Joe woke me up at 10:00 today, once he was done in the bathroom. Shortly thereafter, we trekked to the poolside bar and restaurant for breakfast—I was back to an omelet today, this time a “build-your-own” sausage and cheddar instead of the three-cheese. Yum. Yum. Yum.
It was somewhat of a dreary day here, weather-wise, so we just hung out at the resort.
I devised yesterday’s blog entry, and then wrote out 12 post cards. I forgot to mention that during our “meandering” back to our place last night, we stopped at a little souvenir shop on Duval for the post cards.
I asked to buy stamps at the front desk of our place, and they said, “Just give us your post cards and we’ll take care of them.”
“I have 12 of them,” I said.
“No problem; they’re our post cards, right?” he asked indicating the ones at the front desk there beside him.
I replied, “Actually no, they’re not. I’m really happy to pay for some stamps.”
“No, no. Don’t worry about it. Just give them to us,” he insisted.
Lucky for them I wasn’t sending my normal forty that I usually send.
I ran up to my room and finished the parts of the mailing addresses I didn’t have memorized, and brought them back down. Cool.
In the afternoon, Joe spent some time making travel reservations for his (work) trip to Detroit, which is where he’s heading Monday, after our return to Raleigh on Sunday.
While he did that, I called Disney to arrange travel arrangements with the Disney Magical Express service, which will take us from the Orlando airport to our resort on Disney—Port Orleans Riverside.
We were doing this in the poolside bar and restaurant area, and I ran back to our room to retrieve my slice of the calzone left over from last night, and they heated it up for me. We ordered Bloody Marys, mine to go with my calzone; Joe’s as a liquid lunch. 🙂 They were so good, we got a second round. Think of it as getting primed for Happy Hour in a couple of hours.
Just before leaving this area (to get ready to come back in 30 minutes for Happy Hour), someone came up to the glass dessert case that’s just to the right of me, and picked out a piece of cake.
While sounding uneventful, I had just commented to Joe about how it looked like not one piece of those dessert cakes has gone missing since we’ve arrived here. “These gym bunnies wouldn’t be caught dead eating something like that—especially not in public.” (Meeeooowww!)
The man that did eat one was an older man—as thin as a freaking rail. No, I’m not bitter.
We faithfully attended Happy Hour tonight. Joe had his leftover calzone late in the afternoon, so he wasn’t hungry. I ordered just an appetizer, which were Jalapeños Poppers.
Now, I don’t know how differently this dish can be—personally, I’ve always had them the same way: breaded coating, with the inside consisting of melted cheddar cheese and green jalapeño pepper slices.
These had the breaded outside, but the inside consisted of melted cream cheese and some hot red peppers. I guess jalapeño peppers can be red; perhaps they were habaneros or something, I don’t know. This is what I do know—dipped in the mango chutney that they came with, they were out of this world and I ate the hell out of them.
Tonight was line-dancing and two-stepping night at Cowboy Bill’s. Okay, about Mitch’s assertion that it’s “mostly gay”—not so much. There were three gay men there (and one of them was yours truly), and one couple that was maybe Lesbian. They at least looked like they enjoyed the outdoors.
One of the things about line-dancing when you travel is that you never know if they’re going to do dances the same way you do them in your home town.
I was lured into a false sense of security when I knew the first two dances: Cruising, which ironically, we usually do as our very first dance of the evening and to the same song they did it to, Brooks & Dunn’s Neon Moon, which was followed by a country line-dancing standard, pretty much done the same way everywhere as it’s the name of the song and the dance, The Watermelon Crawl.
Later in the evening, they said, “The Boot Scoot Boogie’s next,” which is another one of the very basic, standard line dances. I ran out there on the dance floor, only horrified to find they did this dance completely differently than we do it. I did a slithery fade off the floor.
In spite of the mostly straight crowd, which grew bigger and straighter as the night progressed (from 7:00 to 10:00, at which time Country Karaoke started), the other two gay guys two-stepped together several times, and I two-stepped with one of them (the one who was dancing the lead), one time, and there were no issues with it. At least there were no cat calls or finger-pointing or picture-snapping that I noticed.
There did seem to be a couple of people looking like they never fathomed two men two-stepping together, and doing it pretty decently, and it slowly dawning on them that when same-sex dancers do partner dances, someone has to learn the “follow” part, which in the “straight world” is done by the woman. Or, of course, if it’s a lesbian couple, one of them has to learn the “lead,” traditionally done by straight men.
Fortunately for me, I’m “ambidancestrous” (my own coined word), which allows me (with attribution to Woody Allen for his quote) to double my chances for a dance on a Saturday night.
There was this very straight, very drunk guy who I spotted at the beginning of the evening and who only became more and more of a basket case as the night proceeded.
At one point, he stumbled over to this busty blond who had been line dancing, and made a move on her. I watched her shake her head no, not smile, and exert every word of body language that said “I’m not interested” without actually speaking.
A little later he stumbled onto the dance floor at the end of a dance and started working this girl who was talking to a much cuter, much more sober, blond guy whom she obviously seemed interested in.
She looked over at the drunk guy a couple of times when he interrupted them, smiled politely, then right back to the blond guy. In the meantime, a friend of the drunk guy came up to the rail at which I was standing and stood close enough to me that our elbows were touching.
“Get it,” he shouted at the drunk boy. “Make a move boy,” he hissed at him.
Then he elbowed me, “That boy is f—ing amazing. I like him. Watch him, he’s going to get that girl,” he said with alcohol pouring off his breath into my face.
“Move in on her, boy,” he abetted out of the side of his mouth again.
And then to me, “I like him, because I see so much of myself in him when I was that age.” (This guy was close to my age, I’d say, and he’d told me that the boy was 20.) “I’m the chief engineer, and he’s on my sailboat. I’ve taken a real liking to him. But I’ve got to train him. You gotta start on ’em young. Train ’em. But this kid’s got it, I’m telling you. Watch him.”
As this man went on and on, I thought more and more about the dog fight scenes in Amores Perros—the pit bull on the dance floor, its trainer talking to me.
I patted the man on the back and said, “I’m going to get a drink; you take care.” And on may way to the bar, I veered to the exit instead, where I took my leave of Cowboy Bill’s. I just don’t know about this straight thing.
Joe had grown tired of Cowboy Bill’s early in the evening, and had left probably 45 minutes after we’d been there. So, I was strolling back to our place by myself, when it occurred to me that I’d never eaten dinner, other than the Jalapeño Poppers appetizers at Happy Hour.
I passed a crêpe place, which was run by an actual French lady, and scanning the choices, my eyes about popped out at this choice: Dulce de Leche, Banana, and Coconut. That had my name all over it, and about three minutes later, it had my mouth all over it.
Before leaving, I said to the woman, “Do you want to hear the one French poem I know, or do you have to listen to thousands of tourists’ only French poems?”
“Go ahead,” she said seeming no more than 50% interested and 50% humoring.
And so I did. Have a listen.
“I’ve actually never heard that poem,” she said, which totally surprised me. I was led to believe, when I had to learn it and recite it in front a French class once, that it was a “French classic.”
C’est la vie, and à demain.