My Trip to Disney World
Well, I am back from Disney World. I made it in under the noses of the Corporation of Evil, and made it back out alive. This post will chronicle what happened, for anyone who is interested.
The players in this comedy are:
Myself
My parents (hereafter known as Mom and Dad)
My older sister (we'll call her the Bitch)
My brother-in-law (the Fucking Prima Donna, or FPD for short)
My sister's three children. The oldest is a boy (Nephew One), the middle is a girl (Neice) and the youngest is a boy (Nephew Two). N.One is 11, Neice is 10, and N.Two is 5.
We left for the airport at 4 AM on Saturday, 14 June. I didn't bother to go to sleep that night. I figured there was really no point in going to bed at 10 PM only to wake up at 2 AM to get ready to leave. And there is totally no point in me going to bed before I'm sleepy. I just end up laying awake all night. So I didn't bother to go to bed, and just mudded all night and packed at midnight.
My dad called at 3:30 to say that they were leaving now to come over. I wondered why, since he had said that they would be at my place around 4:30, and it only takes 10 min to get to my apartment from their house. Dad was rushing around and acting like we were running late, instead of hideously early, and it turned out after I asked him why the hell he was going 15 mph over the speed limit that he was mistaken about the time. He THOUGHT that we were running late, because he thought it was an hour later than it actually was.
:/ Great start.
We had to switch planes in Charlotte, NC, but everything went off well and we got ourselves and our luggage to Florida. We then asked for directions to the hotel - we were staying at Holiday Inn Family Suites Resort. The chick at the rental car desk gave us directions that turned out to be only semi-accurate. They didn't match the ones that Dad had printed off the Internet, and neither of them seemed to match the map that was given to us by the rental car company.
It was around this time that we learned that Bitch and her brood were being delayed, because their original flight out of Nashville was cancelled and they were bumped to a later plane, that caused them to miss their connection at Charlotte. The airline had made a new connection for them, but it would put them in Florida about two hours later than anticipated. It was now around 11 AM, and they were due to land at 2 PM. We had earlier been debating sticking around the airport for an hour until they arrived, so we could all head to the hotel together, but since it would be so long, the 'rents and I decided to go to the hotel alone and let them make their own way.
It turned out that the chick at the rental car desk just plain didn't know her ass from a hole in the ground, and the map we were given was for shit. The directions Dad printed off the Internet probably would have worked great if we'd actually followed them. This is what happened : the directions from the Internet said to take state road 417 to some other road I forget, and then turn left onto International Drive. Only we saw an exit for International Drive before we got to the second road and decided to take it. We could only turn right from this exit, not left, which should have clued us in that something was wrong.
After 20 minutes of wandering, we stopped for directions, and discovered that there are TWO roads in Orlando named International Drive, only one of which (the one we were on) was shown on the for-shit map. We needed to be on South International Drive, which for some reason is not connected in any way to International Drive, and which was not shown on the map given to us by the rental car company.
After a great deal of tribulation and watching road signs, we made it to the hotel.
Around 1:30 PM, the Bitch called us on her cellphone to announce that they were on the ground, and Dad made great effort to warn the FPD about the confusion with International Drive and South International Drive, to keep him from making the same mistake we did.
An hour later, they still weren't at the hotel. Dad called the Bitch's cellphone to find out what happened to them, and discovered that the Bitch and the FPD were screaming at each other in the car because ... guess what? The FPD (who was driving) decided that real men don't need to follow directions, and they had been cruising up and down the wrong International Drive for the past 45 minutes. With the patience of a fucking saint, my dad got the FPD to turn onto the correct roads and got them to the hotel.
I could tell already that this was going to be loads of fun!
That evening, we went out to dinner. The FPD wanted fish, so we went to a place called Moon Fish, which turned out to be super-expensive but really good. I got some excellent sushi there, and was subsequently teased for eating bait.
The next day, Sunday, we went to the Magic Kingdom, the "main" WDW park, the one with the giant castle in the middle. We took a bus to the park. The buses are provided by the hotel, and are free to people staying in the hotel, and make a couple of scheduled runs to each park and a couple back to the hotel. We took the 9:45 AM bus, which wasn't very difficult because all three kids were excited and up very early. There was a little bit of issue with the Bitch at 9:30 thinking that 1. I wasn't sitting right next to her, and 2. she was for some reason responsible for getting me where I needed to be, and she spent ten frantic minutes searching for me up at the two hotel rooms. The rest of us were wondering where the fuck the Bitch was, and she finally came down saying that she couldn't find me and Lo! there I was already ready.
Once at the park, the FPD bought a child leash for N.Two. If you're not familiar with these, they're just like dog leashes, except that they're supposed to attach to a harness that the kid wears and can't get off because it fastens behind the back. N.Two didn't have a harness, so the FPD attached it to the back of the kid's belt. He was mortified for about thirty minutes, but then started to like it once we got into the park and among the crowds, because it made him feel safer.
I also bought a clever but vastly overpriced little water spray-bottle with an attached battery-operated fan. The idea is that you spritz yourself with water and then the fan cools you off. This cost me $16, but it was the best $16 I spent the whole trip.
There are two ways from the ticket and transportation center to the Magic Kingdom - the monorail and the ferry. I wanted to take the ferry in and the monorail out, because we were told that the ferry often has Disney characters on it, and N.Two would probably like that. I also felt that we would probably want to get OUT of the park as quickly as possible, and the monorail is much faster. I was overruled, though, and we took the monorail in with the intent of taking the ferry out. This was the first of many, many incidents when I was ignored and later turned out to be right.
WDW searches all bags before they let you in the park. Creepy.
Once in the park, I wanted to turn left and go to Splash Mountain, which I'm told is the most popular attraction. It was early, and the lines would probably be short, and it was hotter than the pitfires of hell out and getting wet in a log ride would be a good thing. Instead, we turned right and went to Tomorrowland, home of Space Mountain.
It was on the walk down Main Street USA to Tomorrowland that something happened that would turn out to be a trend - we had to keep stopping the group to let the FPD catch up. He consistantly walked very slowly behind the rest of us all day, and while he blamed this on N.Two being unable to keep up, that was bullshit because N.Two was always as far ahead of the FPD as he could get on the leash, trying to pull his father along.
Everybody decided to loiter once they got into Tomorrowland, and yap about what they wanted to do. I'm not used to 98 degree weather with 95% humidity, and I felt like I was going to die, and we'd only been there 20 minutes, so I went to buy some bottled water. Disney sells Dasani (bottled by Coke) - a 24-ounce bottle is $2.50. Outrageous, but what can you do? Everything there was grossly overpriced. I was originally intending to just buy one bottle for myself, since the rest of them were dicking around and acting indecisive, but in the end I went ahead and bought three. This took a good 10 minutes because the people in line at the snack bar were also dicking around, and by the time I got back, everyone had vanished. I sat down in the shade and drank my water and used my little fan and waited for them to show up again.
It turned out that they had gone ahead and gotten in line for the Buzz Lightyear ride. They wanted me to come with them, but I wasn't going to jump line - Kinslayers don't jump lines like assholes. So I handed them to two spare bottles of water and waited for them outside.
Once they got out of the Buzz Lightyear ride, we rode Space Mountain, a roller coaster that goes through the inside of a building in near-total darkness. This ride scared me shitless when I was 5 and is probably what put me off roller coasters, but I'm not 5 anymore so I went on it. I screamed like a girl the whole time.
We stopped after that to get some slushies - I had raspberry. Mmmm. Then the kids wanted to go on the Indy Speedway, which is a kind of lame ride, IMHO. You have a small, gas-powered car that probably goes 5 mph max, that you drive around a track. You can't get out of your lane, because there's a raised metal rail in the middle that keeps your wheels from going too far off-center. There's a similar ride at Opryland, only the cars are Model T's and the track is a hell of a lot longer. Dad went to smoke in one of the designated areas while Mom and I sat and waited for the Bitch and her family to go through the 40 minute line.
At this point, I wanted to go for Splash Mountain, which was on the opposite side of the park from where we were. While the Bitch and the FPD were absent, and once Dad came back, we made plans to take the train around the park to Frontierland, and there get a Fast Pass to Splash Mountain. And, because the plans were already fully-formed by the time the Bitch and her brood returned, there was nothing for them to say about it.
A Fast Pass consists of you putting your Park Hopper ticket into a little machine next to the entrance to the attraction. The machine then spits your park ticket back out, along with a tiny slip of paper saying "return between such-and-such and such-and-such a time." You then go and do your thing until that hour window, and then come back and skip most of the line at the attraction! It's a neat system, when it works. We got passes to Splash Mountain, but they were for three hours later. Yuck.
By now everyone was ready for food, and the FPD wanted to see the Country Bear Jamboree for some godforsaken reason. So we started looking for a place to eat, and N.One got in trouble. For some reason, whether through a mistake or bull-headedness that he inherited from his asshole father, he turned right when the rest of us were going straight and almost got lost in the crowd. The Bitch went after him and dragged him back, and he got a perfectly justified chewing-out, but after everything had been dealt with and N.One was sulking, the Bitch just kept on bitching about it for a good ten minutes. I finally got fed up and told her to shut up, it was over, and her complaining about it wasn't helping. She sniped at me a little bit, and Dad had to break it up.
We ate at a Frontierland restaurant that served mostly hamburgers and hot dogs, and were caught by a rainstorm. When the rain stopped, it was still hot and even more humid, and so we went into the Country Bear Jamboree building to wait for it to open. The daily 3 PM parade came right past the building.
The Country Bear Jamboree is a 10 or 15 min show performed entirely by animatronic robots dressed up like hillbilly bears. It is not amusing at all, unless you are 5 years old ... N.Two loved it. The rest of us, including the FPD who was the one who wanted to see it in the first place, were bored stupid.
After that we loitered again, discussing what we were going to do. It was now about 4 PM - note how time is passing and we are not seeing much of the park.
Finally we went to Adventureland and went through Pirates of the Carribean. This was pretty amusing, even if it's basically without event, just a boat ride through pirate scenes played out by animatronic characters. Then we did the safari boat ride - our boat driver was really amusing. It would have been really, really dull if not for him.
Next we loitered again and then went through Splash Mountain - finally. This is a log ride with animatronic scenes that play out the story of Brer Rabbit. The scene in which Brer Fox is trying to get Brer Bear down from a rabbit trap will stay with me my whole life ... Brer Bear is caught in this rabbit snare with his feet up in the air and his (nonexistant) genital region displayed to passing boats. It's just plain wrongful. It looks like he's in some kind of BDSM dungeon scene about to be fucked.
Up until that point I had succeeded in not having a single sexual thought all day. But that ruined it for me.
The ride culminates with a long drop into "the briar patch" and a huge splashdown. It scared me shitless and I screamed like a girl, but it was nice to get soaking wet.
We were then caught in another rainstorm, and wandered over toward Fantasyland, stopping to go through the Haunted Mansion. This was my sister's favorite ride when we were there when I was five. It's a slow little ride through several dark rooms and ghosts and things show up. The ghost effects in the ballroom are really neat, but otherwise it's rather dull. N.Two didn't like this one.
In Fantasyland we rode It's A Small World, which was =my= favorite ride when I was five. Probably because it's slow-moving, brightly-colored, and there's that damned catchy song playing all through it. There was another sexual moment here, as there is an animatronic Aboringine boy with a boomerang that he's holding and waving like a giant cock. I got teased a lot because I liked this stupid ride twenty-five years ago, and I was just about to hit someone by the time we left.
After this, the FPD and the Bitch took the kids to the Dumbo ride while me and the 'rents waited for them. It was here that I discovered that the birds in WDW are absolutely fearless.
By now it was starting to get late, and we needed to catch the bus back to the hotel, so we began wandering toward the exit. All the kids were tired and getting cranky, and my feet were killing me. The FPD continued to hold us up, and continued to blame it on N.Two although that was clearly bullshit, and whined when we couldn't walk straight through the castle due to a show going on in front of it.
We took the ferry back as planned, at which point it was acknowledged that I was right, and we should have taken the ferry in and the monorail back. We got home mostly without incident, and I was never so happy to get my shoes off.
Next up - Epcot
The players in this comedy are:
Myself
My parents (hereafter known as Mom and Dad)
My older sister (we'll call her the Bitch)
My brother-in-law (the Fucking Prima Donna, or FPD for short)
My sister's three children. The oldest is a boy (Nephew One), the middle is a girl (Neice) and the youngest is a boy (Nephew Two). N.One is 11, Neice is 10, and N.Two is 5.
We left for the airport at 4 AM on Saturday, 14 June. I didn't bother to go to sleep that night. I figured there was really no point in going to bed at 10 PM only to wake up at 2 AM to get ready to leave. And there is totally no point in me going to bed before I'm sleepy. I just end up laying awake all night. So I didn't bother to go to bed, and just mudded all night and packed at midnight.
My dad called at 3:30 to say that they were leaving now to come over. I wondered why, since he had said that they would be at my place around 4:30, and it only takes 10 min to get to my apartment from their house. Dad was rushing around and acting like we were running late, instead of hideously early, and it turned out after I asked him why the hell he was going 15 mph over the speed limit that he was mistaken about the time. He THOUGHT that we were running late, because he thought it was an hour later than it actually was.
:/ Great start.
We had to switch planes in Charlotte, NC, but everything went off well and we got ourselves and our luggage to Florida. We then asked for directions to the hotel - we were staying at Holiday Inn Family Suites Resort. The chick at the rental car desk gave us directions that turned out to be only semi-accurate. They didn't match the ones that Dad had printed off the Internet, and neither of them seemed to match the map that was given to us by the rental car company.
It was around this time that we learned that Bitch and her brood were being delayed, because their original flight out of Nashville was cancelled and they were bumped to a later plane, that caused them to miss their connection at Charlotte. The airline had made a new connection for them, but it would put them in Florida about two hours later than anticipated. It was now around 11 AM, and they were due to land at 2 PM. We had earlier been debating sticking around the airport for an hour until they arrived, so we could all head to the hotel together, but since it would be so long, the 'rents and I decided to go to the hotel alone and let them make their own way.
It turned out that the chick at the rental car desk just plain didn't know her ass from a hole in the ground, and the map we were given was for shit. The directions Dad printed off the Internet probably would have worked great if we'd actually followed them. This is what happened : the directions from the Internet said to take state road 417 to some other road I forget, and then turn left onto International Drive. Only we saw an exit for International Drive before we got to the second road and decided to take it. We could only turn right from this exit, not left, which should have clued us in that something was wrong.
After 20 minutes of wandering, we stopped for directions, and discovered that there are TWO roads in Orlando named International Drive, only one of which (the one we were on) was shown on the for-shit map. We needed to be on South International Drive, which for some reason is not connected in any way to International Drive, and which was not shown on the map given to us by the rental car company.
After a great deal of tribulation and watching road signs, we made it to the hotel.
Around 1:30 PM, the Bitch called us on her cellphone to announce that they were on the ground, and Dad made great effort to warn the FPD about the confusion with International Drive and South International Drive, to keep him from making the same mistake we did.
An hour later, they still weren't at the hotel. Dad called the Bitch's cellphone to find out what happened to them, and discovered that the Bitch and the FPD were screaming at each other in the car because ... guess what? The FPD (who was driving) decided that real men don't need to follow directions, and they had been cruising up and down the wrong International Drive for the past 45 minutes. With the patience of a fucking saint, my dad got the FPD to turn onto the correct roads and got them to the hotel.
I could tell already that this was going to be loads of fun!
That evening, we went out to dinner. The FPD wanted fish, so we went to a place called Moon Fish, which turned out to be super-expensive but really good. I got some excellent sushi there, and was subsequently teased for eating bait.
The next day, Sunday, we went to the Magic Kingdom, the "main" WDW park, the one with the giant castle in the middle. We took a bus to the park. The buses are provided by the hotel, and are free to people staying in the hotel, and make a couple of scheduled runs to each park and a couple back to the hotel. We took the 9:45 AM bus, which wasn't very difficult because all three kids were excited and up very early. There was a little bit of issue with the Bitch at 9:30 thinking that 1. I wasn't sitting right next to her, and 2. she was for some reason responsible for getting me where I needed to be, and she spent ten frantic minutes searching for me up at the two hotel rooms. The rest of us were wondering where the fuck the Bitch was, and she finally came down saying that she couldn't find me and Lo! there I was already ready.
Once at the park, the FPD bought a child leash for N.Two. If you're not familiar with these, they're just like dog leashes, except that they're supposed to attach to a harness that the kid wears and can't get off because it fastens behind the back. N.Two didn't have a harness, so the FPD attached it to the back of the kid's belt. He was mortified for about thirty minutes, but then started to like it once we got into the park and among the crowds, because it made him feel safer.
I also bought a clever but vastly overpriced little water spray-bottle with an attached battery-operated fan. The idea is that you spritz yourself with water and then the fan cools you off. This cost me $16, but it was the best $16 I spent the whole trip.
There are two ways from the ticket and transportation center to the Magic Kingdom - the monorail and the ferry. I wanted to take the ferry in and the monorail out, because we were told that the ferry often has Disney characters on it, and N.Two would probably like that. I also felt that we would probably want to get OUT of the park as quickly as possible, and the monorail is much faster. I was overruled, though, and we took the monorail in with the intent of taking the ferry out. This was the first of many, many incidents when I was ignored and later turned out to be right.
WDW searches all bags before they let you in the park. Creepy.
Once in the park, I wanted to turn left and go to Splash Mountain, which I'm told is the most popular attraction. It was early, and the lines would probably be short, and it was hotter than the pitfires of hell out and getting wet in a log ride would be a good thing. Instead, we turned right and went to Tomorrowland, home of Space Mountain.
It was on the walk down Main Street USA to Tomorrowland that something happened that would turn out to be a trend - we had to keep stopping the group to let the FPD catch up. He consistantly walked very slowly behind the rest of us all day, and while he blamed this on N.Two being unable to keep up, that was bullshit because N.Two was always as far ahead of the FPD as he could get on the leash, trying to pull his father along.
Everybody decided to loiter once they got into Tomorrowland, and yap about what they wanted to do. I'm not used to 98 degree weather with 95% humidity, and I felt like I was going to die, and we'd only been there 20 minutes, so I went to buy some bottled water. Disney sells Dasani (bottled by Coke) - a 24-ounce bottle is $2.50. Outrageous, but what can you do? Everything there was grossly overpriced. I was originally intending to just buy one bottle for myself, since the rest of them were dicking around and acting indecisive, but in the end I went ahead and bought three. This took a good 10 minutes because the people in line at the snack bar were also dicking around, and by the time I got back, everyone had vanished. I sat down in the shade and drank my water and used my little fan and waited for them to show up again.
It turned out that they had gone ahead and gotten in line for the Buzz Lightyear ride. They wanted me to come with them, but I wasn't going to jump line - Kinslayers don't jump lines like assholes. So I handed them to two spare bottles of water and waited for them outside.
Once they got out of the Buzz Lightyear ride, we rode Space Mountain, a roller coaster that goes through the inside of a building in near-total darkness. This ride scared me shitless when I was 5 and is probably what put me off roller coasters, but I'm not 5 anymore so I went on it. I screamed like a girl the whole time.
We stopped after that to get some slushies - I had raspberry. Mmmm. Then the kids wanted to go on the Indy Speedway, which is a kind of lame ride, IMHO. You have a small, gas-powered car that probably goes 5 mph max, that you drive around a track. You can't get out of your lane, because there's a raised metal rail in the middle that keeps your wheels from going too far off-center. There's a similar ride at Opryland, only the cars are Model T's and the track is a hell of a lot longer. Dad went to smoke in one of the designated areas while Mom and I sat and waited for the Bitch and her family to go through the 40 minute line.
At this point, I wanted to go for Splash Mountain, which was on the opposite side of the park from where we were. While the Bitch and the FPD were absent, and once Dad came back, we made plans to take the train around the park to Frontierland, and there get a Fast Pass to Splash Mountain. And, because the plans were already fully-formed by the time the Bitch and her brood returned, there was nothing for them to say about it.
A Fast Pass consists of you putting your Park Hopper ticket into a little machine next to the entrance to the attraction. The machine then spits your park ticket back out, along with a tiny slip of paper saying "return between such-and-such and such-and-such a time." You then go and do your thing until that hour window, and then come back and skip most of the line at the attraction! It's a neat system, when it works. We got passes to Splash Mountain, but they were for three hours later. Yuck.
By now everyone was ready for food, and the FPD wanted to see the Country Bear Jamboree for some godforsaken reason. So we started looking for a place to eat, and N.One got in trouble. For some reason, whether through a mistake or bull-headedness that he inherited from his asshole father, he turned right when the rest of us were going straight and almost got lost in the crowd. The Bitch went after him and dragged him back, and he got a perfectly justified chewing-out, but after everything had been dealt with and N.One was sulking, the Bitch just kept on bitching about it for a good ten minutes. I finally got fed up and told her to shut up, it was over, and her complaining about it wasn't helping. She sniped at me a little bit, and Dad had to break it up.
We ate at a Frontierland restaurant that served mostly hamburgers and hot dogs, and were caught by a rainstorm. When the rain stopped, it was still hot and even more humid, and so we went into the Country Bear Jamboree building to wait for it to open. The daily 3 PM parade came right past the building.
The Country Bear Jamboree is a 10 or 15 min show performed entirely by animatronic robots dressed up like hillbilly bears. It is not amusing at all, unless you are 5 years old ... N.Two loved it. The rest of us, including the FPD who was the one who wanted to see it in the first place, were bored stupid.
After that we loitered again, discussing what we were going to do. It was now about 4 PM - note how time is passing and we are not seeing much of the park.
Finally we went to Adventureland and went through Pirates of the Carribean. This was pretty amusing, even if it's basically without event, just a boat ride through pirate scenes played out by animatronic characters. Then we did the safari boat ride - our boat driver was really amusing. It would have been really, really dull if not for him.
Next we loitered again and then went through Splash Mountain - finally. This is a log ride with animatronic scenes that play out the story of Brer Rabbit. The scene in which Brer Fox is trying to get Brer Bear down from a rabbit trap will stay with me my whole life ... Brer Bear is caught in this rabbit snare with his feet up in the air and his (nonexistant) genital region displayed to passing boats. It's just plain wrongful. It looks like he's in some kind of BDSM dungeon scene about to be fucked.
Up until that point I had succeeded in not having a single sexual thought all day. But that ruined it for me.
The ride culminates with a long drop into "the briar patch" and a huge splashdown. It scared me shitless and I screamed like a girl, but it was nice to get soaking wet.
We were then caught in another rainstorm, and wandered over toward Fantasyland, stopping to go through the Haunted Mansion. This was my sister's favorite ride when we were there when I was five. It's a slow little ride through several dark rooms and ghosts and things show up. The ghost effects in the ballroom are really neat, but otherwise it's rather dull. N.Two didn't like this one.
In Fantasyland we rode It's A Small World, which was =my= favorite ride when I was five. Probably because it's slow-moving, brightly-colored, and there's that damned catchy song playing all through it. There was another sexual moment here, as there is an animatronic Aboringine boy with a boomerang that he's holding and waving like a giant cock. I got teased a lot because I liked this stupid ride twenty-five years ago, and I was just about to hit someone by the time we left.
After this, the FPD and the Bitch took the kids to the Dumbo ride while me and the 'rents waited for them. It was here that I discovered that the birds in WDW are absolutely fearless.
By now it was starting to get late, and we needed to catch the bus back to the hotel, so we began wandering toward the exit. All the kids were tired and getting cranky, and my feet were killing me. The FPD continued to hold us up, and continued to blame it on N.Two although that was clearly bullshit, and whined when we couldn't walk straight through the castle due to a show going on in front of it.
We took the ferry back as planned, at which point it was acknowledged that I was right, and we should have taken the ferry in and the monorail back. We got home mostly without incident, and I was never so happy to get my shoes off.
Next up - Epcot