So much for planning

Today's planned itinerary involved a return to Sea World in the morning, followed by an early afternoon nap, ending with an evening at Magic Kingdom to pick up the rides we missed last time (and hopefully see the fireworks).

Things started off well, with the projected upper-90s weather not as bad as it could have been, thanks to occasional breezes and some intermittent cloud cover. By lunch time we were still going strong, and Liza wanted to run through the special Halloween trick-or-treat stations.

The weather by then had hit sweltering, so after we visited all the treat stations and ogled all the cool costumed performers, we changed Liza into her swimsuit so she could visit the water play area. She hated it, as you can tell.

She was hilarious. It was like the big dumping buckets had some sort of magnetic pull, and although she didn't want to get her face wet, she couldn't resist standing underneath them, so she found a solution in covering up her eyes every time the bucket got ready to dump. Sort of like an ostrich with its head in the sand, only wetter.

By the time she was done in the water, it was pretty much time to get dinner, so we headed out. Liza was still going strong, but I was just wiped out, and we never did make it back out to hit another park in the evening. The fireworks just started as I was typing this. Oh, well. It's not like Liza even knows what she's missing ... there are definitely pluses to visiting the parks with a clueless kid who hasn't read the tour books.

******

Coolest thing I've seen recently was the jumping stilt performers at Sea World. We saw them a couple of times, and it totally makes me want to invent a time machine so I can go back and learn to be a really kick-ass gymnast so I could do this for a living. Except, you know, for the sweating and the lycra.

Speaking of which, Jason and I were really embarrassed to be laughing at the stagehands at the dolphin show, who were sometimes visible to the audience and therefore had to wear the same wetsuit-style costumes as the performers. I mean, if I were a 250-pound guy, I'd feel bad enough about myself without having 2,000 people laughing at me when I went to my position backstage ... four times a day. But Bubba had a gut on him, and that shiny wetsuit wasn't helping to hide it ... sort of looked like he was smuggling a frozen turkey. Luckily for you, I didn't take a picture.