Paul's Down-Home Page

For our first real vacation day, we went to Animal Kingdom. It’s the largest park in terms of area, but it has relatively few things to do. We started off with an invigorating shuttle bus ride, then made a beeline straight for the safari ride, which is basically an open jeep you ride on a track through a zoolike area. We saw several elephants, a group of giraffes, some Thompsons’ gazelles, a few oryx, a batch of hippos, and a lioness. Matthew was entranced, especially by the elephants. This was Arlene’s favorite ride. We also went for a walk on the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail, where we looked for (but didn’t find) the legendary white-bellied go-away bird.
Next, we wandered over to the Asia section and the Kali River Rapids. Matt and I sat this ride out, since a)I didn’t want to get wet and b) Matt was too small. The riders were unanimously thrilled with it. After a quick snack, we went on to see It’s Tough to be a Bug. Mom and the older boys loved it; Matt spent the whole time with his face buried in Arlene’s shoulder. David and I rode the Dinosaur thrill ride, which he said was “so turbulent” that it “aggravated his motion sickness”. Indeed. So, here are a few pictures:

So, yesterday we packed our stuff and set out for Disney World. It was snowing.
We got to the airport about an hour earlier than I would have if traveling alone—a wise precaution given that we had all three boys. Checkin was uneventful, but then we hit the first of several travel snags: our inbound aircraft from Cincinnati was delayed due to weather. It arrived about 20 minutes late, and we hustled aboard. Then we had two rounds of de-icing, which the boys liked pretty well (we told Matt that they were spraying the plane with orange juice to make it sticky). Bobby Brown, the flight attendant working our flight for ACA, was bar none the friendliest, most cheerful FA I’ve ever had, anywhere. His boss is getting a glowing letter.
Our flight to CVG was bumpy, and we got there just in time to board our connecting flight to Orlando. Borrrrring, smooth flight. The real fun began when we got to Orlando: our luggage wasn’t there. The DL ramp folks in TOL hadn’t loaded it because our aircraft was overweight. I guess they figured bumping luggage for a party of six was better than bumping three sets of two, or something. Anyway, I didn’t find that out because Thomas and I had gone to the Budget car rental counter. Imagine this scene: a 50-foot-long counter with about 15 computer terminals and 17 people in line… manned by two rental agents. When we finally got to the head of the line, the very helpful agent fixed up our reservation and arranged to have an Explorer for us, so I went back to baggage claim to check on our bags. DL promised to have them delivered to the hotel. (They eventually arrived around 11:45pm, festooned with big red “VIP” tags. Evidently “VIP” in Delta’s lexicon means “leave off airplane”). We trooped out to the parking area and boarded the Explorer, which turned out to have a defective airbag. Oops. Back to the rental island, where they instead gave us the minivan that I should have reserved in the first place. (All this way to take an exotic vacation, and what am I driving? A minivan. Sheesh).
We found the hotel easily, unloaded our carry-ons, and walked across the street to Downtown Disney. I have some good pictures of Matt with Buzz Lightyear and the older boys at the Lego store, but they’ll have to wait until everyone else wakes up and I can find the camera. Everybody remained really cheerful and flexible throughout our travails yesterday, which I appreciated greatly.
This morning, our plan is to hit Animal Kingdom early to ride the safari ride, then see Legend of the Lion King and some of the other live shows (because I’m in a hurry now I’m not linking to any of the Disney pages for these; you can find more links here

So, the mercury posse came back today with a Lumex, a mysterious device whose noise level is only exceeded by its cost. It’s basically a portable mass spectrometer that can be used to measure extremely low levels of mercury. The State of Ohio standard is less than 1 µg/m³. In the breathing zone, our levels were lower than that, but inside the affected cabinet and on the floor beneath, we were around 1.4µg/m³.. So, according to the health department, we’re still contaminated. Time to call State Farm and give them the good news: at minimum, we need to replace the affected cabinet (which of course means we’ll probably have to replace the others, since matching a 12-year-old cabinet set is unlikely) and the contaminated section of floor. Since the floor is 12-year-old sheet linoleum, it’s probably going to have to be replaced too. What the hey, let’s remodel the kitchen.