Welcome to Wonderland #3: Sandapalooza Shake-Up - Hardcover

#1 New York Times bestselling author Chris Grabenstein is the author of ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY, MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY OLYMPICS, MR. LEMONCELLO'S GREAT LIBRARY RACE, and THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS. He has coauthored numerous bestselling books with James Patterson. You can find Chris online at ChrisGrabenstein.com and on Twitter at @cgrabenstein.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know how I survived the fourteen-story plunge,”  I told my audience.

They were all sipping frosty fruit drinks and nibbling conch fritters at our motel’s brand-new poolside restaurant—the Banana Shack.

“I slid over the first waterfall and rocketed into a ninety-degree zero-gravity free fall! It was a steeper drop than the Summit Plummet at Disney’s Blizzard  Beach!”

“Woo-hoo!” cried my grandpa, Walt Wilkie, when I mentioned outdoing his archrival, the Walt over in Orlando.

“I slid around an awesome loop-de-loop that shot me like a cannonball across the sky and into a log flume! 

Next came a series of wicked switchbacks, plus an aqua tunnel that hurled me straight through a  tank swarming with live sharks!”

“That part was my idea,” added my business-savvy best friend, Gloria Ortega, because Shark Tank is her  favorite TV show.

“Finally,” I said, putting the cherry on top of the ice-cream sundae of my story, “I splashed down in a surf pool, where I caught a wave and went boarding with  n audio-animatronic Surf Monkey aqua-bot!”

“That is so cool!” said one of the kids at a nearby table.
 
He and his family were among the lucky guests who’d been  able  to book rooms at my family’s St. bPete Beach motel after it became super famous in the movie Beach Party Surf  Monkey—the Hollywood blockbuster starring Academy Award– winning actress Cassie McGinty, YouTube sensation Kevin the Monkey, and local hero Pinky Nelligan, who’s one of my best buds. The “No” neon in our No Vacancy sign had been lit for so long we were afraid it might burn  out.

“Where exactly is this waterslide?” asked the boy’s mom.

“Right now,  only in my computer.”

“He used a RollerCoaster Tycoon expansion kit,” explained Gloria.

“But,” I said, gazing at the towering concrete hotel on the other side of our short stucco wall, “someday we might buy the place next door and actually build it.”
 “What?” said Grandpa. “All of a sudden you want to buy the Conch Reef Resort?”

“Hey,” I said with a shrug, “it’s the perfect height. Fourteen stories tall.”

“Whoa, dude,” said our new chef, Jimbo. “Are they,  like, selling,man?”

Jimbo is what they call a Parrothead.  That means he loves the  laid-back, island-breezy music of Jimmy Buffett. Jimbo is extremely mellow and always wears a baggy Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses and has a ponytail sticking out the back of his baseball cap. He doesn’t shave too often, either. “Mr. Conch should sell his resort to somebody,”

I told Jimbo. “Because ever since our movie came out, nobody wants to stay over there except the people who wanted to stay over here and couldn’t.”

My audience laughed. Grandpa and I grinned.

Fact: Conch Enterprises, the company that tried to sabotage our motel’s movie, wasn’t doing so well anymore.

Double fact: Grandpa and I couldn’t’ve been happier if all the doughnuts in the world were wrapped in bacon and dripping with cheese.