Our wild American roller coaster of a holiday !!

We just got back from 10 days in America. Matty was there for an internet conference but we decided to makeit into a little holiday as well.
I arrived on a red eye flight to Mattys hotel room here on Thursday morning (he was already here because of an internet conference). Niether of us had slept much that night but we were determined to pack in a full day of roller coaster riding and sugar eating anyway, i dropped my bags, jumped on Matty then jumped in the shower and by 9.30 we were on a bus on our way to Universal Studio's 'Treasure Island'. We were insanely delerious for the first half of the day as we were so sleep deprived and overwhelmed by the Orlando heat and humidity but we managed to have an absolute blast dizzying ourselves to the degree we could hardly walk, by going on roller coasters and twisting turning churning rides of every kind back to back for 4 hours! After we sat down and had a rest and the adrenalin had worn off we got a jumbo sized soda full of sugar and caffine and soon we were ready to roll again and we proceeded to get absolutely satuarted to the bone on some on the water rides. Lots of Laughing and screaming all day.

Day two we went to the actual Universal studio's (wich is separate to the treasure island park) and went and saw pretty much every show and ride at the park. It was a day of the most wonderful sensory overload and mind tingling crazy fun. We were like two little kids wandering from atraction to attraction holding hands, giggling and gasping at all the sites. Then at the end of an awesome day we ran back over to the treasure island park (our passes could get us in to both anytime) and rode the biggest rollercoaster over and over till closing time constantly sneaking into the express line that you are supposed to have a special pass for!! he he he, i think i screamed so much my voice box almost fell out!

The next day we spent winding down...lazing by the pool and eating thai food (wich you can't get any of in whistler and we so desparateyly miss) and exploring this magnificent enormous hotel of ours, wich has a movie-set-like man made rainforest in the middle of it complete with 5 waterfalls, lush foliage and rivers full of fish, turtles and crocodiles. It also has a massive pool area, hot tubs, 3 extravagant theme retaurants (one in a life size boat that is afloat on a little man made lake - beach thing), heaps of pubs, a luxury spa and gym, a mini timezone-like games palour (wich matty has been enjoying) and heaps more. last night we went exploring and found this amazing exabition of this modern day treasure hunter who has found pirates treasures and spanish gold aniques at the bottom of the oceans. it was so awesome.

Since we had a nice relaxing day off, the next day we decided to go back to universal studios for the third time! It was so hot so we decided we would wear our swimmers and not much else and then just go drench ourselves on all of the water rides.It was a fun way to cool down i'll tell you now! We ended up spending heaps of our time in this area of the park that was obviously designated for kids. They have this 'wet' area that is a big Dr Seuss playhouse with water spurting out of the ground and buckets of water that automatically fill up and tip out from above and this sort of thing and we proceeded to absolutely drench ourselves from head to toe. Matty and I were running around screaming and playing with all the kids while all the dry adults around us watched on. They looked quite amused. We even managed to get some of them to play!! (if you call playing, us spurting them with powerful water pistols and them giggling at us and running away)

After we were all theme parked out we spent the next 3 days driving the coast of orlando to some beautiful beaches (staying well clear of the category 5 'hurricane rita' just down the coast!) where we relaxed, went nude body surfing and did a reverse bungy 4 times each. Our last stop in orlando was the historic and appanrently very haunted st Augustine, America's oldest continually civilised town. Wewent to a wine tasting in the afternoon and then went on a very eerie ghost tour (made more eerie by the blurry visions the wine was causing) of the town and learnt about the grusome darker side of the towns history. After about the 11th cold chill went down my spine on the tour it started terrentially raining and we got wetter that wet and ran through the flooding streets giggling and retreated to our lush hotel for a hot tub.

Then it was off to Las Vegas for 3 days which was quite a spectacle indeed. I ended up being so tired and jetlagged while I was there that I never quite was myself the whole time. We spent most of the time during the days just wandering around looking at all the crazy themed hotels in vegas. Some where between the giant eiffel tower at the paris hotel and the giant sphinx at the luxor we saw a full grown lion playing ball with a man and went to the worlds highest theme park (yes we went to another one!)
We did also manage to go out to this very exclusive club called 'the pussy cat dolls' which had great music and a 3 hour line up which we talked our way though in 30 mins and danced our little hearts out in an open air balconi over looking the gawdy neon of the vegas strip.

The three days in vegas ended up being 4 because we missed our flight home. We made the best of it though and went to a great ice hockey game where we yelled and screamed and ate giant pizza. the airline was nice enough to give us free tickets to fly home the next day so it all worked out well.