The travel began with myself, pastor Chris, Tara, and 5 youth.The extravaganza was facade under the name "Youth Activity." Don't let the name fool you. It was not all rainbows and kittens. We all hoped in two cars and headed about an hour away to "Old Town" in Kissimmee. (Which is apparently pronounced K-sem-me instead of the way it's spelled which is Kiss-a -me. But, whatever.) It was my first time at this interesting place. As we pulled in I looked with awe at the rides, and shops.
We all gathered together before setting of so that Chris could explain what we were suppose to do. It all seemed easy enough. No one would have suspected what the night had in store for us. We were handed a piece of paper on which, Chris and Tara had made a collection of crazy things the youth had to do as we videoed them. So, the began. It was really funny! Then we stopped in front of a man who was speaking into a headpiece, convincing the crowd to gather closer and watch. Behind him sat a mechanical bull. Ya, you know what's going to happen next. It only took two young girls, with their pitiful cries and tugging on my arms and before I knew it, there I sat on top of that crazy mechanical bull. A crowd began to gather as the man spoke into the headpiece and made fun of my Kansas origins. Before I knew it, I was holding on for my life as the machine turned and twisted faster than a blink of an eye. That was the LONGEST 30 seconds of my LIFE!!! But, I held on. I didn't fall off until I was trying to get off the stupid thing. It was harder than it looked. It took me a while before I could walk straight again.
A few minutes later we had made it past all the shops and found ourselves among all the rides. We stood there a while looking up at them. The youth went back forth from adult to adult begging to ride something. Before long it was decided that some would ride the go carts and others would ride the Super Shot. Which basically just took them up really high and then dropped them. After half of them had gone on the go karts, we started walking to the other ride, tickets in hand. As we walked, they again convinced me to go with them. (I should have said no) I handed my purse to someone to hold and walked up onto the platform. We sat down and got buckled in. Before you could say Jiminy Cricket, we were slowly climbing the tower. Finally we reached the top and stopped. Instead of dropping right back to the ground we just sat, helplessly looking out across the entire town lit up in lights. It might have been pretty if I wasn't expecting to drop at any second. There I was waiting, waiting, waiting, clutching for dear life waiting to drop, but nothing happened!The first minute we sat expecting it to suddenly drop, thinking that it was the way the ride worked. The second minute I began to relax and try to enjoy the breeze. Minute three came and you could feel every wind, rock the ride. After minute five I got brave enough to look towards the ground to see if I could see anything. I saw people looking up and it made me think something was wrong. I was right, something was wrong. Minute six I began to pray. HARD. Around minute ten, we suddenly dropped, beginning our decent to the ground. As soon as we landed safely, pretty much everyone got out of the seat and ran off the platform. I can't blame them.
Later we found out that the lights had gone out, that the man manning the ride was surprised it stopped and didn't know what to do! He almost turned the power off which would have plunged us to well...disaster! Looking back now I consider myself insane for going up a second time...................
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