Challenged to Post, "Without Comment"

[It's been a minute since I wrote something here, but I thought I'd put this out there so I could easily reference it later should it become needed.]

Someone has challenged you over the next X days to post on some media platform pictures of:

 - Your favorite albums of all time.

 - The movies that were most influential on you.

 - The books could you read over and over.

 - The [some way of pretending to get random things] photo(s) on your phone. [1]

 - The food you blah blah blah . . . 

 - The place(s) you would yadda yadda yadda . . .

 - etc, etc, etc.

Let's be clear, I'm not opposed to these sorts of things.  I most likely am interested in what you might have to share.  After all, the reason we are ostensibly friends on whatever social media platform this is occurring on is because we both chose to be.  Thus, I probably care some amount about you and am interested at least on some level about who you are, what you care about, and other parts of you life.

But here's the supposed kicker, you have to post them, "without comment".  

Though I'm probably reading more dramatic emphasis into it than is really there, I always imagine it more like:

"I was challenged to post this, WITHOUT COMMENT!"  [Dum, dum, dummmmmmm!] [2]

But the question is, why?

Why wouldn't you comment?  What point is there to the whole thing if you don't comment?

Oh, here's some photo that seems important . . .

 . . .but I've no idea why.

Hey look, they like a movie that 90% of people like . . . 

 . . .  what a non-surprise.

They've read that famous book . . . 

. . . that millions of other people have read too.  

Complete non-shocker, and honestly, I don't care.

Of course if you were to comment then suddenly I do care.  Because now I know that the reason you picked that photo was because of [something meaningful and/or interesting].

Or maybe it wasn't.  Maybe you just like the way you look in that photo.  Or you just want to show the world your cute kid(s).

Maybe you just like that movie because of that one fight scene.  Or that one line.  Or because of that hot actor/actress is in it.  

And I suspect that's one of the real reasons people are so pleased to post "without comment".  Because they have nothing to say beyond, "I liked this."  Because their 10 things are completely banal and in truth uninteresting. 

A second reason is probably that after posting and commenting on 1 picture of their kid/dog/self/whatever that fulfills the requirement of this supposed challenge, they would really have nothing left to say on days 2 through 10.

A third reason, and most likely to most applicable is that people are lazy.

So, before I wrap this up.  Let me actually challenge you.

The next time someone "challenges" you to post pictures of whatever "without comment", I challenge you to completely ignore the lets 'o', 'u' and 't' in the word "without" and to post them WITH comments.

Because let's be honest.  One of the main reasons you accepted this "challenge" is that you were hoping people will think the things you picked are cool/interesting/say something about you, and/or that you want people to talk with you about it.  

There's nothing wrong with that, so skip the hoping someone will take the lame bait of a pic with no comments and start the conversation yourself.  

I for one will be way more likely to: 

 - pay attention

 - think about what you've posted for more than half a second

 - post a comment

And if the person who challenged you complains about your changing the rules, just reply to them with a link to this post.

Challenged to Post "Without Comment": D-

[1] - This is "Pretending to be random" because: A) if the randomly selected picture isn't something you want others to see; or B) isn't cool enough; or C) you really want to pick some other picture, we all know your just going to pick whatever you want.

[2] - That's a bad attempt at dramatic sounding music.

Disney Food

Here, in one giant post, is a grade for all of the food we ate on the Disney trip.

Each entry tells:  the food I ate (what restaurant I got it at/where that restaurant can be found) a brief review, and then the grade.

Day 1 Breakfast:
Chocolate Peanut Butter Pop-Tart, (the box of pop-tarts/my hotel room): cheap breakfast for the win.

Pop-Tart: B-

Day 1 Lunch:
Reuben Stromboli w/ Caesar Salad, (Pop Century Restaurant/Pop Century Resort): I like a Reuben [1].  I like a stromboli.  Seems like the two together should be a pretty tasty combination.  The crust had a few random holes in it, so that when you bit into the stromboli, thousand island dressing would come oozing out the holes like some kind of food world gunshot wound.  It made things kind of messy, but overall it tasted fine.  The Caesar salad was awesome. [2]

Reuben Stromboli: B-
Caesar Salad: A

Day 1 Dinner:
Buffet (Crystal Palace/The Magic Kingdom): The food was okay and forgettable.  I had several different things, but all I can remember is boiled shrimp w/ cocktail sauce, some kind of roast meat [3], paella and a cucumber salad.  There was more but like I said, it was forgettable.  There was a buffet full of desserts too: chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, lemon tarts, key lime tarts, tiny cheese cakes, apple cobbler and more. The best part was that they had Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger walking around and meeting folks.  You could get your pick with them and such.  The Bear gave Piglet and Pooh a hug.  He gave Eeyore and Tigger a wide berth.

Buffet Food: B-
Buffet Dinner: B+
Wandering Pooh Characters: A- [B if you're the Bear.]  

Day 2 Breakfast:
Same as Day 1

Day 2 Lunch:
Fish and Chips (Yorkshire Fish Shop/Epcot Center [UK pavilion]): The fish was fully covered in greasy fried goodness.  The chips [4] were fat and hot.  There was tarter sauce, but no cocktail sauce. [5]  For dessert you got a giant sugar cookie.  There was also a squad of ducks pandering for castoffs.  They got quite a few chips from us before we noticed the "Don't feed the ducks" sign.

Fish: A+
Chips: A-
Sugar Cookie: B+

Day 2 Dinner:
Roasted Chicken w/ Potatoes (The Chefs de France/Epcot Center [French pavilion]): Though we arrived early, we got seated pretty quickly.  There were only about four options and while I'm not too particular, my actual choices that I was willing to choose from were pretty small.  French Onion Soup for an appetizer.  It was awesome.  As good as the French Onion Soup I had in Paris. [6]  The Pook and I debated asking if we could cancel our main dishes and just have more soup.  Baked chicken with potatoes and a smattering of gravy and broccoli.  The chicken was fine.  It was pretty good for chicken, but then it was chicken so, meh.  The potatoes were actually quite tasty.  I'm not one to go gaga over potatoes, but I actually quite enjoyed these.  The gravy was great, but like most "fine dining" restaurants you didn't get nearly enough of it.  The broccoli was whatever.  For dessert I had profiteroles.  Basically, small puffs of pastry with vanilla ice cream between them, doused with chocolate sauce.  I seriously debated getting the chocolate mousse but the waiter recommended these.  They were quite tasty, but I really love me a chocolate mousse and afterward I wished I had gotten it. [7]

French Onion Soup: A++
Baked Chicken: B-
Potatoes: B+
Broccoli: C+
Profiteroles: A-

Day 3-5 Breakfast:
Cherry Cheese Danish (Pop Century Restaurant/Pop Century Resort): It was the size of a 45. [8]  And so awesome I had it every morning for the rest of the trip.  The Bear got a Pain au Chocolat, which is essentially a flaky croissant type of roll with chocolate chips and chocolate sauce in it.  He took the tiniest of nibbles and declared he didn't like it. [9] So the Pook and I finished it off for him. [10]

Cherry Cheese Danish: A
Pain au Chocolat: A-

Day 3 Lunch:
Barbecue ribs (Flame Tree Barbecue/Animal Kingdom): I know, there's something contrary to eating ribs in a park all about animals, but hey they were right tasty and I really appreciated them.  Our guide book told us to eat here and it was not wrong.  The ribs, as stated, were excellent.  It came with some coleslaw that was sub-par, some baked beans that were awesome and for desert the Pook and I decided to split between us a Chocolate Mousse and a Key Lime Pie [11].  However, after we each had tasted both, I ate all the rest of the Mousse and she had all the rest of the Key Lime.  Which wasn't unusual at all for me (cause Chocolate Mousse is awesome) but was strange for her since she usually is anti-tart desserts in general and anti-Key Lime Pie in specific.

Ribs: A-
Coleslaw: C- (I didn't even finish mine.)
Beans: A
Chocolate Mousse: A+

Day 3 Dinner:
African Buffet (Boma/Animal Kingdom Lodge): I will admit from the outset that I wasn't really looking forward to this meal.  I wasn't dreading it or anything, but I had a strong suspicion that I wasn't going to enjoy it too terribly much.  The restaurant "Boma" has a buffet of various dishes that are supposed to either be African in origin or at least African influenced.  There were four different meats.  I found two of them (chicken and something else that I've already forgotten) to be just meh.  The beef was okay and the pork was quite tasty.  There were four different soups, but I only had one of them.  It was essentially a spicy chicken soup akin to chicken tortilla sans the tortilla.  The other three soups were non-starters [12].

Then there were a variety of side things.  I tried a little of this and that.  The guide book recommended the watermelon rind salad, so I took some of that.  But the one bit I put in my mouth didn't stay there very long.  It tasted nothing like what you would think watermelon rind salad should taste like and everything like bad.  I tried to spit it out without the Bear noticing.  Nothing else was memorable enough to remember.

There were again a bunch of desserts.  The highlight for me was the Kenyan Coffee Tarts and as I usually can't stand coffee that was odd.  The Bear ate chocolate chip cookies and wished for ice cream.

Boma buffet overall: B-
Watermelon Rind Salad: F
Chicken Soup: B+
Kenyan Coffee Tarts: A-

Day 4 Lunch:
BBQ Hot Dog (Casey's Corner/Magic Kingdom): There was a bun.  It was much bigger than your average hot dog bun.  There was a giant pile of coleslaw and there was a giant pile of pulled pork barbecue.  I suppose there must have been a hot dog in there somewhere, but you certainly couldn't taste it.  Don't get me wrong, the barbecue was right tasty, but I was craving a good dog.  I should have got the chili cheese dog that the Pook ordered.  It was the same giant bun but with a lake of chili and cheese.  Either way it came with a pile of fries too.  The fries were average.

For dessert I got a brownie which was prepackaged and okay in its own prepackaged brownie kind of way.  The Bear and the Pook got cotton candy. [13]

BBQ Hot Dog: B+ [14]
Fries: B
Brownie: B
Cotton Candy: A

Day 4 Dinner:
Chili Nachos (Pop Century Restaurant/Pop Century Resort): Our dining plan only paid for five dinners, so we had to slum it for one dinner.  We decided to go cheap and eat at the hotel. [15]  I had the nachos even though they looked kind of weird.  But the menu board said the were homemade chips so I gave them a try.  They came with ample amounts of the usual assortment of nacho toppings.  When I got to the table I found that they were not nacho chips at all, but instead homemade potato chips.  Which was strange but okay.  The biggest problem is that they were seasoned with something that made them taste like barbecue potato chips.  That was kind of off putting.  So once I ran out of nacho toppings, I quit eating the chips.  We may have had some kind of dessert, but I'm drawing a blank.

Chili "Nachos": B-

Day 5 Lunch:
Pizza Bread (Pop Century Restaurant/Pop Century Resort): Just as we only had five prepaid dinners, we also only had five prepaid lunches.  So after spending a hot morning/early afternoon at Disney's Hollywood Studios we went back to the hotel for lunch.  Judging by how often everyone else ordered it, the hot dish at the restaurant was the Pizza Bread.  It came from the same line that my Stromboli from day one did.  It was pretty standard french bread, sauce, cheese and pepperoni.  As an added bonus, it came with the same Caesar side salad as the Stromboli as well. Only this time the salad was not nearly so good.  The service however was just as bad as the first day.  This time there were two ladies, one of which was leaving and thus couldn't be bothered to do more than a minimal amount and the girl just coming on shift who clearly didn't like the girl leaving telling her what to do and thus took it out on us customers by sucking at her job.

On the plus side, after lunch we got giant ice cream sundaes from the ice cream counter.  Mine had mint chocolate chip and chocolate ice cream, toffee, chocolate fudge, cherries and two gummy worms that I have to the Bear.

Pizza Bread: B
Caesar Salad: B-
Ice Cream Sundae: A

Day 5 Dinner:
Ohana Dinner Buffet (Ohana/Polynesian Resort): You start off with a salad that has honey-lime dressing [16], pork dumplings and chicken wings.  Then for the main course you get some noodles, stir-fried vegetables and all you can eat pork, beef, chicken and shrimp that have been cooked on their giant grill.  The waiters bring the meat around on skewers much like a Brazilian restaurant and give you all you want.  The salad was okay as were the wings.  But as I didn't want to fill up on them, I didn't each much of them.  The dumplings were awesome, even though they had honey drizzled on them.  I think I ate four.  The noodles were no good, too much of some seasoning for my taste.  The Pook said she thought it was ginger.  The vegetables were standard.  Of the meats, the first round of meats we got were hot and juicy and awesome.  The second round were mostly overcooked and not so awesome..  The shrimp are giant and unpeeled.  I must have eaten twelve or so.

For dessert there was a bread pudding with vanilla ice cream and a banana caramel sauce.  I'm not usually a big fan of things with bananas cooked in them or of bread pudding.  Nevertheless the Pook and I finished the whole thing and all of the Bear's leavings. [17]  I contemplated pouring the remainder of the caramel sauce straight into my mouth, but ultimately restrained my self.

Perhaps the worst part of the experience was the "floor show".  A Hawaiian lady gathered all of the kids and had them do a race around the restaurant with brooms and coconuts.  Then she taught everyone a Hula Dance.  Both of which were fine.  Her condescending demeanor however made the whole thing seem annoying and interruptive. [18]

Honey-Lime Salad: B-
Chicken Wings: C+
Pork Dumplings: A-
Noodles: D+
Stir Fried Vegetables: C
Pork the first time: A
Pork the second time: B-
Beef the first time: A-
Beef the second time: C+
Chicken the first time: B+ [19]
Shrimp Every Time: A+
Bread Pudding with Ice Cream and Banana Caramel Sauce: A++


Day 6 Lunch:
Quiche Lorraine (Boulangerie Patisserie/Epcot Center [French Pavilion]): I got the Quiche Lorraine [20] and the Pook got a ham, cheese and bechamel on a baguette sandwich and then we went halfsies.  The quiche was very good.  The sandwich was okay.  For dessert I got a chocolate tart.  It was amazingly good.  Though a tad large because by the end I was a little over done with the chocolaty goodness.

Quiche Lorraine: B+
Ham Sammie French Style: B-
Chocolate Tart: A

Day 6 Dinner:
Pork Chop (Akershus[21]/Epcot Center [Norwegian Pavilion]): The Pook had fond memories of this restaurant from when she had eaten here with her parents as a kid.  Among other things was the memory of butter pats pressed into Mickey shapes.  Sadly the butter pats were gone, but they've been replaced with a lot of princesses.

For an "appetizer" you can eat all that you want off of their appetizer buffet.  The buffet has enough on it that you don't actually need to order anything else.  I had salami, muenster cheese, salad, cucumber salad, and several other things that I no longer remember.

My main course was a pork chop with lingonberry sauce, potato casserole, and asparagus.  The pork chop was the size of my head and a bit over cooked to my taste.  When it is served anywhere else in the south, the potato casserole would have been called hash brown casserole, but nevertheless was pretty standard.  The asparagus were grilled and as good as you could ask asparagus to be.

For dessert you weren't given a choice.  Instead they brought you a plate with Chocolate Mousse Cake, Apple Cake and Rice Pudding.  The Chocolate Mousse cake was as good as the words chocolate mousse profess it to be.  The apple cake was a bit dry and thick.  Even though rice pudding is evil, I dutifully tried a tiny bit.  I think I only shuddered once.

The real draw of this restaurant is that it is filled with Disney Princesses.  You get your picture taken with Belle when you first enter [22] and then Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Mary Poppins all wander around the room chatting with everyone and getting their pictures taken.  The Bear wanted nothing to do with any of them.  Pook got her picture taken with all of them. [23]

Appetizer Buffet: B
Pork Chop: B
Potato Casserole: B
Asparagus: B
Chocolate Mousse Cake: A
Apple Cake: C+
Rice Pudding: D-

Well there you have it.  Way too much info on the food that we ate.  If you bothered to read this far, give yourself a pat on the back.  I'm gonna go see if I can find anything close to a chocolate mousse.


[1] - In case you don't know, a Reuben is corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and thousand island dressing, usually on rye bread.
[2] - The service at the counter that prepared the food was horrendous.  The guy taking orders had the short term memory of a goldfish.  The next day I saw him cleaning off tables.  Just sayin'.
[3] - The kind where a guy dressed like a chef (but who actually had nothing to do with cooking the food) slices you off a bit of the whole and lays it on your plate with his knife and two pronged fork thing.
[4] - French fries to you unwashed heathens.
[5] - There was ketchup too, but I'm not much of a fan of ketchup.
[6] - Actually I had French Onion Soup several times in Paris.  Most days it was great, but on some days it wasn't that good.
[7] - When the Pook and I went to Paris, I had chocolate mousse just about every meal as well.  Much like the French Onion Soup, it was a varied experience.  The one I had the first night was to die for.  The one I had the last night was no better than Jello Pudding.
[8] - The record, not the hand gun.
[9] - Leave it to my son to turn down chocolate for breakfast.
[10] - We went back to the room and got a Pop-Tart for him.
[11] - Technically it wasn't a "pie" but a cup of Key Lime Pie goodness.
[12] - Curry soup, coconut soup and butternut squash.  No thank you.
[13] - Blue and pink respectively.
[14] - Probably would get a higher rating if I were to have it knowing to expect BBQ and not so much hot dog.
[15] - Which was good because dinner at the hotel was about $30.  Dinner at any of the other places we went too would have been between $120 and $150.
[16] - The dressing doesn't sound right to me.  I could have sworn it had pear in the name, but that's what the website says.
[17] - He just had ice cream with Mickey Mouse sprinkles.  But he wasn't feeling very good and we could let the ice cream just go to waste could we?
[18] - Which is a word that I just made up and doesn't at all mean the same thing as annoying, except for a bit.
[19] - I didn't have the chicken a second time, but the Pook said it was just as overdone.
[20] - Ham and cheese quiche.
[21] - Gesundheit
[22] - They give you a big picture and several smaller prints for free.  Well, not free but the price is included in your meal.
[23] - Later the Bear got his picture taken with some snails we found on a ledge.  He was quite excited by that.

The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World 2013

The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World 2013: We got this book hoping it would be slightly useful in helping us pick restaurants for our trip. [1]  If it helped us avoid one bad meal, we figured it would be worth the $20 price tag.[2]

If you are planning to go to Disney World any time soon and they've doubled the price of the book, it would still be a solid value and you should purchase it immediately.  Simply put the book is awesome.

Granted a large part of the book is taken up with reviews of hotels, but that doesn't detract from it's worth.

A similarly large section is given over to rating all of the restaurants in Disney World and since the book isn't written or created by anyone actually associated with DW, they can and do tell you when things stink and when you should avoid them. Using it to pick the places we ate lunch and dinner more than covered the cost of the book.

It also reviews all of the rides and shows and tells you which ones are awesome, which ones aren't and which ones haven't been updated since the 80's.

But perhaps the best part of the book is that it tells you what rides to ride in what order.

?????

Wait you say, the book tells me to go ride a certain ride first and then what to do next?

Exactly.  And while that sounds like you are having your vacation dictated to you, what it really means is that you will get to ride more rides and see more shows.

For instance, are you interested in riding the Toy Story Arcade ride in Hollywood Studios?  If you follow the book (as we did) you end up waiting about five minutes.  When we went back later the wait was 110 minutes. [3]

Evidently, the writers of the book went to the park and watched and rode everything at all times of the day.  They watched traffic patterns [4] and saw when certain rides were busy and when they weren't. And then they put together several different agendas designed to maximize your time riding and watching and to minimize your time standing in line.

We spent six days in the four different parks at DW and the longest we waited (with one exception) was probably 10 minutes. Okay, let me hedge my bets and say 15 minutes, tops.

The book is very clear that to maximize things you need to follow their order religiously and that to deviate means you risk losing your ability to zip from ride to ride and instead get to stand in a queue like a sheep.

And if there are things you want to ride that it doesn't have listed or there are things listed that you don't want to ride, it tells you how to replace and deviate without hosing yourself.  Also there are several different agendas to choose from. [5]

The book claims that it reduces average wait time per day by about four hours.  I would have to say that it made it even less for us.  On most days we finished everything on the list with hours of time to spare.

Which is why we ended up standing in line for a longer time, once.  We had ridden everything and seen everything that we wanted to see at Epcot and it had started raining.  So to waste time until our dinner reservation,[6] we waited 20 minutes to ride the ride at the Mexican pavilion.

You could also spend a few more bucks to get more info and updated lists and wait times on their website, but we forgot to do that so I can't tell you how good that was.  But I can say that we didn't need it.  The book was plenty good.

The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World 2013: A+

[1] - They'll be an entire post about eating at Disney World soon.
[2] - We bought it at Barnes and Nobles, it's actually $5 cheaper on Amazon.
[3] - No, that's not a typo.  The wait was nearly two hours.  What's more astonishing is how many people were willing to wait that long.
[4] - The traffic patterns of people.
[5] - Spending 1 or 2 days in a park and with or without small children.
[6] - That's right we were wasting time while at a Disney theme park because we had nothing else to do, in June.

Mini-Golf @ Pigeon Forge

Mini Golf (a.k.a. - Putt Putt) @ Pigeon Forge[1]: As state in a previous post, the Pook and I recently spent a few days in Pigeon Forge.  We picked that spot for three main reasons.  One of which was that they have a lot of mini-golf courses and the Pook had a hankering.[2]  So here are the definitive grades for the courses that we visited.[3]

Ripley's Old MacDonald's Farm Mini-Golf: Sticking with two of the Pigeon Forge traditions, this course is country themed and owned by Ripley's. In Pigeon Forge, if you aren't interested in looking at people shove nails up their noses, Ripley's is more than willing to take your money in a variety of other venues.  Including an aquarium, a world's record museum and at least six other attractions including one that's a 4D theater.[4]  


We visited this course first, mainly because there was a retarded amount of traffic and we were right beside it.  None of it's three courses were really difficult at all and they were very "luck" related.  A slope filled with gophers that make your ball pachinko down the hill is a good example.  Thus good and bad players alike won't have any trouble getting the ball near the hole. So it's fun to watch but doesn't require much skill. Lot's of large animal figures talk to you throughout in bad accents and make awful puns.  There's also a repetitive country instrumental song that plays constantly that will haunt your dreams for the next three days. (Cow Course: B: 40 P: 46,  Chicken Course: B: 34 P: 39, Pig Course: B: 40, P: 43)


Hazzard County Country Club: This course was located at Cooter's Place in Gatlinburg.  Cooter also has a museum, store and go-carts.[5]  We initially passed this by, but ended up rushing back when the sky opened up and started trying to drown us.  The course is indoors on the second floor of a building that clearly used to be house.  Thus the different holes wind down the hallways and in the rooms, which is sort of strange.  There's Dukes of Hazzard memorabilia on the walls throughout.  In the end we were glad we visited this course because it turned out to be one of the best.  There was no random junk on the holes but there were plenty of slopes and bumpers which meant you had to be skillful and not just lucky.  (B: 47, P: 52)


Hillbilly Golf: Originally I had no interest in playing this course that's located in Gatlinburg, but when the Pook read that you had to take a ride in an incline up the side of the mountain and then the holes wandered back down the mountains side, I was very interested.  When we were walking by and saw that one hole of golf cost $13 my interested evaporated.  You can save money by walking 50 yards back up the road to Cooter's.

Professor Hakkers Lost Treasure Golf: Two different courses are offered here.  You can take a mine train up to the first hole of both or you can walk up the stairs.  If you're into short train rides in a tiny mine car take the train.  If you want to beat everyone else to the first hole, take the stairs.  Lot's of decorations and such to look at, but most of the holes are just big putting greens without any obstacles, slopes or bumpers.  So kinda lame.  Of course the greens are large and the holes so far from the edges that you end up taking a lot of strokes.  (Gold Course: B: 55 P: 63, Diamond Course: B: 52 P: 55)

Adventure Golf: Two different courses that are a bit run down but don't let that put you off.  They were my favorite of all the ones we visited.  Very challenging with slopes, bumpers and obstacles placed in a way that required you to have skill and not just luck.  Also a lot of giant monsters and buildings give it good ambiance.  I highly recommend this one.  (Course 1: B: 43, P: 48,  Course 2: B: 46, P: 47)

Walden's Landing Firehouse Golf: The last place we visited.  Random animals and firehouse equipment decorate the two courses.  Unfortunately a lot of the time the right call was to completely avoid those and hit around them.  For instance on one hole you can send you ball through a loop-the-loop or you can putt beside it and get right to the hole.  The two best parts of this course were the following.

On one hole there is a ladder lying across the end of a ramp that requires you putt between the rungs to get your ball to the lower green.  The Pook upon seeing this said, "You know I'm totally going to hit the rung don't you?"  She then putted and hit directly on the ladder rung causing the ball to roll all of the way back to the start.  Then she did it again.  Laughter ensued.

As the scores I've listed at the end of each courses review reveal, I had won every round of golf we played up until this point.  On the phone with my mom[6] she said I should be a good husband and let the Pook win one[7].  Having dominated her on the first course and knowing that this was the last mini-golf we would be playing, the second course was the last chance she would have to win.  The round started with me choking on the first hole and taking six strokes to her three.  Rapidly the Pook increased her lead to six strokes by the sixth hole.  So, while I don't usually play to lose, I was happy that it looked like she would actually win a round.  Fast forward to the eighteenth hole and the score is tied.  Like a lot of courses the last hole was a goofy thing that you were supposed to do in one stroke.  You putted down a slope to five openings in the side of a box.  Getting the ball into the center opening counted as one stroke.  The openings on either side of that were two strokes and the outer two openings were three strokes.  The Pook went first and the ball rolled straight down the slope and struck the divider on the left side of the one stroke hole and didn't go into any hole.  So she walked up and putted it into the one stroke hole (thus counting as two strokes).  I lined up and prepared to putt.  If I made it into the one hole I would win.  The two hole would mean a tie and the three hole would mean the Pook finally won one.  I hit the ball and it hit a microscopic bump on the lip at the start of the slope.  The ball shot up into the air and flew to the left[8].  From there it landed on the edge of rail on the left edge of the entire green and shot straight into the one stroke hole. Sorry Pook, some things are just not meant to be. (Red Course: B: 42, P: 51, Yellow Course: B: 45, P: 46).

Ripley's Old MacDonald's Farm Mini-Golf: B-
Hazzard County Country Club: A
Professor Hakkers Lost Treasure Golf: B+
Adventure Golf: A+
Walden's Landing Firehouse Golf: B

[1] Actually some of these are located in Gatlinburg and not Pigeon Forge, but the two are essentially the same place anyway.
[2]The other two reasons are that it is an inexpensive vacation and that it was in a different state than our children.
[3] These courses represent only a fraction of the choices available.  I don't think anyone actually loves mini-golf enough to actually play all of the courses in the area.
[4] Which makes it one D short of the 5D theater we saw in Gatlinburg.
[5] The entire place was a homage to everything Dukes of Hazzard.  Including a TV that constantly runs episodes of the show.  Having not seen one since I was a young lad let me tell you this.  Man are those bad.
[6] No I don't call my mom every day while on vacation.  Unless she's watching my kids, then I totally do.
[7] Yeah right.
[8] At which point I thought to myself, "Oh well.  I've lost this one."