Life: Idiotropic

Phantasialand is a big amusement park that Tiara's been wanting to go to since, well, the first day she heard about it probably about 2 years ago if not earlier. So, today (finally), I got made good on an old promise and we spent the day there together.

It was kind of a birthday thing. And she wanted a friend along but I wasn't going to pay for a gazillion friends to go and if she invited one, then others would be upset/mad/jealous that they weren't invited (8th grade girls are sooo challenging), so she was smart and invited Tyler, a friend of hers and the son of one of my close friends. He's nice. He's not obnoxious like most boys his age. So they could just have fun without any of the teen weirdness.

Phantasialand was fun. We managed to get 11 (Tiara did 12) rides in 9 hours with a lunch break and some getting lost included, so that's not bad.

I had fun and felt kinda like part of the gang instead of the boring adult chaperon, after all, I was the one who wanted to go on the "scary" black Mamba when both Tiara and Tyler were too scared to go.

But, as young as I'd like to be, I learned that

1) A full day of amusement park fun is quite exhausting. At one point I really just wanted to sit and relax a bit - just long enough for them to stand in one line and go on one ride... but did they let me, no. I ended up standing in line watching Tiara do the flipping stomach rocking ride that both Tyler and I agreed was nauseating enough to watch let alone be strapped into. Tiara is now better known as Queen of the Iron Stomachs (my former amusement park title, sadly taken away when I reached the ripe ol' age of 30 and lost the stomach for Disneyland tea cup style rides).

2) Standing in line is a lot more fun when you're 13 and even more fun when you're 13 and standing in a large group of your peers. Standing in line with two shy teens almost a third my age trying to make conversation is, well, kinda boring. Not that they were boring. Tyler chose to keep conversation from lagging by counting Tiara's "blond moments" (she got to 21 by the way - and he got to 7) and bugging me about the French. I like everything French/France and he doesn't. But what does a 13 year old know?

3) Making out in line is frankly, disgusting. Yuck. Gross. Eeeew. In one particular line we were behind one disgusting couple who needed a small hotel room and may be some mouthwash. Happily, the line split and we went a different way just to get stuck behind an even more disgusting couple. Eeew, ick, gross. And it's really hard to avoid when you're crammed together in really tight lines without personal space.

4) Amusement park food almost always looks better than it tastes. We unanimously voted for Chinese food (what were we thinking? Amusement park Chinese in Germany!) thinking that we would have some choice in the matter. Tiara wanted rice. I think we had all though that rice with some meat/veggie thing would be good. Nope. Chinese meant really greasy egg rolls or noodles. We got noodles. Filling, but flavorless.

But, we had a great time and we got to do a lot of spinny upside down roller coaster rides that made Tiara and I scream and Tyler, who is a boy and therefore cannot scream lest his boy-card be taken away, moan. After 9 hours of that we were all (yes, even the kids) ready to go home.