Family Vacation 2005, Day 8....

Last day in Florida.

Grandma, Grandpa, Veronica, Joey, Geralyn, Jeff, Vinny, and Jeff all packed up their cars and headed to breakfast early. Grandma, Grandpa, Veronica, and Joey were driving the whole way back and not taking the train so they needed to get moving fast. There was nothing but rain in the forecast for the drive home. Ellie, Jennie, and myself finished clearing out the house of all the stuff we had left over and packed up our cars and checked out around 10:30. We stopped by Universal on our way to the train station and got lunch at the NBA City Restaurant (per my request of course). It was pretty cool. You walked thru "the tunnel" on your way into the dining area. There were two large screens and a bunch of tv's all over the place. The walls were covered in photos of players and coaches from the league from all different eras. There was an upper dining section which was on a balcony that circled around the lower section. The food was pretty good and reasonably priced (not as high as I would have thought). The theme of the restaurant even continued into the bathrooms. Over the waste baskets there was a rim w/net. The boys had fun slam dunking their used paper towels. After lunch we played a couple of the games they had. Jennie and I faced off in a one-on-one shooting game. One of those games with three balls and you have 30 seconds to make as many shots as you can. They had a scaled down version for little kids which Nicky and TJ played a few times. Since we had to get moving and didn't want to be late for the train, we didn't spend any time looking around the place or stopping in the gift shop. We got to the train station only to find out that the incoming train was late (again) and we couldn't check our car in yet because they were busy unloading the train that had just arrived. So all of us who were in line to get in parked our cars and headed in to the terminal. We finally got our car checked in and boarded the train about 3 hours later than scheduled. The train was less crowded than on the ride down to Florida and in our half of the train car there was a family of 7 and our group of travelers. Plenty of room to spread out. And this time we were smart and brought along a power strip and an extension cord so that all of the boys could watch their dvd players and not have the batteries run out. On the trip down to Florida we found out that the information online was a little misleading and instead of there being an electrical outlet for every seat, there was one outlet for the entire car. The good thing is that if you know about that, then you can request the outlet seat - which we did. Nothing else too exciting happened on the train, and thankfully there was no screaming baby on this train ride.