The City is Now Behind You, the Mountains in Front

(A diary entry from years ago...) Gatwick Airport, Saturday morning, way too early. A little too much 'Meze' the night before, not really in top form but off on holidays. There will be ample time to recover, if only we can get there. The flight - a charter - is predictably delayed, reportedly because of the late arrival of the flight. What kind of excuse is that? The plane is late because it is late. We retire to a dim satellite television sampling area where the audience is snoring its way through a CBS exposé on crooked cops. I reckon it's all a conspiracy. Flights are deliberately delayed so that you are forced to spend time in the Gatwick Village shopping tenement where the magazine shops have no real magazines and the chemist can prescribe nothing stronger than a six- pack of flavoured condoms. Trish hovers over a magazine with a tastefully nude Sylvester Stallone on the cover. I warn her if she buys it I'm going back home. She plumps for one with Meg Ryan on - which I can live with. I hide out in the toilet. A discarded tabloid bears the headline 'Virgin girl comes third in Miss Sussex Beauty Contest'. I'm trying to remember if I've ever been to Sussex. Then I realise the paper is an airport rag and that, in this instance, ‘Virgin’ is an airline and not a state of mind. On the plane finally. I claim the window seat leaving Trish to deal with a round yellow old-girl with a blatant beige wig perched at forty-five degrees on her head. She sprays her sandwich all over my wife as she pronounces her dislike of all 'Pakkies'. I ask her what she's got against camels anyway but she suffers from selective deafness. Her partner in geriatric aviation harassment dawns over the back of my seat. She looks like Shirley McLaine devoid of her beliefs. The ladies order large Johnny Walkers to wash down their take-off boiled sweet then tumble into turbulent nasal sleep. But now, suddenly, it's Majorca. We fly in low over what is such a pallid landscape compared to the lush colours with which we are familiar. The hand that painted this watercolour appears to have added too much water to the paints to thin the hues. Of course, actually the opposite is true, it is lack of water which has made this portrait pale. We glimpse windmills. A surprise. Palma Airport is a jamboree of disorientated grannies wandering off by themselves through sliding doors and out into the afternoon sun. The lager louts by the baggage carousel seem strangely subdued. Perhaps they sense that the great palm-rubbing period of anticipation of their holiday is now coming to an end. Now there is nothing left to do for the next fortnight except drink, read yesterdays Daily Mirror, and scrape sand from their tattooed arses. Never mind boys, it'll all still sound great when you tell the lads back home. We make contact with our car hire lady outside the airport caff. Blonde, briefcased and businesslike with a line in patter straight from Len Deighton. "Here is your car...here are your keys, map and papers...We will not speak again unless something goes wrong...." We follow her outside. I nod and smile, hopelessly hyperactive, and instantly forget everything she tells me. Eventually she slinks off to her next dead letter box and we slink back into the shelter of the terminal to take a deep breath and prepare ourselves for the drive. You just know it's a foreign country. The signs are there. I find a 'caballeros' and duck in to 'check my makeup'. While lined up against the wall with all the other guys, the door opens and a cleaning lady rattles in. She nonchalantly dips her mop and splashes it in and around our slightly parted legs. The others don't seem rattled by this. I study the ceiling and try not to add to her work. We get on the road. Trish has carte blanche to remind me as many times as she feels is necessary that we should be driving on the right. She reels off the directions and they present themselves and are passed in the order they are written, which is always nice. The phrase which I took to my heart from the directions in the week before we left was, " the city is now behind you, the mountains in front." Now here we are, thrown centrifugally from the Via Cingtura and off up the Valdemossa road, the city very much behind. "Sit back and relax," I advise Trish, "It's going to be quite a run to Valdemossa." Two minutes later we are there.

Riding the Hulk

Yes I know.

I’ll probably get all kinds of disappointed visitors to the blog, now that I've chosen a title like that, but I really had to start somewhere.

You see, I’ve got all ‘verbally bunged up’ at the prospect of writing this little ‘Wot I Did on My Holidays’ post.

I think it reminds me too much of coming back to school in September and being forced to write an essay about the summers holidays, “… I went to the beach. I swam. I got some sand in the crack of my ass...” You know the sort of thing.

Anyway, we went to Orlando, Florida for two weeks on a holiday which veered heavily towards Theme Parks, Popular Culture and Eating Out. This was an extravagant splash-out for us, as a family, and it was a great success. I was nervous that my guys would find the whole theme park experience a little overwhelming but they lapped it all up and still wanted more.

As for me, I’ve always wanted to see them and now I have and I feel very satisfied and more than a little bit wiser as a result. In my younger days, I drove past the place in Anaheim, turned up my nose at it and carried on down the road to Hearst’s Castle. I've since occasionally wished that I hadn’t.

Operating on a ‘day-on-day-off’ schedule, we saw six different theme parks – one of them three times – and there were loads more I would like to have seen. But the nature of this type of holiday is that people queue up to tell you how you picked all the wrong parks and all the wrong rides and the way they did it was so much better than yours.

So not too much detail for now, I’m too jet-lagged and emotionally fragile to deal with the angst.

I’ll probably return to this holiday, in future posts, to perhaps try to say a little about how I found America to be on this, my second visit (the previous one lasted four months).

I’d also like to try to write a little about Disney in particular. Incidentally, thanks and kudos here to Henson Ray who did a great post garnered from his own vast theme park experience which I caught just as I was setting off for the park. Thanks mate!

But, for today… The Hulk. I’m sure you know that it’s a roller coaster in Universal’s ‘Islands of Adventure’ park.

I had never been on a Coaster of this magnitude and I wanted to do it. I expected to be fearful and sick, disoriented and dizzy. Still I wanted to do it, it was something I hadn’t done and I wanted to see what it felt like. (I seem to think like that, more and more these days.)

Some stats: 'The Hulk' is a 2.4 minute ride which reaches a top speed of 67 miles per hour, completes seven inversions and 2 underground trenches and has a max drop of 105 feet.

It’s green.

None of my family would venture on to it, so I set off myself to do it. A pilgrimage of sorts…

Actually that reminds me – in a water park called ‘Wet n Wild’, on a water slide called ‘The Black Hole’ an attendant handed me an inflatable dinghy and told me to carry it to the top of the stairs behind me. I found this to be a genuine quasi-religious experience. I won’t go into any more detail lest I offend some quasi-religious visitors but I think you know where I’m coming from.

So I went on 'The Hulk'.

I had to wait for one hour and ten minutes in heat that made me desire the ride on account of the possibility of it being breezy. I queued alongside a charming lady from New York via Brazil. She told me I had a cute accent and nice blue eyes (which was appreciated) but her entire family were in front of us so I don’t think she was actually hitting on me too hard.

Unlike most roller coasters, where you get dragged painfully slowly to a pinnacle and then get chucked off, 'The Hulk' points you upwards for the expected plod to the top… and then it shoots you as if out of a gun-barrel at a speed that goes from 0 to 40 in two seconds flat.

You are then thrown straight into an amazing series of twists, pools, dips and radical changes of direction. It is tremendously exciting and wildly exhilarating.

I loved it - every second of it.

But allow me to let you in on a little secret of Roller-coasters. I’m probably breaking some unspoken club rule here but what the hell.

It’s simply this – they are not as scary as they look. If you’re bold enough to get your ass in the seat, you will be rewarded by a pretty unique experience but you won’t be as terrified as you expect to be, not even close.

So now, I’m hooked!

Bring ‘em on!! I went on to ‘do’; ‘The Kracken’ in Sea World and ‘The Mummy Returns’ in Universal, as well as some more. I couldn’t do as many as I wanted to because my family kept demanding my return but, like the fella said in the Terminator 3D show at Universal…

...

…well, you know what the fella said.