I don't remember exactly which, but you get the point. As you might be able to tell from this map (storm in the lower right corner), the ride is basically a chute that you slide down by yourself sans tube into a giant whirlpool that is suspended over basically a really deep hot tub. What the map doesn't convey is that the chute is at about a 45 degree angle and is quite long, so by the time you hit the whirlpool area you're going very fast. Even more so if, like some of us, you're on the heavy side. Once you hit the "bowl" things don't get much better because now you're spinning around with mist being sprayed on you, going fast enough you can barely lift your head, and you don't have a clue in hell which direction you're pointed. Just about the time you do figure out which way is up, you're dumped out of the bowl through a hole in the center that's about 4 feet above a deep pool. You have no control over how you come out of the bowl. I tried to get myself feet-first and managed to come out head-first and backwards both times. Don't let my description of it throw you off, though. In spite of injury to Justin, I think that was one of the most fun rides we went on all day.

After the park it was back into the Civic for the trip back to Melbourne to relax, take a shower, grab some food and great beer at Coasters and head back to Dan and Beth's for gift opening. I hope Beth agrees, but I think it was a pretty great day.