Yoo Hoo, Disney EchoEars!
Continuing with a series of WDW trip reports from my friend Bruce Metcalf...
Metcalfs @ WDW day 11, OT: Busch Gardens
Breakfast at Boatwrights in Dixie Landings.  I don't know what they do to
make the sausage taste like that, but it's enough to make this Yankee
forgive the South for grits!
Dinner at Artists Point in the Wilderness Lodge.  Fair onion soup,
*marvelous* salmon pate served with the apple butter and regular butter for
the rolls that is better than all four salmon dishes served at Askershus
last night, a rare venison chop (prime rib for the non-Bambi-eating SWMBO),
deep-dish apple pie with cinnamon ice cream, wines from my favorite
Washington State winery (Chateau Ste. Michele), and decor that is half
National Park Service and half Piet Mondrian.  Don't miss this joint
(unless paying $100 for dinner for two makes you break out in a rash, of
course).
        >>> OFF-TOPIC ALERT <<<
Today we went to Busch Gardens, just an hour away.  Perhaps I should say
"Bush-league Gardens".  I don't know, but I remember being a lot happier
with BG when it consisted of three picnic tables, two birdcages, and a free
beer booth out behind the brewery in San Fernando, CA.  It was free then,
too--today it costs (just a little) more than a day at Disney.
FWIW, BG is actually two parks in one.  One is a collection of
state-of-the-art* roller coasters with slight amounts of theming in the
queue areas.  The other is a fairly large and well-managed zoo with
frequent opportunities to ask questions of competent staff.  Why anyone
would consider it a good idea to put these two parks in the same place is
beyond me.  Oh yes, they're also reputed to brew beer somewhere around the
place, but we never found it.
* Note for adults:  state-of-the-art = turns-you-upside-down.
The zoo was good.  Annotated tours by monorail, steam train, aerial
tramway, and (extra fare) jeep past the animal enclosures gave us better
than expected access to the animals on display.  The displays of
chimpanzees, gorillas, warthogs, and meercats were particularly interesting
and informative.
We did take one ride, the smallest of the water flumes.  Disney should copy
their signs for Splash Mountain: "You *will* get wet and you *may* get
soaked!"  Poor engineering and inadequate training put SWMBO and I in the
back of a log with a small woman and child in the front.  We dragged our
tail all through the ride.  As with the coasters, theming stops at the
loading platform and does not resume.
This gets put down in my book as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which is
a nice way of saying, "We don't plan to go back."  YMMV.
BTW, remember the guidebook "Orlando's Other Theme Parks" that gave me bad
data about the Kennedy Space Center?  It told me to turn left when I needed
to turn right.  I never would have gotten there by following his
directions.    I see a pattern developing here.
Bruce Metcalf,
EMuck Rufus,
mailto:bmetcalf@cdc3.cdc.net
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