To Tennessee!- Day 1

On Thursday, July 3rd decided to drive up to Orlando. The drive was pretty uneventful besides the ever classic Stuff You Missed in History Class and Freakonomics episodes. We listened to some pretty interesting topics like Francis Glessner Lee: The Crazy Lady Who Transformed Forensic Science and The Science of Complementary Food. 

When we finally arrived at Orlando it was close to dark, so we decided to stop at the local Hard Knocks, a hyper-realistic lazer tag game. 

       Charlie modeling the Hard Knocks poster. 

There were three types of guns: shotgun, SMG, and pistol, and "realistic environments" including an office area with cubicals and a warehouse with conveniently placed boxes. We had fun ducking behind cover, sliding, and making believe we were in a real life version of Battlefield. We even got battle scars (aka scraped knees) from all the sliding and looked super awesome running from cover to cover and using "military speak" we'd learned from movies. 

And then all the other customers looked at us weirdly and tried to back away from us as slowly as possible while tring to inconspicuously dial 911...

After convincing the cops we were simply tourists, and not axe murderers, we decided to go and eat at Taverna Opa, a Greek restaurant we had visited during our previous escapade to Hard Knocks. We weren't that hungry so we just got a few appetizers to share, and Charlie got a gyro. The food was delicious, the napkins littering the floor and being used as confetti confusing, the music catchy (even if it was in Greek) and the belly dancer... interesting. Apparently, it was someone's birthday so he got to dance with the bellydancer... odd present, but who am I to judge? Anyways, the only intresting thing about that situation was how, with Charlie blatantly avoiding eye contact with the dancer and Dad's survival instinct kicking in, making him suddenly very interested in his food, Mom was the only one left to ogle at the bellydancer and make crude jokes... which is no different from usual, I guess. Oh well.

After the dinner, we continued driving for about an hour until we found a good hotel in Deland (No, I'm serious, the name to the town was Deland... The Land. I guess the mayors just weren't feeling creative that that day. "What should we name our town?" "I don't know, it's just the land we got from Aunt Deb." "By God, Darry, you're a genius, that's what we'll call it... Deland!") and went to sleep.