Uh Oa… I want some more
We finally made it out to Trader Sam’s Grog Grotto this past weekend! Now we are part of the cool club 🙂
Talk about an awesome date night! We had dinner reservations for Kona Cafe because everything there is yummy and the service is pretty fast, but in hindsight we should have grabbed a pager from the Grotto *before* dinner. The rumor was the 2 hour wait they tell you at the door isn’t really 2 hours… well, it was for us. Almost on the dot. Fortunately, we made some fun new friends while we waited! They were Disney Cast Members and 2 of them were former Jungle Cruise Skippers. So we all chatted about the parks while we waited, which made it go by pretty fast.
Once we got inside it was all a bit overwhelming but we saw our new friends so sat near them. Let me tell you how much fun it is sitting next to a former Skipper when someone orders a HippopotoMaiTai! He was quite dramatic in shooting the hippopotamus out of the nearby tree. A bit later in the night he showed us video of him being a crazy Skipper, and told stories of how he once fell in the water, and other shenanigans that happened on the cruises. He even went into his old spiel and had us laughing our heads off!
Mr. Roamer ordered the Shrunken Zomie head and I ordered the HippopotoMaiTai because I couldn’t resist his cute face on the collectible glass! Our waiter asked us if we wanted to keep the cups, and we said, of course! They were both really strong and fruity drinks, definitely slow sippers.
Sipping on these while taking in everything going on in the Grotto was a lot of fun. Not to mention the hilarious ex-Skipper next to us. This would be a great place for a group of friends, not so much a date night, but we always make new friends so it was a really good time for us.
Next we decided to split the Uh-Oa as we heard @thetimtracker recommend it, and had to try it. Plus the glass for it was one of the best looking ones they currently have.
Word of warning: They bring it out and light it on fire. In the dark and with all the commotion and chanting it’s hard to tell what’s going on or what to do next. The powder you’re supposed to throw on the fire is NOT fire juice. I repeat, it is NOT fire juice. It is cinnamon. And if you throw too much like we did because it looked really cool when the fire flared up, your drink will taste like a cinnamon stick exploded in your mouth. Next time, we won’t throw so much and we might actually be able to tell you what it tasted like.
It comes with these super long straws and even (4) straw holes to put them in! Another note which we didn’t see until we got home with the clean glass, is that there are little pockets in the corner where drink was probably not sipped up. So make sure you stick your straw in there to get every last yummy drop! It will have you singing that Neon Trees song all night. “Uh Oa.. I want some more… Uh Oa.. what are you waiting for?”
It was soon closing time (midnight closing on a Saturday? really? hopefully hours will extend once it officially opens) and so I grabbed a few camera shots of the scenery before we headed home.
Then came the biggest question of the night – how much do we tip? Normally for a bartender to make a drink we tip $1 for beer, $2 for mixed drinks. A waiter did bring them to us, so we should tip 20%, but 2/3 of the price was merchandise (the glasses) – do we tip on that? If they won’t give us a merchandise discount or a Tables in wonderland discount on the alcohol then where exactly does this fall? Share your comments below or tweet us and let us know what you think!
Here are some close up shots in the daylight of the glasses we got. We’ll be back for the others later! I think we’ll take the girls during daytime hours (4-8 pm) so they can have as much fun as we did. After 8 pm it’s 21+ only.
