Dive Quest

So I don't have a lot of pictures for this post, mainly because for a majority of the last 5 hours I was either backstage at Disney (no photo's allowed) or underwater (no underwater camera here).

Dive Quest, was in a word: AWESOME. Seriously to any divers out there that are physically able and headed to Disney World, I think I would rate this as a "must do." I was a little nervous about going, mainly because it has been a while since my last serious dive and I was handicapped (cast and all that).

The Dive instructors were great, if you have dove in the last... 10 years you should have very little problem at all. Heck, not to toot my own horn or anything but I was one of the best divers in the group, holding neutrally bouyant, using a reasonable amount of air (I had 800 lbs of air left when we were done, most everyone else was at 200 or below and one guy had to refill mid dive!) and moving through all zones of the water (most everyone ether just hugged the floor or swam an inch below the surface, I was moving all over the place in there).

I got to see a TON of fish, I was literally nose to nose (maybe a foot seperated us) from an 8 foot shark. I would have played chicken but the dive instructors told us that we weren't allowed to touch the animals so alas, I had to move out of his way... but it was pretty cool/creepy being that close to an animal of that size. I could see his teeth and everything... FUN TIMES! There were also tons of rays (one nice sting ray with about a 3 foot tail), turtles, and other numerous fish that I had no clue what they were.

Despite all that, my favorite part of the dive was actually interacting with the guests on the other side of the glass. I had an absolute blast entertaining the people. There was one little girl, probably 2 or 3 who was on the other side of the glass who seemed a bit scared of all this people floating around. I waved at her and she cautiously waved back, while hiding behind her mom. I then took out my regulator and stuck my tongue out at her, everyone on the other side of the glass started laughing real loud and she even laughed and came up to the glass to stick her tongue out at me. Then I swam over to the Coral Reef (the restaurant under the aquarium) and got to interact with several of the diners. They all seemed to love seeing the divers swim by, and I even performed a few tricks for them. I floated by while standing on my head, so I was upside down the whole time. I played peekaboo with a little boy, I turned myself upside down and then would stick my head down from the top of the glass. All in all a completely wonderful experience that I would do again in a heart beat.

After Dive Quest we had just enough time to run over the the Garden Grill in the land where we had a reservation. Something went wrong and we ended up having to wait about 40 minutes to get seated. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, but since we plan on waking up early tomorrow morning we had to eat real fast once we were seated to make sure we could leave right away so Maddie could get some sleep.

This meal was also Maddie's first "up close" encounter with a Character. Maddie seemed to LOVE the characters, as long as they were about 3 feet away. Once they got any closer and she started getting worried they were going to eat her or something and just got sorta clingy to mom. Then the character would walk away and Maddie would spend the next 5 minutes trying to crawl up the side of the booth so she could get a glimpse of them. Then she would see another character coming, get real excited, wave and smile at them, and then when they got close she shied away. She did this about 5 times, but we have heard it is actually quite common for children of her age to have that exact reaction.

Well we got back at 9 pm (a really late night for us) but the good news is that by 9:15 Maddie was conked out. We will see when she wakes up tomorrow morning, we are planning on doing the Little Ones Early Magic hour, but figure we may end up leaving the park as early as 11:00 tomorrow morning so she can get a nice long nap in.

Hope everyone has a wonderful evening, I am done with this post cause I have some episodes of Lost to get watching :p