I had never been to Disney World. Classmates growing up would disappear from class and return with Mickey shirts and stories of castles and anthropomorphic animals and overall amazement, while my family, too poor to travel so far, would occasionally go to the shore for a day or two. I'm not sure if I defensively built a wall to think that Disney was not cool, or overrated, but I also don't like lines, crowds, and humidity, so perhaps the Mouse and I weren't meant to meet.
But of course we ended up going. It is simply Something that People with Kids Do so we did. This trip was not for me and I knew that. My kids wanted to be a kid unlike me and see the Mouse up close. Contrary to outward appearance, I was looking forward to it. The kids were out of their minds excited and I was finally going to see this place after three decades of hearing about it.
People tell you what to do, where to go, what to avoid, and it can be helpful, but there really is nothing like seeing the place in person. It is astonishingly large. Each park is the size of a New England state and we have the sweat stains to prove it. There are few landmarks of any height to orient you and the roads are haphazardly intersected by monorails and lakes and rivers and plastic mountains and things meant to look like a future that will never happen and a past that never did. It is beautifully landscaped and has no bugs even though it was built on a swamp. Magic is hard ass work, apparently.
I wore a MagicBand (tm) on my wrist at all moments. It lives up to its name quite well--money that I've never seen from direct deposited pay checks that I've never held gets mysteriously zapped into the bank of some wizard that fuels all of Disney. Transactions are shockingly easy; I've purchased enough bottles of $3 Dasani water bottles to fill the Marianas Trench. I've bought expectedly bad bagels, surprisingly good coffee from Joffrey's Cafe (the Mouse must not have HBO), and at the end of each day, I gleefully slammed the magic band into the receiver to buy an $8 can of beer, for which I would have paid double that. The MagicBand has tracked my purchases, my steps, the rides we have ridden; it knows when I pee, when I stop to put more sunscreen on my kids, and when I am nearly pancake blocked by the spatially unaware Oklahomans who populate the park. Like all new technology I am suspicious at first, but quickly become blind to its evil; in fact, I love my MagicBand so much by departure that I find myself sad while removing it from my wrist at the Orlando airport security. I might also be professing my love for it because it either can track all my thoughts, or it removed part of my brain during the trip. So there.
The treks are arduous and the humidity covers you like wool, but there is an app that guides you and "cast members" who are high on lithium and very helpful and plentiful. And oh, the lines! And oh, the lines to wait for other lines! There are adults who are here without kids and this melts my brain like the Mouse shaped ice cream does in my kids' hands. But the "Disney people" are a whole other thing for a whole other discussion.
The hotels are, quite literally, unreal. A monorail runs through the middle of ours, while others are jungles, or forests, or meticulously made to to represent every corner of the globe, though I didn't see one resembling Akron, Ohio.
Our hotel pool was gorgeous and our kids could have spent all day there but one day, suddenly, whistle blows..clear the pool...some kid took a dump in the pool. Thankfully there is a backup pool, because of course there is, and we swim on gleefully while a still smiling cast member fishes a turd from the big pool.
I am a cynic but I am not heartless and that Mouse and his legion of cast members slowly win me over. We go on a legitimately awesome safari, I watch my kids fight DARTH FRIGGIN VADER, we watch a 3D movie that makes my head spin like a top, we see July 4th level fireworks every night, and I watch my daughter--who 3 months ago declared herself "over" Frozen--belt out "Let it Go" like it was 2015 all over again.
And sure, maybe we paid a minor ransom for the "character breakfast" you see below but the moment that Mouse stopped at our table, our kids faces lit up in pure, genuine amazement--high pitched squeals, gleaming eyes, and all that. The Mouse has done that thousands of times a day for decades and across generations. It was quite astonishing, and something I'm thankful I was able to see.
And now that we are friends, Mickey, would it kill you to serve some goddamn beer at Magic Kingdom?
