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Dale, Josiah, and I conducted college visit #6 last weekend. We went to the college of William and Mary. It is the second oldest college in the US. (Harvard is first.) While UVA can claim Thomas Jefferson as their founder, William and Mary claims Thomas Jefferson as a student. Prior to our college search process, Dale and I thought William and Mary was a private school.

William and Mary (W&M) is a beautiful place. It is located adjacent to historic downtown Williamsburg and the old brick buildings and cobblestone walkways transport you to a time long ago. It has beautiful grounds with large old trees and lawns. The buildings are old brick on the outside, but many are nicely renovated on the inside.

The Sadler building on campus housed a pleasant dining hall and a number of fun lounge areas to hang out in. One lounge area had pool, air hockey, and foosball tables along with a skeeball machine. I was quite impressed with the skeeball machine. Here I am walking around a historic campus, and all I can think is “Wow! They got a skeeball machine!”

One lounge area had a stage for student musicians to set up on and entertain the crowd. There was a piano on it, so Dale told Josiah to put out a hat and start playing.

We were shown inside an academic building but not a classroom and a dorm building but not a dorm room. The dorms were not as decrepit as UVA or as nice as CNU. At W&M there are not enough dorm rooms for all the students. After freshman year, getting housing is similar to being on an overbooked flight waiting to see if you get bumped.

Our tour guide told us of the great lengths she went to guarantee a place to live. After freshman year, she signed up for a language immersion dorm in which all the students who live in the dorm communicate in Chinese. (She was of Chinese heritage.) The College has Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish dorms also. For Junior and Senior year, she joined a sorority. All sorority and fraternity housing is on campus. I have always wondered why people join sororities and fraternities. This was the first time someone told me it was to guarantee she’d have a place to live.

The library has massage chairs for all the stressed out double majoring students. Achievement is a primary focus at the college.

Because of this striving for achievement, there are some once in a lifetime opportunities at W&M. One program allows you to study two years at William and Mary and two years at Saint Andrews in Scotland. Each year, twenty students are accepted into the program in the areas of economics, history, international relations, and English. The students who complete the program graduate with a diploma from both universities.

The W&M mascot is now a griffin (mythical creature with the body of a lion: King William’s coat of arms, and the head of an eagle: US national bird) W&M used to have a Native American mascot, but the NCAA ruled that all colleges had to change mascots that may be considered offensive to Native Americans. However,  the students still refer to themselves as the tribe.

Thankfully, during our tour, we heard no stories of secret societies with hooded robes or pitchforks. The most amusing tale concerned the bridge across the pond on campus. It involves many tales not to be believed. “If you walk across it alone, you will remain unmarried for life.” “If you walk across it with friends, you will be friends for life.” “If you kiss someone while standing on the bridge, you will marry that person.”

This, of course, brought up the subject of what counter actions a girl had to take if she decided afterwards not to marry the guy. Our tour guide suggested the girl would have to throw the guy off the bridge. Dale suggested that if a guy was stuck in a “kissing on the bridge destiny” that he wanted to escape, he should jump from the bridge and swim to freedom with the turtles.

Our last day of adventure in Florida was in Orlando. Dale and Zeke spent the day at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Dale took 3 pictures of Zeke with his phone: Zeke eating lunch, Zeke eating dinner, and Zeke watching the Monster’s Inc. laugh floor. We have no photos with a castle or a Disney character to show you. You’ll just have to trust us. Zeke went to Disney.

Being no fan of giant spinning rides, Dale chose Disney with Zeke instead of Universal with Josiah, Abby , and Gabe. He thought it would be the easier go. Zeke had other plans. Dale spent the day crisscrossing the park here, there, and back again, because Zeke had lots of rides to cross off his list.  Zeke went on the “must rides”: peter pan’s flight, dumbo, and buzz lightyear, and even ventured onto the “must not ride”: snow white’s scary adventure.

Snow White’s Scary Adventure was the bane of our trip to Disney when Josiah and Abby were 5 and 6. They cried and cried and cried on that ride and cried and cried and cried after we got off that ride. They did not calm down until after It’s a Small World worked its hypnotic magic.

Zeke, wanting to prove his toughness, endured it without a tear. Dale was thankful Zeke made it through without the It’s a Small World follow up.

Zeke’s favorite show was the Monster’s Inc. laugh floor. He watched the show 3 times.

Dale survived the day and into the night. They left the park only shortly before we left Universal.

Meanwhile, I was with the other kids at Universal Islands of Adventure. The primary reason for our day at Universal was to go see Harry Potter World. As soon as the park opened, we jogged back to Hogsmeade and Hogwarts. Seeing the places described in the books was a lot of fun. Hogwarts castle looked terrific and Hogsmeade was terrifically detailed.

We went on the three rides first. The forbidden journey ride through the castle had amazing special effects from the movies, but it was the spiders that made Abby scream. She was fine with the quidditch match, the whomping willow, the dragon and the dementors, but the spiders were just too much. Admittedly, they were large and ugly, not sure if they were scream worthy.

The dragon challenge was a large looping roller coaster (Josiah’s type of ride) and the flight of the hippogriff was a small roller coaster (My type of ride). I like small roller coasters that threaten to toss you off the edge or drop you out the bottom. I do not like to go upside down and around and around, banging my head against the bars.

After the rides, we went to eat lunch. It was 1030 am. I figured it was the only time we would make it into the restaurant. Gabe had fish and chips, Abby and Josiah had shepherd’s pie, and I had pasties (I couldn’t believe my luck). We all drank frozen butterbeer which tastes like butterscotch and is quite delicious.

In Harry Potter world, all the shops are packed with people. Outside some shops, you have to wait in line just to get in. The shop I liked the best was the Owl Post. The kids bought post cards with owl post stamps and the clerk stamped them from Hogsmeade.

There were marauders map t-shirts, slytherin robes, hufflepuff mittens, ravenclaw bags, and gryffindor scarfs. You could purchase sirius black’s wand, fluffy the three headed dog as a stuffed animal, and a sorting hat. The shops were full of things to make you laugh and things to make you cringe. Even moaning myrtle was in the bathroom.

Once we had seen most of Harry Potter World, we wandered around the other parts of Universal to escape the crowd. I loved Seuss landing, especially the Cat in the Hat ride. Gabe and I ate green eggs and ham for dinner. The most popular t-shirts said Thing 1 and Thing 2. I was tempted to buy Dale a Seuss t-shirt that read “Father of all Things.”

Josiah loved the Marvel section of the park, and I hated it. It was a loud and hot concrete cityscape. We all went on the Spiderman ride, but I sat out the Hulk and the fearfall. By the time we got to the storm force acceleration, even Abby and Gabe sat out. Josiah went on it by himself and spun himself silly.

The animated dinosaurs on the Jurassic Park ride were pretty impressive. Josiah was so fascinated staring at the big t-rex that he failed to notice we were about to plummet down the waterfall. It was the only time I heard him scream for real all day.

In Toontown, we stood in the line for the raft ride for 5 minutes before it experienced technical difficulties and shut down. We walked back out staring at the poor people stuck in the rafts partway through the ride. We got drenched on Dudley Do Right’s Ripsaw Falls which turned out to be quite a fun ride after a 65 minute long claustrophobic wait. I was sad to discover none of my children had ever heard of Dudley Do Right and Snidely Whiplash. Oh the laughs they’ve missed.

Toontown also brought us the only good show of the day: A skateboard, bmx, motorcycle stunt show. Watching two motorcycles race around the interior of the metal globe is such a fascinating sight to me.

Our biggest waste of time was the sinbad stunt show. It was dreadful.

As time ran out, I told Josiah, Abby, and Gabe they could run ahead of me and ride Harry Potter’s forbidden journey using the single rider line one last time. Meanwhile I purchased some chocolate frogs from Honeydukes and Bertie Botts every flavored beans: one tasted like earwax, another tasted like soap. Gabe ate them both. I also bought 2 more butterbeers to go. One of the longest lines in the park is for the butterbeer stand in the middle of the street. Everyone stands in it and waits. Meanwhile, you can walk into the three broomsticks or the Hog’s Head pub and purchase it much quicker. I didn’t tell anyone this as I appreciated my short line.

Then, I sat outside the pub listening to the shrieking mandrakes in the shop window next door and waited for the kids to return. We needed to get back to the front of the park in order to catch the bus back to the hotel. Abby arrived and Gabe followed soon after. Then we waited and waited some more. The likelihood of us making the bus grew dimmer and dimmer as there was no sign of Josiah. I immediately began to fret. “Did he forget where we were supposed to meet? Did he lose his glasses on the ride? Where could he be?”

Eventually he ran up to us, much too late for us to catch the bus. “What happened?” I asked.

“When we finished the ride. No one else was there to get on. She asked if we wanted to go again, so I said yes. You can’t pass up a free ride.” he said.

My sister in law, Karin, recommended Siesta Key as a good family place to stay on the Gulf of Mexico. With Legoland and Disney/Universal filling two days, we were limited to three days at the beach. Although most places rent weekly, we were blessed to find one condo with a three day gap in their reservations. It was listed online under Siesta Key and for two days of quiet relaxing beach time, I thought I was in Siesta Key.

Then my brother, Mike, called to suggest we get ice cream at Big Olafs. Abby pestered her Daddy until he finally agreed to leave the beach. We plugged Big Olaf’s into the GPS and discovered it was a few miles north. As we drove, we went from nowhere to somewhere. Siesta Key was hopping. There were crowds of people walking, biking, running, and driving about in all sorts of contraptions. There was loud music, restaurants and stores, people to see and places to go. There were condo highrises, grand homes, and cabanas on the beach.

I walked into a shop to buy one roll of toilet paper, and the guy in front of me groaned at the sight of it. He had just finished paying for his purchase.  “Toilet paper, that’s what I was supposed to buy,” he lamented.

We stopped at a mini doughnut stand and bought Zeke some doughnuts. He loves doughnuts. Then we got in the long line at Big Olafs. It was a bit of a wait, but Mike was right, the ice cream was excellent. We walked back to the car with cones in hand. Abby looked around with joy. She had found her spot.

Unfortunately, she has Dale and me for parents. Parents quite content to stay in a small place on Turtle Beach looking for shells and watching the locals fish, where nothing exciting happens.

The next morning, we checked out of the condo and drove north, because Dale remembered finding sand dollars on a beach east of Tampa. He couldn’t remember where. I had read that Clearwater had sand as beautiful as Siesta Key so we tried there. When we arrived, we discovered all the people who weren’t at Siesta Key were in Clearwater. We ate shrimp at Crabby Bills and I asked the hostess where people go to find sand dollars. “Drive up to Dunedin. Take the causeway out,” she said.

As we drove, leaving all the people and excitement behind, the landscape started to look familiar to Dale. We ended up at Honeymoon Island State Park and walked the beach for several miles in search of sand dollars. We didn’t find any whole sand dollars, but it was a beautiful day with only a few people about and not a highrise in sight.

“With only a morning free before you flew back from your Tampa business trip two years ago, how did you find a place so remote?” I asked.

“I really do like people,” he said unconvincingly.

After working a year in his new job, Dale needed a holiday. He had one week of vacation saved up, and he wanted us to go to Florida. We love the beach. We miss the beach. We were off to the beach. Hurray!

But before the beach, he wanted us to go to Legoland. Gabe is lego mad crazy, and Dale knew Gabe would love Legoland. What surprised me was that we all loved Legoland, even Abby who nearly passed out standing in the line for the  Coastersaurus.

The lego creations throughout the park are astounding. I was amazed at the things they had built: An SUV, a giraffe, a city scape, elephants, a plumber carrying a toilet, a Florida grandma with curlers in her hair, a rocket, R2D2, foxes, monuments, a squid…

I could have taken photo after photo after photo and not captured it all. The attention to detail was amazing. The NY street scene complete with a mime war was hilarious. There was so much to look at and the surroundings were lovely. They plopped Legoland down into the old Cypress Gardens. The giant trees provided ample shade and there were many places to sit and eat granny apple fries.

The granny apple fries were the food of the day. They were delicious. To make them: Peel and core a granny smith apple, slice into fries, coat in cornstarch, deep fry for 3 minutes on 375, drain on paper towels, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and serve with whipped cream for dipping. I had read an online review where the woman recommended the apple fries and wrote “trust me on this.” I’m glad we trusted her.

Gabe and Josiah did Lego mindstorms where they maneuvered their lego robots. Gabe and Zeke went through lego driving school and drove lego cars. We all hopped on the giant lego fire trucks and raced each other to see who could put out the fire first.

Gabe, Zeke, and Abby had great fun trading mini figures. All the park employees had mini figures on their name tags and they would trade it for a mini figure of your own. Gabe had great fun with this and we were on constant watch for figures to trade for. Abby thought she had bested Gabe when she traded for the mad scientist minifig, but on the other side of the park, he had managed to trade for one as well. With the park closing, Gabe made one last mad dash around in the hopes of a final trade. Much to his delight, a park employee pulled out a clown minifig he had stowed away in a drawer. Gabe was thrilled. The minifig came with a tiny pie to smash in an unsuspecting face.

The Vinatieri family gave us a package for our trip to Florida. The instructions were to open it on the 9th hour of our trip.

So here are some photos of Gerund’s Spring Break with the Manry family: