This post is way past due, but I figured…why not! Life has been crazy and we had a very up and down October. But it is still worth memorializing what happened as there were some really fun moments that we will want to remember.
Plus—this is the first year of SeaWorld’s Howl-o-Scream festivities, so we must document that! October is all about haunted houses and we made sure to experience this. We ended up not purchasing front-of-the-line tickets for this event because we didn’t know what to expect. Covid + new event + just kicking off – we thought it probably would not be that bad. We were right!
The tickets stated we could get there at 6 pm and the goal was to get there early and hit the rides, while there was still light. Then make our way to the spooky haunted houses at night. The problem was that SeaWorld was not set up fully, so they corralled us into a proverbial playpen until the event began at 7 pm. We were bored. As 7 pm came closer, a “DJ” and “live actors” made their way to the playpen to rile us up. Probably get there about 6:45 pm or right before the start of the event next year.
With only three haunted houses, we were able to make our way through the park quite quickly. One fun thing they had was unique foods. We ate a few random “bloody burgers” and even got the “toxic mac and cheese,” which was dyed mac and cheese with flaming hot Cheetos on top. Surprisingly—it was good. We finished early and hope that they build off this event for future years.
The next adventure was Grant’s favorite event of the year --Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando. I have told Grant that I am superstitious when it comes to Florida and he just laughs it off. Every time I go—I cringe and worry about things back home. Last time we came back from Orlando we found Ripley in a bad state and had to put him to sleep. This time we thought was going to be better as Sophie is in tip-top shape… little did we know…the CURSE OF ORLANDO struck again.
Our first stop was to visit Debbie and Andrew our friends who just had a baby (David). The baby was adorable, and they seem to be doing well. We went to eat with Andrew’s parents (Bev and Erik) at this really good Italian restaurant. Our food came out well…there’s had a few hiccups. Afterward, we drove to check into our hotel and start the night of horror.
This year Grant got a hotel right outside of the park so we could just walk in and walk out. There were 10 houses this year and each one was a random, but unique theme. Beetlejuice was a standout for its lifelike depiction of the movie. The other houses that were fun to go through this year by far were the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Haunting of Hill House, and the Pumpkin maze. The major bummer this year was that although masks were not required to enter the houses—they did put up “plastic” barriers between you and the actors. This led us to kind of know where some of the scares were coming from this year, which ruined some of the usual jump scares.
Grant of course loved it. Said it was way better than Halloween Horror Nights Hollywood and if you ask…will go on and on and on about the event. I’ll admit that this year overall Orlando was better, but the best house was at Hollywood.
The next morning, I got up early and checked my email. Big mistake. Most are already aware, but we are attempting to hatch a child and the first step is embryo creation. We “were” (past-tense) working with a clinic in Mexico and the results of our PGS (genetic testing) came back. It turns out all the blastocysts that we had created had genetic defects, which means that none were viable for transfer. To make matters worse we were now 25k poorer with nothing to show for it. The agency we were with was not helpful. We spoke with the doctor and were told to try again with no guarantees of success. They had no idea what it happened. They wanted another 20k. They were kind and said “sorry,” but we were not confident in their ability.
I read the news first and I woke Grant up from his slumber. I was upset/devastated. We quickly packed up and hit the road. I told Grant that the curse had hit again, which probably me just being passive-aggressive and attempting to deflect my own emotional insecurities. All of a sudden, we came to a complete stop. What we would later find out is that a tanker ahead of us exploded causing the entire highway to come to a screeching halt. Here is the scenario—I am angry at the world, Grant has no idea what to say, I am stuck in Florida on a highway, and I am starving. After running out of things to look at --I got out of the car and started walking along the highway to get some fresh swamp air and just think alone. Of course, as I am a mile down the road and approaching the crash site the cars start to go. I start racing back to the car and Grant does some crazy driving skills to pick me up. The rest of the way home we talk about the next steps. We are pretty good about getting knocked in the face and picking ourselves back up without wallowing too much. The next two weeks we spend researching new fertility/surrogacy clinics with the hope of finding the right one for our future ninolindo.
As we are searching, we run up against my favorite event of the year, which is Universal Studios Halloween Horror Night Hollywood. Our annual companion Lara joined us and we engaged in our normal rituals to ward off against any curses that may have followed from Orlando. We stopped at In-And-Out, swam in the green inferno pool at Hilton, watched Halloween Kills at City Walk, and then entered the park to find food. Next year, we are going to have to find a dinner place early as City Walk was packed with people leaving the park.
Hollywood was different than Orlando in that a mask was required. However, there were no plastic barriers to see where the actors were. Our first house was by far the best, which was the Exorcist. No one is a huge fan of this IP, but man did they have some good scares that knocked all of us on our butts! There were 6 this year or 7 if you include the Walking Dead attraction. With our front-of-the-line passes, we cut our way through hours of lines and were finished right around midnight. We are getting older as we were exhausted! The next morning, we got donuts from Voodoo Donuts and drove home.
Around this time, we chose to go with a new fertility clinic, Western Fertility Institute / L.A. Surrogacy. The price tag sucked, and we even spent more to guarantee a boy, but after failed adoption, surrogacy in Mexico, we just wanted a win. We met with the doctor, Ashim Kumar, M.D., and he was surprisingly hysterical. He and Grant got along swimmingly and made me look like a stick in the mud. After our sit-down, I had to get poked and prodded and provide a sample. The doctor asked if I wanted to see what my sperm looked like, and I of course wanted to see that. Here is a video of what my swimmers look like:
We are still waiting on the results of a few tests as I write this to get this new show off the ground!
Even with all of that going on we still hadn’t reached Halloween. On the 30th, we went to a really fun Halloween Party that Holly and company put on. I found this really weird 9-foot tall inflatable squid costume on Amazon and then found a “scuba” diver costume to go with it. We would have totally won the costume contest, but Grant’s batteries died in his suit. So…so to did our chances of winning.
On Halloween, we went over to Rachel and Joseph and watched Hocus Pocus in their driveway. Grant was a bit upset that we did not see Tyler Perry’s Boo, but he got over it. A terrifying 2021 is in the books and we can’t wait to see what trouble awaits us this time next year in 2022.