New Year's 2006

On a whim, and at the encouragement of my coworkers, I flew down to Orlando for New Year's. I made the decision less than 12 hours before the flight at 7:55am the next day, and amazingly, my brother and Oliver decided to come with me.


Epcot

All three of us had stayed up past 2am the night before (which is why I had to wear my glasses the whole time), but we were determined to go on this crazy trip... or maybe I was... and I forced two innocent people to take this journey with me.

So, we woke up somewhere between 4am and 5am, hopped on a flight to Orlando, rented a car, and drove to Disney World... where we waited... and waited... and waited some more - to park... to buy tickets... to ride rides... to buy food... to watch fireworks. I guess that's what happens when you want to spend New Year's at one of the most popular attractions on Earth. Going to the Magic Kingdom wasn't even a possibility, so we ended up at Epcot. It turned out to be a better New Year's location that I would have ever imagined it to be.

I'd like to go out on a limb here and say that we still had a great time. Even though after riding that new space flight simulator, we all felt like we had huge hangovers without even having a drop of alcohol. You know you're in trouble when the ride has actual barf bags available.

Epcot is really an ideal location for New Year's. You get to mill around with a couple hundred thousand of your closest friends, drink alcohol from all the different countries (German beer, French champagne, Japanese sake, etc), and there really isn't a bad view of the fireworks since they are centered over the lagoon in the middle.


Fireworks

Plus, Epcot had set up various elaborate stages that effectively were small club environments... complete with DJ's spinning everything from hip hop to salsa to old school to trance. Whatever you're into, there was a stage for you somewhere in between two countries.

I think we were all too tired to get wild and crazy. We just rode whatever we could get on with less than a 2 hour wait and wandered around the countries multiple times. We also marveled at Disney's ability to recruit "authentic" cast members for each country. Every employee seemed to be straight from whatever country they were representing... they even went as far as to have a Scottish girl manning the cash register in the Scottish section of the United Kingdom gift shop.

After wandering around Epcot until 2am, we still had a couple hours to waste before our 6:45am flight back to Houston (yeah, we were hardcore... no hotel room... just fly in - party - fly out baby!). We managed to waste an hour eating some artery clogging breakfast foods at the Waffle House, and then Oliver and I proceeded to wander around a Walgreens for a while (ask Oliver if you want to know what REALLY happened between Nick and Jessica).


Waffle House

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough to do at 4am in the happening city of Orlando, so we ended up crashing at the airport until our morning flight out.

So that's it. I got what I wanted for New Year's - immersion in a big drunk crowd, spectacular fireworks, and that "partied too much" feeling. Hope it was as good for everyone else as it was for me!

Welcome to 2006!