My Honeymoon

On August 24th, 1998, my wife-of-less-than-24-hours and I left Illinois and drove to the Milwaukee airport. We both felt great. The wedding was fabulous, but now the time had come for just the two of us to celebrate. We parked the car and began to remove the luggage we'd brought. I'd hoped to bring along my fan to use as white noise at the hotel, but wasn't able to find any room to put it in. Crap, I probably wasn't gonna be able to sleep well without it.

We headed into the airport and waited for our flight to board. Once on the plane, we relaxed. After about 3 hours, we arrived at our destination: sunny Orlando, Florida. We picked up our bags and took a bus to the world famous Walt Disney World Resort. It was getting close to sunset when we arrived at where we would be staying: The Disney All-Star Sports Resort:



We relaxed the rest of that first night, but looked forward to seeing all the sights over the next 6 days. Just like when I went to Disney World with my stepdad in '93 and '94, I utilized the "The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World". It gave the best times of day to hit certain rides, the best rides to go on, the best places to eat, etc. It was quite helpful.

We went to all 4 Disney parks while there: the newly opened Animal Kingdom, Disney-MGM Studios, Epcot Center, and, of course, the Magic Kingdom. One of my favorite rides at the Kingdom is Splash Mountain. For pretty much all of our days down there, it was quite hot. High 80's, low 90's, maybe even warmer. Thankfully, some of the attractions were indoors. Each morning, we would go to the All-Star Resort's cafeteria for breakfast. Invariably, I would have two glazed donuts and some Powerade to drink.

One of my favorite parks was Disney-MGM. Why? Well, the 30-foot (life-size) Star Wars AT-AT is one of the coolest things I have ever seen:



the "Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular" is bitchin', and the brand-new (at that time) Twilight Zone Tower of Terror was also rockin'.

On about our 3rd evening in Florida, we decided to go to Pleasure Island (no, it's not like that, you dirty devils). They have all sorts of cool things there like comedy and dance clubs as well as a gigantic Tower Records. We took one of the Disney buses there. Partway into the ride, my beloved said that she was feeling sick. Luckily, we arrived at our stop a couple minutes later. She got off the bus and immediately vomited on the ground.

She said she wanted to go back to the room and rest, that I should stay and hang out a bit since I was already at the Island. So she returned to home base while I looked around. Vince Gill's new CD had just come out, so I listened to parts of it at the record store. After a while, I grew bored and returned to the hotel. She wasn't in the room; could she be cheating on me already? I assumed that she had most likely gone to get medical treatment. A short time later, I received a call from my wife. She said that she was at the hospital in Celebration, Florida. It's called Celebration Health.

Cool name, innit? If you're deathly sick, they send you to Invigorating Intensive Care; if you're having an acute issue, they ship you to Ecstatic Emergency Care. The docs said she was very dehydrated, gave her an IV, and released her a short time later. She came back later that night.

After going to all 4 Disney parks, we set out to see Universal Studios (we had to rent a car to do so). That evening, after going to the park, we went to one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Steak & Shake. My stepdad had introduced me to it 4 years prior and I loved it. On the way there, though, we experienced a mighty bad thunderstorm. The lightning strikes a lot closer in Florida than up in Minnesota. My girl got mighty scared (this can easily be explained; she was a lightning rod in a past life).

I wound up sleeping just fine without the fan. On our last night in Florida, we went to a big souvenir store in Downtown Disney. We bought a couple shirts and my love bought herself a Mickey Mouse watch. All in all, we had a great honeymoon.