elfs | Sunday: Morning In America!

Oh, Vader, to have sunk so low.

Morning. Gummy eyes opened onto a day. On my way to the Marriot next door, I was warned by another chaperone, "The line at the Starbucks is long." I asked if she meant at the Hilton. "Yeah, there." I went to the Marriot, where there was no line at all. Instead, I made small talk with the Windpower Convention going on there, apparently a very big deal.

When I got back with my "Triple venti latte 2% no-foam leave-room with one shot of simple" (come on, I've had six hours of sleep three days in a row, yesterday walked the length and breadth of Disneyland five or six times, and walked the length of the entire park facility twice, while herding a constantly changing gaggle of giggling girls!), it was time. There was an hour of rapid packing, making sure the girls were in motion, making sure the one girl from another group who asked me to carry her phone charger got it back, collecting room keys, accepting a big hug from Storm, and then checking out. We assembled in a meeting hall downstairs, where we would leave our luggage for the day while we went to the California Adventure park.

We walked down to the park, and let them loose inside. I walked around to the ElecTRONica exhibit to look at in the daylight. The graphic design of Tron is really hard to convey to the real world; the stylings look tacky in daylight. I met two other girls who begged me to ride on the Tower of Terror with them. It's a Twilight Zone themed vertical drop, with multimedia effects and blackness to enhance the experience of being in a creepy elevator in a creepy hotel. Sadly, the voice actor doing Rod Serling wasn't that great, and the splice job between his voice and Rod's was obvious.

From Steampunk Hero to Sad Little Fish

The visuals were amazing, though. It is very effective as a ride. There were photos you could buy at the end, but I was nearing my budget limit and didn't. It showed the two girls screaming in surprise or fear, and me with this great, maniacal grin.

Finally got a breakfast croissant, which was the first meh meal I've had in the park. Oh, and a, um, "latte." It's like the scene in Frasier where Niles ends up in a lower class of bar from what he's used to. "What kind of wine do you have? Oh. I'll have the, um, 'red.'" If I asked for a "triple venti latte 2% no-foam leave room with one shot of simple," they'd look at me like I was speaking gibberish.

I mentioned this at the all-hands chaperone meet-up at noon, and one young lady said, "That made my head explode." Guess she's not a coffee drinker.

I also got a call from a parent in Seattle, of one of my charges. After she had had conversation with her daughter the night before, she was very concerned about her daughter's diet. "She forgets to eat on trips like this. Could you sit her down at lunch and make sure she eats something?" So we did. The kid actually seemed grateful, and she and her two peers accompanied me to a lovely bakery and restaurant where I had the salad shrimp louie, and she dutifully ate all her clam chowder. "I like to eat," she insisted. "I just forget!"

Fortified, we went to the "Wild Grizzly Rapids Ride." Round eight-person rafts on a roller coaster-cum-water slide thing, with lots of opportunities to get wet. We got wet.

My last duty was to find a gift for Kouryou-chan. I found some socks she'd love, and a deck of playing cards with Star Wars / Disney character mash-ups, which Omaha will decry as blasphemy, but Kouryou-chan, who is learning to play cribbage, will probably like.

After that, we rallied at the rally point, and it was time to head home.