My wife, kids, and I have been unabashed Disney World nuts for quite a few years now. We’ve gone on at least one Disney trip each year for the past 5 years—usually in December when the crowds are down and the decorations are up. 2010 was no exception. We made our plans in the summer and spent the entire fall saving and paying on the trip. It was to be a special one because we were going with my wife’s parents and her sister’s daughter. We had gone with my in-laws before and had a really wonderful time…until everyone got food poisoning. We all were looking forward to this trip because my kids adore their cousin and my wife and I were hoping for some chances to do a few things on our own.
When all was said and done the trip was one of our worst Disney experiences. We came home swearing we would never go again; we would spend our money to do something else entirely next year. Now, June 2011 my kids are begging me to go back to Disney and I am finally ready to consider the idea again. My wife, however, will be a tougher nut to crack.
It started off badly. We left our house around 6am, just as planned and everyone (except me) fell asleep. A few hours into the drive, I received a call from the pet resort that was helping us foster our cats. Our cats had been in transition for quite a while—we’d been fostering and boarding them because our son developed an allergy to them and we moved into a no cat house. We had finally arranged for permanent homes for them and were planning to take them there after the trip. That morning, on the drive to Disney, I learned that our 13-year old cat Chloe had died. Now Chloe was our first cat and was my wife’s cat. Before we had kids, she used to have birthday parties for this cat. I knew everyone would be upset by her passing…so I didn’t tell anyone.
Not long after we met up with the grandparents and niece, the family tension started. Now taking a Disney trip is really no vacation. Unless you have two weeks to spend, there simply is too much to do and not enough time to do it. So, you end up cramming the days very full. It is tiring and sometimes stressful. The Disney parks are at this very moment crammed with exhausted children crying and good-hearted parents (whose only desire is to give their kids a good Disney trip) screaming wildly at their families. Really, go and check it out. Disney trips create a certain amount of mental and physical duress that can drive even the most patient, loving parent to the very brink of sanity. Under those circumstances, some family tension should be expected. We got it in spades and it flared up periodically throughout the trip.
The trip wasn’t all stress and difficulty, though. While at EPCOT we got to ride Soarin’ and Test Track a couple of times and my kids loved showing their cousin the Nemo ride. We had a great meal at the Italian pavilion at Tutto Italia and our niece got to see and get photos with a bunch of the key characters. The kids and my wife went to a princess breakfast at Cinderella Castle and had a great time. My son got a sword, my daughter and niece got a wand, my wife got a nice breakfast and plenty of pictures…and I got to do Space Mountain and the Haunted Mansion on my own! The in-laws weren’t well and missed most of that day. We went to Hollywood Studios and did Toy Story Mania a couple of times. I got to do the Tower of Terror, which no one else wanted to do, and everyone else did Rockin’ Rollercoaster. The kids got their picture taken with Lots-o-Huggin’ bear (I personally wanted to punch him in the nose because he’s a bad guy). We ate at the SciFi Diner, which is a restaurant with a drive-in movie theme. The tables are shaped like cars and there is a giant movie screen showing B-movie clips. We got to walk down the Streets of New York with (fake) snow falling and everything lit up by the Osborne Lights while Christmas music blasted. We logged two days at the Magic Kingdom and got in most of what we all wanted do to there, also. Several passes through the Peter Pan ride, Snow White’s Scary Adventure, the Pooh ride, and Dumbo. I grabbed a quick trip through Pirates of the Caribbean while on a mission to get fast passes. Now that I think about it, we really did pretty well in getting to do the stuff we wanted to do.
The circumstances of that fun made it more challenging…remember this trip was in early December. The weather wasn’t great the entire time we were there. The first day it got into the low 70s, and the kids did some swimming. I did, too. Notwithstanding the pirate-themed swimming pool, it was a bit too cold for my taste. The next day it rained and turned colder and the last couple of days it was downright cold, getting into the 30s at night. Disney hosed me $50 for some ponchos purchased at Hollywood Studios and the kids collectively lost a pair of mittens and a hat. It is hard to have a magical time when you are cold and wet and feeling slightly abused.
Besides the weather and the tension, two other occurrences epitomize this particular trip and will forever be part of my collective Disney memories.
One of these involved a retainer and Pizza Planet. While eating at a very crowded Pizza Planet on a rainy and cold day, I accidentally threw my niece’s retainer in the trash. I was just trying to be a good guy and bus the trash off the table so we could rejoin our forced march of fun. (No good deed ever goes unpunished.) Now normally throwing something in the trash isn’t a huge deal—you just go and get it out. In this case, we were in a packed Disney restaurant that produced tons of trash per minute. It only took a couple of minutes to realize what I had done, but in that time the trash can I had used filled up. I had to go dumpster diving in a hurry as the family collectively freaked out over the retainer. Feverishly I pawed through half eaten pizza, spilled sodas, and salad remnants looking for the retainer. The people who sat next to the trash can seemed to take great interest and delight in my quest. They made lots of suggestions and even seemed prepared to roll up their sleeves and dive in with me. (Something my father-in-law did.) Happily I found the retainer wrapped in a napkin before I reached the bottom of the can.
As I said, everyone freaked out over this incident. The niece was scared. After all, losing retainers and breaking glasses are two of the most feared events in a kid’s life. The grandparents freaked because they were responsible for the niece and her retainer. My wife and kids freaked because everyone else was wigging out. After my triumphant return from the trash with the retainer I was hotly scolded for throwing it away, sent straight to the restroom to wash my hands and the retainer, and then coated liberally with hand sanitizer when I returned. I never did bus the table again on that trip. The bright side is that I can now add excavating at Pizza Planet to my professional resume.
The other event, the one that really captures the spirit of the trip and my personal experience, happened on the last night, in our last hour at a Disney park. We were at the Magic Kingdom hurrying to get in the last rides and souvenir shopping before the Christmas party we didn’t have tickets for was to start. It was freezing cold and we all were tired. Now, my son seems to have a small bladder. He has to pee a lot and the need rarely arises when a bathroom is conveniently nearby. We carry a pee bottle with us for these situations. Luckily he’s a boy, so his equipment works well with pee bottles. Earlier that day, we had used the pee bottle and I hadn’t taken the time to empty it—I just stuck it on the back of the stroller. You can see where this is going. My father-in-law and I had just dashed back to fetch the strollers as everyone else pushed onward with the fun. As I got to our stroller I grabbed a bottle of water and took a big slug…only it wasn’t water. The first gulp went down, the second one—after I realized what I had done—got spit out. The crazy thing is that I was so tired, so stressed, so focused on completing the mission that it didn’t faze me at all. Without missing a step, I spit out the pee I hadn’t swallowed, took a drink of real water, and pushed the stroller on through Fantasy Land. Magical!
The next day the in-laws and niece left and we spent time riding the monorail, visiting hotel lobbies with big Christmas trees and shopping at Downtown Disney. It was a good to wind down with just our family negotiating it all. As we usually do, we stayed until 8:30PM and got home at about 4AM. When we got home we discovered that the landlord’s painters—who were fixing some peeling paint in the bathroom—had covered our bedroom in a fine dust from the sanding. So at 4AM, after a long Disney trip, we changed bed clothes, dusted surfaces, and mopped the floors.
We had had so much f***ing fun that, as Clark W. Griswold famously said, we were whistling Dixie out our…well, you remember the line.
Oh yeah, and the next day I had to tell everyone about Chloe…is it any wonder that we didn’t want to go back?
1 comments:
Yep, love particularly the retainer story. Rick threw Juli's retainers out in the airport trashcan on the way to vacation. He brings her back to us without them, goes back to look. Retainers GONE! Not a great start. Moral of that story, advice given by the orthodontist, never wrap retainers in napkins! It seems to be a common occurrence. You did get the flavor of the non-relaxing Disney vacation exactly right!
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