Ahoy hoy, one and all! Now I know most of you hard core journal readers out there have been losing a considerable amount of sleep wondering why I haven't updated in over a week. Such a radical departure from my usual prolific output is bound to bring up some red flags among the vast Victor journal reading community. Is he all right? Did something happen to him? Is there something wrong with his computer? Is it my computer that's broken? Am I in some sort of prolonged nightmare where Victor never updates? Well you can disband the midnight prayer vigils and put away the cyanide capsule; I have returned (I you haven't figured it out already).
Extreme sarcasm aside, I have been on the longer side of my usual journal down periods. This time, however, I actually have a reason for now updating in a while which doesn't involve oversleeping and sheer outright laziness, I was on vacation. It was obvious that I was on the straight path to burn out and needed a little rest and relaxation from the grueling grind of my summer unemployment; that and my friends and I had to do our annual road trip to Florida for the third year.
For all the new people and the extremely forgetful, the road trip to Florida has been a fixture of my early Augusts for the past two years. It originally came to be as a way to take advantage of the single extra days left on my friend's family's Disney world ticket passes. The same friend also happened to have an aunt in Florida who abandons her trailer home to stay with relatives up north every summer. Having free park tickets and free relatively close lodging to the park, we and a third ringer made the long trip down in 2002. This would have been a one time event but the following year more old park hopper tickets were found and the trip repeated. We had thought we'd had our last Florida trip when my friend's family decided to go to DisneyWorld in the spring ( you know I suspect they're big on theme parks) and came back again with excess days on their tickets. Thus fate had given us another southern odyssey.
There seems to be a lot of positive associations with three: third times a charm, triple crown, three's a magic number, three times a lady (perhaps that one only applies to Lionel Richie). However, in the world of sequels three most often then not is a pale shell of what the series was originally about. It's like seeing a current episode of the Simpsons, there're still some good moments but compared to the fantastic works of the past it's a bit lacking. You can't say it was completely awful since there is a faint aura of past glory that still lingers amid a tired story. When has the third in a trilogy not failed to disappoint a little bit when compared to its predecessors? Off hand I can only think of Jedi (although I am Empire man), Return of the King (but that's really part of one whole movie), and Rambo III (which is mostly due to the fact that all the Rambos are the same). Nearly all other examples I can come up with seem to be relegated to the cinematic wastelands of Rocky III, Austin Powers: Goldmember and that third Ninja Turtle movie where they're mysteriously in feudal Japan. Thus was the overall theme of this my Godfather III of Florida road trips.
If you want to read a good description of the second road trip you should probably check out the August 22 entry for last year. I was reading it before I wrote this and was surprised at the quality of it and how thorough I was in my description. I was also somewhat disappointed since I don't have much else more to write about since it covered everything. That's the case with excessive sequels, a dearth of fresh ideas (and the opportunity to use the word "dearth"). Since I'd only be repeating myself in a different way (what is this a college essay?) I'll skim over the parts I already covered in Florida entry part deux.
Another common aspect I've noticed among third films is the excessive hype over substance, the sequel merely being tenuously propped up on the success and accomplishments of the shoulders of the former pictures. I just realized I've gone through a good part of this entry without mentioning a single thing that actually happened on the trip. I'm telling ya this entry is boffo! If you loved the first two entries you'll love this! Hype! Hype! Hype!
The three of us started our trip down south with our traditional breakfast at the local dinner. We had overslept the night before and started off at about 11 which was about two hours later than previous trips. I thought about getting the steak and eggs but I remembered my friend's ominous proclamation of eating every meal at Steak N Shake once we were down there. If I was in for a week long diet of nothing but Steak burgers I figured I should have had some variety beforehand.
Fortified with New Jersey dinner cuisine we packed everything up in the Honda Prelude. it's a nice car but a sporty Japanese compact is woefully designed to accommodate an extended road trip of three. When all the packing is done the poor fool is crammed in the normally small back seat area with excess back trunk spillover. Of course I wasn't that much better off since I had to move my seat up to a rigid posture to accommodate my friend in back. I don't know if my posture was improved or worsened by the iron maiden like configuration of my chair but all I can say was by the time we arrived my ass was quite sore.
Of course the most important trait of any road trip car is the CD player and for this year I went all out. I burned a magnum opus of 10 original mix CDs: 7 random, 3 "themed" along with the extensive collection of past CDs I've made in two years of College Bowl road trips. If there was one piece of improvement to myself that I could claim in my two years of college is my mix tape making skills. The intricacies of selecting a solid opener, picking a poignant closer, tailoring to the audience without pandering, peppering track lists with a delicate balance of the obscure and the mainstream, maneuvering the tempo of the mix from power cruching highs to soft piano ballad lows, mastering the dynamics of the intros and outtros, this was what I've learned the most of after nearly $80,000 in college. While I'm still merely a young padawan in the hierarchy of mixology I'd say it's money well spent. My two other friends, consummate amateurs, brought about 10 CDs between them. The carousel system of turns that developed eventually broke down towards the end of the trip when other friends got sick of repeating their supply of mixes for the Nth time and allowed me to let loose. I can proudly claim that there was not a single repeated CD for me , a proud first.
Of course while there was no repeated CD there were some repeated songs, overlaps among the collections. While my drive for variety and my friends' lack of CDs kept overlap down from last year there were still a few super hits of coincidence. "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham was a repeat offender, Billy Squier's "The Stroke" made a surprise second appearance on the top of the repeated list you know what they say about the cream rising to the top), but "Rock and Roll Band" by Boston gets the special award since it got numerously repeated and came up eerily on the radio when we had reached the final leg of our return trip. The band to have appeared the most including repeats and non repeats was The Ramones (catchy two minute punk rock is just the thing to shore up that extra space on a mix CD).
As for our stay in the Sunshine State we set up camp in the trailer, which looked exactly the same as it did when we left it last year. It's as exciting as any house owned by an 80+ year old woman would be. We weren't choosey though, just glad for beds, showers, and central air. We were going to set up the lone receptionless TV to play dvds when we noticed a problem. My friend had forgotten his Xbox remote which was the only was to run DVDs on the system, I had brought my PS2 but not the wires for the PS2, the other friend brought his Gamecube but alas it couldn't play DVDs. So there we were with two potential DVD players and no way of receiving entertainment. Thank goodness for the Walmart.
Since every town in the backwoods south seemed to be dominated by a monolithic Walmart Supercenter we went there for all to buy all our sundries and such. It was also next to the Steak N Shake and as it turned out my psychotic friend had indeed by the end abused his car leverage and forced us to eat a week of Steak N Shakes. At the Walmart though we found a DVD player for less than $40. My friend also bought a copy of Major League for 8 dollars. Putting two and two together you would figure out that we watched Major League on our new DVD player that night. We had planned to rent more movies using my forged Florida Blockbuster card I made last year but we just got too lazy (another symptom of third sequels) and we filled the gaps with video games. Being the frugal and unscrupulous sort of person I was I later returned the player at the end of the week for a full refund. They didn't seem too suspicious of my lack of reason for returning the machine after 4 days. In the end we had merely bought the machine to play Major League once. We lived like kings.
As for the theme parks it was quite uneventful from the first two times we went. So uneventful in fact we decided to only get a one day pass for Universal rather than the two. If you really broke down Universal we probably don't even ride 10 rides. While I'm a fan of riding the "bad rides" like ET and Jaws my jaded friends veterans of many Florida family vacations were not so eager. So we went through a best of compilation: all the roller coasters, Spiderman ride, Back to the Future, T2 in 3D (which still makes absolutely no sense in the Terminator canon), and the new Mummy ride (which is all right a shade above the Spiderman ride in terms of fun to waiting in line ration). It was hot and it rained as we were leaving.
Disney World was Universal squared. Just one of Disney's 4 parks, MGM is more than a rival for Universal. It was another marathon day this year, all the parks sans Animal Kingdom in a blaze of family themed glory! We started out at the Magic Kingdom and made our round among all the rides of last year. The only differences were that I got to go in the front seat on Space Mountain (which makes you feel even more like you'll be decapitated on the way down), we went on the Carousel of Progress (I had no idea this thing was here, a creepy animatronic trip through time hosted by a robot that looks like John Wilkes Booth and sounds like Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka), and It's a Small World was Closed (a crushing disappointment). It was then onward to MGM which we want stickily by the numbers. The only thing different was they fixed the Tower of Terror to be a different kind of fall every time you went on, when we got on it was still set to suck. Oh and the music for the Aerosmith Rockin' Sell Out Coaster this time was Love in an Elevator (I which I think they changed to say roller coaster), last year it was "Sweet Emotion" I believe. With all that Hollywood themed fun out of the way it was the final leg towards everyone's edu-tainment Mecca: Epcot. Since my friend has a twisted fetish for the Spaceship Earth ride (but then again I'm crazy about the Hall of Presidents) we were forced to endure its slow moving horror show of learning. I was surprised though, our "time travel vehicle" didn't breakdown, a first. It was getting late and for the second year in a row he had missed out on Body Wars and Cranium Command. A word to the wise when Epcot says they close at 9, it means most of their rides will close at 7. Fortunately we salvaged the night by catching the last run of everyone's favorite energy conscious lesbian in Ellen's Energy Adventure sponsored by ExxonMoblie (they paid me to mention that). With the storm clouds gathering we made a quick trip international trip around the world pavilion. If you ever want to fake a world tour on someone just take some pictures at each pavilion and buy some souvenirs...just make sure they don't ask to see your passport. With our international consciousness broadened we wearily made our way to the exit. It was hot and it rained as we were leaving.
Having exhausted ourselves on family friendly delights and the sunny/thunderstorm Florida days we pack up on Friday and headed out. Not before delaying our start by three hours trying to do our mysterious benefactor aunt a favor by washing her sheets and towels. While it might have been a bit of a rush job and the bigger sheets weren't that dry they were...for the most part...clean. It was hot and it rained as we were leaving.
The ride back home was even more uneventful than the first. At least the first had some degree of optimism and enthusiasm. We just wanted to get the hell home and put all these alien southern states with their endless stretches of mountainous highway behind us. We drove focused and efficiently, making the quickest of stops for gas and a little bit of food. My friend thought of the grand idea of chain drinking Red Bulls to help him get the hump in Maryland. As for the effects of the drink, he was certainly not sleeping. After his third straight shotgun of Red Bull he was in some sort of energy drink induced daze (perhaps brought on by an excess supply of "taurine"). He said he could feel the burning of the liquid as it was traveling down his throat. Whether it was the potent wing-giving properties of the drink or just a mild allergic reaction it kept him sharp enough to maneuver us back to good old New Jersey as we caught the sun starting to inch over the smoke stacks and chemical plants of North Jersey.
Thus concluded the third and perhaps final Floridian trek. I'm not even sure if I'd want to go if the opportunity for a 4th trip came up. If you thought third movies were bad fourths start going into the Deathwishes and all those extraneous Psychos. Sequels of 4 and over are more reserved for horror franchises, porn series, and Faces of Death complications, neither of which I suspect the road trip of turning into (well I am quite the ladies man, but three chicks at the same time...that'll be a little rough). For a series running on empty at two sequels I sure seemed to have found enough garbage to write about. I'm sure this entry is rife with spelling and grammatical errors but hey give me a break, I'm writing something aren't I? Perhaps there's some life in the franchise, maybe if we get a hot young director change the direction a bit who knows. As for me it looks like I'll be hanging around as this summer fades out and school starts in the fall...my third year. | 
