After nine weeks away, I sure am glad to be home. I see that my last entry was about two weeks ago, but when you have eight people in a holiday house with liberal amounts of alcohol and a laughably poor poker game most nights, there isn’t much time left for a cohesive weblog entry. We’re both better off I didn’t post until now. 
Here’s a wrap-up of all the stuff we did but that I never got to say until now…
After spending a few more days at the various theme parks Disney had to offer we got the hang of fast-passes, and hopped from one park to another to maximise our good ride quota. After a while you begin to wish you could fast-pass a lot of things however; restaurants, airports, hotel check-in etc etc. One of the times we fast-passed Soarin’, Epcot’s latest addition, there was a 160 minute wait in the regular line. You find yourself averting your eyes from the hundreds of people waiting in the regular line who glare as you speed past them into a one to two minute wait. Disney without fast-passes would be a very painful experience.
My Aunt, a long-time Tampa resident, recommended St. Augustine as a place not to miss. After much convincing (mainly balance related matters) I organised a Segway tour for five of us, so we left early one morning to make the near two-hour drive to the coastal town. The tour itself surprisingly turned out to be on par with the hard-to-top San Francisco tour I spoke about in the entry, “Segway to Alcatraz, and the Breath of Death” and the town itself was great – real estate sadly reflects it however, so hopes were quickly dashed of a holiday house in the future. 
The Segway tour, St. Augustine Glided Tours (a nice pun), is infact ran by a single guy, Cary Coleman, who owns and operates the tour and is also the dealer for the area. He’d only been going six months but already had a decent fleet and was much more liberal and easy-going about what we could and couldn’t do with his machines.
The main difference that I noticed was going off onto grass and dirt was completely fine, and we discovered that very shortly into the trip as we took a short-cut across a park. In San Francisco a big deal was made about a small amount of dirt that had washed over the side-walk, and we’d all been told to go carefully over it as if it would send the Segway off in some wild direction and throw us off infront of a passing car. Another marked difference is that there’s no helmet or safety vest to get in your way of fun at St. Augustine, mainly because Cary said his insurance guy said it wasn’t necessary (no complaints here). He is a little carefree with the fast keys though, as a couple of us found slyly switching to the fast one half-way through the tour.
When we got back to the Fountain of Youth (a strange themed-park and where the tour originates from) Cary gave everybody a try on the XT, which essentially is a Segway with offroad wheels. After burning around on this for a while he even let the kids have a go, which they are still talking about. Overall, this tour was probably the one thing you really must do if you go to St. Augustine, and Cary was an entertaining and generous guide.
The Kennedy Space Center was next; another enjoyable day and just as fun as any theme park. Seeing life-size rockets and space shuttles were just as good as the 3D IMAX films and tours to the various sites in the national park.
Earlier on in December we crossed back into Florida after staying in Macon, Georgia for the night and found ourselves at one of the dozens of fireworks stores littered around the area. There’s a funny loophole with fireworks in FL; it’s legal to sell them only if you are wholesale and not retail (every store has “Wholesale!” written above the doors) and they’re only legal to purchase if you have a permit to use them, which as a minimum costs $500 for insurance. The interesting loophole however is, the wholesale stores aren’t required to ask you for your permit, so that and the wholesale rule together basically mean that anybody can buy fireworks in the state.
So after buying a measly $100 worth (which in Australia would have set us back $400-500 not considering most of what we bought is banned in Australia) we had a look on satellite photos and saw that we had a nice field behind the holiday house in which it would be perfect to let them off. We got cold feet seeing how close other houses were next door to us, but at about 5pm on New Year’s Eve fireworks started to light up the skies in every direction. Gawd Bless America. Seven hours and one burnt thumb later we’d let off some fireworks that would attract the federal police if used in this country – and everybody involved had a lot of fun doing it.
After the new year rang in we took it easy for a few days, then sadly left the holiday house and continental USA for Hawaii; our one-stop before home. We spent a week on Oahu taking it easy, doing a bit of shopping and sight-seeing, before finally heading to Sydney then back home to the Gold Coast.
As per usual I have a bunch of photos, but I’ll have a tinker at this new WordPress (2.0) to see if I really need to use Gallery any more. But if you haven’t done so already, sign up to the email notification so you won’t have to check if I’ve written anything since your last visit.
