A Night Out
This is going to be a "quick" version of our night out last weekend. If I threw in a lot of details it would be too long to read.
I promised my son that my wife and I would take him and his girlfriend to a concert at Downtown Disney this past Saturday, so we headed out about 4:00 pm. The ride only took a little over an hour (plus an additional 35 minutes when we were headed the wrong direction - but that's a different story).
We dropped them off at the market place in Downtown Disney then I parked the car and my wife and I walked around. We had my digital camera so we took a couple of pictures in front of Planet Hollywood. Donna had an idea to,"Take the picture of ourselves like the kids do!" So, we sat in front of the big blue globe, camera held in front of us, and tried to take a good picture of the two of us. After about four tries we finally got a pretty good one.
Then, we walked around to find a place to eat. Well, we didn't find anything that we wanted, so we got in the car and drove into Buena Vista. We ended up at the Kobe Steak House. Just as we arrived a slew of teenagers headed to the prom showed up in their prom dresses and tuxedos. We had a nice meal, but Donna still can't get over the fact that I actually ordered the "Pupu" platter. She giggled at me when I ordered it. After the waiter left I told her, "That's the first time I ever ordered pupu for dinner." We laughed and had a good time, taking more pictures.
Next, we headed toward Disney World because Donna wanted to see if we could park at a hotel and ride the monorail. Fortunately, it was around 9:00 by then, so we didn't have to pay a parking fee to get in. We pulled into the Polynesian Resort first, only to find a guard shack. Instead of making something up when the guard asked me where I needed to go, I found myself saying, "We just need to turn around." Then, we drove on to the Grand Floridian, but it had a guarded entranceway as well.
Donna told me not to worry about it, to go ahead and leave, but I wasn't ready to give up yet. I had seen a walkway through the trees and started looking for a place to park. I found a parking lot not too far away, but it said "Cast Members Only." Since it was so late the lot was mostly empty, so I parked, taking a chance that we wouldn't get towed.
I have to admit, we had to walk farher than I wanted, but we found the walkway and entered the Polynesian parking lot. A bus was unloading at the hotel, so we caught up to the people and tried to blend in. We felt like big time crooks, doing something illegal. When we made it to the entrance to the hotel we stopped and took some more pictures. By this time we were getting pretty good at taking our picture "like the kids do".
Then, we headed in. We walked around for a bit and finally stopped at the game room. Donna wanted to play pinball so I got a card (no, they don't take coins) and we played some games. She somehow managed to beat me at air hockey, pinball and a shooting game. For someone who used to practically live in a game room, I was quite humiliated and was quite happy to move on.
We thought the monorail had stopped running, but I saw a sign that said the station was upstairs, so we headed up and hopped on. It didn't go very far before it stopped at the Grand Floridian, so we decided to get off and check it out. This time, instead of taking our own picture we asked someone else to take it for us.
It was a much more glamorous hotel than the Polynesian, but there wasn't a lot to do there, so we jumped back on the monorail. We filed in and the people filed in behind us. We made one more stop at another hotel, but decided to stay on. Good thing too because even more people piled in this time. At one point, a large man was standing in front of us holding onto the bar. His rear end wasn't too far from my face and my wife leaned over and whispered, "The things we do for free."
The next stop was actually Disney World so almost everyone got off, leaving us virtually alone in the monorail car. Of course, we took some more pictures.
The next stop was the main parking area and after we pulled away we saw our car. So, to keep from having to walk all the way back from the Polynesian, we rode around again and got off where we only had to walk a little ways to the car.
We had a lot of fun and it only cost us $6.00 (not counting the meal of course). Who says you have to spend a lot of money to have a good time?
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