After a bit of investigating we found out that the ride lasted six minutes and that the area could hold seven people at a time. Seeing the length of the line in front of us, it didn’t seem that this would take all that long.
Ah, but just because they could fit seven people in there, it didn’t mean that every group ahead of us was made up of seven people. Afterall, we were only six. Once again, we were waiting in line.
It was late, we had been at the museum for hours now and the children’s ability to wait was now extremely curtailed. While they did their best not to complain, they were honest about not really wanting to be in line. They wanted to do the Ride; they just didn’t want to line up for it. Kara kept wandering around outside the line and, eventually, we stopped fighting her over this so long as she stayed near us.
Finally we were next. We entered the ride at 17:28. The museum was scheduled to close two minutes later. Overtime!
Again, I’m not a Star Wars fan, but I had been looking forward to being ‘on’ the spaceship. The cockpit of the Falcon did not disappoint in this regard. We were encouraged to flip any and all the switches we could find, bar one that would shut the ride off. George and Jason took one front row seat and Niko and myself crammed into the other. Amy and Kara sat behind us but just to the side so they too could see. The little room darkened as we fiddled with the switches and, suddenly, the ‘windscreen’ in front of us lit up. We were in space!
X-Wings and Tie Fighters flew past us in a dog fight!
It was a beautiful thing.
Rather quickly they started whipping the education on us again. Anthony Daniels came over the ship’s com system (identifying himself as the voice of C3PO and then doing the voice, Niko did not react to this moment of ‘reality’) and took us to lightspeed to our real universe. In the Falcon, we flew past Earth and our Moon, visited the reaches of the solar system, observed the radiosphere and saw what the edge of the universe might look like before returning, again via lightspeed, to the Star Wars universe and X-Wings. The situation was totally immersive, not unlike the reaction my brain has to an IMAX movie but on a much smaller scale.
As we exited the ride we expressed our glee for it. There was no question that it had been worth the wait. George felt ten again.
The lights were being turned off. The museum was closing. Finally it was time to go. By the time we collected our coats, visited the bathroom one last time and I paid for the parking it was 17:47. We had been at the museum for seven hours. No wonder we were all so tired!
Still, George is an expert driver and we had directions that would take us more directly to the Delavan/Lake Geneva area that Amy was headed for so this wouldn’t take long.
Right?
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