Saturday, Jun. 03, 2006
Let me catch my breath
Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked for over 36 hours.
Straight.
Our kids planned a one day trip to Busch G@rdens as a reward for those who had supported the program's fund raising efforts.
The park is 5 hours away, and since it was a one day trip, there and back, we wanted to leave super early. At 6:00 am. But our kids are notorious for being late. So the solution was to have a sleepover the night before at the Museum, so that they would all be in one place, we could wake them up, shove them in the vans, and take off.
But no one ever gets any sleep during a sleep over. The kids are too busy watching movies and playing video games (and sometimes trying to hook up, but thankfully not this time), while the chaperones are too busy trying to make sure that everyone is safe (or no one is sneaking off or trying to hook up).
I got to work at two in the afternoon. I fell asleep at 3:00 am. Woke up at 4:30 and did a quick check on the kids. Half of them were sleeping, and the other half were still up watching "Nightmare on Elm Street" (they'd never seen the first one before; I didn't know that was possible). At 5:00 we woke everyone up, they ate breakfast and got ready. At 6:00 we were in the van and driving to Tampa.
I was impressed with myself because this was the first time I drove non-stop for over 5 hours. And considering how much I hate driving, that's quite a feat.
We finally get to the park and there is one goal in mind: ride every. single. roller coaster. And fuck everything else.
And that's what we did. Well, I rode all but 2.
I have a thing about roller coasters. Ever since the youth fair, double loop incident back in 1992, when I almost fell out during the first loop and I slid under the railing to hide in the foot space during the second one. I didn't look at a roller coaster that put people up-side-down again for the next 10 years.
But I think I'm over that now. Especially after riding the She!kra . Holy shit that thing is insane. It takes you up, up, up. And then the track becomes almost perpendicular to the ground. All of a sudden, you think you're about to go down, but the car dangles over the edge and holds you there for, like 20 seconds. Imagine standing a ruler up on a table and balancing something on the top edge...that's what it fel like. Then, without warning, you start to fall, and all you can see is the ground coming towards your face. It is intense, but kinda cool. The fact that I rode that thing, not once, but twice, I think has cured me of my fear.
We left the park at 7:00pm and drove all the way back to Miami in one shot. No stops. I didn't get to my bed until 3:30 am. I slept until 9 and was back at work at 1:30pm. The life of an underpaid, overworked person.
So I go back out of town on Monday, this time with 8 kids. We'll be staying in dorms at one of Florida's state universities so that they can get a feel for what college is really like. This is one of the few trips that I actually enjoy because it's a tiny group of students and we get to do a lot more cool things like touring nuclear labs and brain institutes and hyperbaric chambers, than we would if we had 20+ kids with us. Plus, the group always gets super close and the kids get real comfortable enough to talk about everything. It should be fun.
summerroll at 10:20 a.m.