Friday, March14 2003

Good morning and welcome to Day 7 of the 9th Annual Spring Training Trek 2003!

Oh what a day. What highs. What lows. And that was just the weather. Today was a light day (relatively speaking), revolving around the Braves vs. Yankees game in the afternoon and feeding my continual obsession with all things Cirque du Soleil. First, the game. I have a play by play review of the game, but I am not going to give it to you. It's not that I am too tired (although I am). It is that it is too painful to bring up this memory; it seems like a violation of the Disney magic to speak of something so dismal.

OK. You want to know, how bad was it. It was so bad that I considered leaving early. I didn't, of course, but I considered it. Let me paint a picture for you. The Braves played a split squad game, and although the team fielded many of their A players (Chipper and Andruw, Giles and Furcal, Castilla and Fick), but definitely left their A game at home. By the end of the top half of the first inning, the Yankees (yes, if it wasn't humiliating enough already) had 3 runs on 2 errors. By the end of the second inning, it was 5 runs on 4 errors; only one run as earned. By the third inning, starter Trey Hodges was a memory. In the fourth inning, relief pitcher Joe Dawley gave up 3 runs before the Yankees were finally shut down. But it could have been worse. The Braves gave up 5 walks and the Yankees left 12 men on base.

In the meantime, the Braves could not hit the ball if you painted a diagram.. Out of 29 at bats, the Braves had just 3 hits. Adam LaRoche's seven thinning sacrifice fly scored Bo Porter with the Braves' only run of the afternoon. The only good thing was the weather. Warm but not sunny; it wasn't the heat that put me to sleep, it was the Braves lackluster play. But for every beginning there is an end, and the game did eventually end the misery. So it was a quick trip back to the Port Orleans Riverside resort for a change of clothes and then on to Downtown Disney's West Side for my annual viewing of La Nouba.

If you have never seen a Cirque du Soleil performance, I can not describe it to you other than to say it is a visual and auditory assault on your senses. If you have not seen it, you can not understand it, and when you do see it, you are at a lost for words to explain it. Before the performance, the theater host made a special announcement. Since the show opened in December of 1998, there had been 1,999 performances. This performance was number 2000. The show starts with a traditional parade of performers around the theater before the first act takes the stage. High wire, extreme bicycles, aerial acrobatics and trapeze, balancing and Diablo jugglers, and a tumbling finale that includes performers running up the side of a building. When the show was over, balloons fell from the theater sky as the performers hugged each other in congratulations. Then the stage hands came out and all were applauded by the theater ushers. It was a super special moment that I simply lucked into.

Part of my Dreammaker vacation package included a $25 voucher to Planet Hollywood, so not one to turn down a mostly free meal I journeyed to the center of the earth for dinner. After an appetizer of chicken pot stickers in a garlic cream sauce, I had the LA Lasagna (4 large tubes of pasta stuffed with Ricotta cheese and meat, along with a glass of Geyser Peak white wine. For desert I tested drove the white chocolate bread pudding soaking in a pool of caramelized brandy sauce. Sometimes you just have to open your mouth and shovel it in. Feeling very full, I decided I needed a little adventure (not to mention a good laugh) so I returned to Pleasure Island and the Adventurer's Club. After ringing in New Years, it was time to call it a day. Time is running out for this trip, but there is still a lot to come so stay tuned.

Fuskie