Rock and I took a 6 day vacation to Disney World in Orlando around mid-September (seriously, time flies). Subie joined us for the first four days. We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and had access to all the parks and also took a day to see Universal Studios. And I’ll just get this stated now; it was seriously one of the best vacations ever! Below, a lengthy list from Bad to Awesome of how it went, and a few pictures that are not in any particular order.
The BAD- Dear lord, are there lines. Lines for rides, lines for food, lines for the bathroom, lines for the bus, lines to take pictures…I do not like lines. That said the longest line we voluntarily stood in was 45 minutes long to see a 30-minute scene of “The Lion King on Broadway Show” at Animal Kingdom (which was awesome). I say voluntarily, because the longest line we actually stood in was about an hour and a half long, after the Electrical Magic parade at Magic Kingdom just to get out of the park and onto our resort bus. Guess who was not a happy tourist that day? Poor Rock and Subie, evil Sin came out and it was not good for anybody :-(
- The walking. Yeah, yeah, it’s an obvious one, but it had to be said. We were so exhausted when we got back, we slept twelve hours straight the next day. That’s not an exaggeration. And maybe the walking wouldn't have been so bad but for the horde. Not the WoW Horde. I'd take lovable orcs, trolls, and the walking undead over the thousands of tiny feet and hands that were swarming every inch of the place and rending the air apart with their furious high-pitched squeals. Yes, I don't necessarily like kids, but the magic of Disney is that you get used to them pretty quick. So much so, that I didn't even remember I had an opinion on it till Rock pointed out that Magic Kingdom is the unofficial spokeperson for birth control. So true.
- Rock on a plane. To be fair, he’s not afraid of heights or of small spaces, it was the “dear god, we’re trusting this human-made piece of metal to not crash 35,000 feet” that got to him. Outwardly he seemed ok, but I was really nervous for him…poor Rock.- Disney Quest’s Build Your Own Rollercoaster. Rock and I built it together and, thinking it would just be a movie of the ride, we went ahead and put in all the crazy loops and figure eights and jumps. And then we’re ushered into a capsule that will simulate the experience. Holy hell. Ok, disclaimer: I am NOT a fan of rollercoasters. I’ll go so far as to say I hate rollercoasters and don’t see the attraction in them, at all. I was not prepared for this ride to feel like an actual rollercoaster but, I don’t know how they do it, you can feel the acceleration (I have been in rollercoasters before, once or twice) and the capsule does flip you upside down and sideways and it jumps and all the rest of it. It was the closest thing to a rollercoaster I rode during the entire trip and it took me completely by surprise.
- That’s about it for badness. I complain about lines but honestly, since it was off-season at the parks, we got into the rides we wanted in 20 minutes or less, and about 80% of the time we just got to walk right on with no waiting.
The GOOD- Disney Quest. It was pretty awesome to play some old school arcades as well as some immersive virtual games all in the same floor space (and five stories of it!). Unfortunately, the virtual games already feel terribly dated and we get better graphics and motion-controls from a Wii. The place was probably the bomb not even five years ago, but it could use a major overhaul. Why hasn’t Disney partnered up with Microsoft or Sony to showcase some in-the-works technology? Which leads me to:
- 3D, 4D, and virtual-immersion attractions. The rides that use 3D technology are still fun in their own right, either because they have cute stories (the PhilharMagic is adorable, with Donald Duck running through various Disney storylines like Fantasia, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid), or have interesting 4D effects (smoke, water sprays, smells, seat movements, lighting effects, human actors), but with the 3D saturation clogging up every local movie theater, the charm has faded a bit. Clearly, just a few years ago, this would have been THE place to experience some solid, fun 3D action. The 4D elements still keep the rides alive, but the 3D technology is now second fiddle.
- The craziness of it all. I spent most of the trip remarking on the strangeness of certain jobs. I mean, someone’s job out there is to be the Sebastian the Crab puppeteer on the Voyage of the Little Mermaid. The show was cute and whacked out but I seriously spent the entire show feeling bad for the guy that has to activate the smoke machine and light effects (though it’s probably just a computer at this point). The kid in me loves seeing the guys in the mouse costumes and the actors dressed up as the Princesses, but I find myself just thinking “how weird is that?” I don’t know, we met “Mary Poppins” at breakfast and she came over to talk to us and I felt like such a dumbass for talking to a woman in a costume pretending to be Mary Poppins, when this woman knows I am not five and therefore don’t actually believe she is Mary Poppins, so we both know she is just a woman in a costume pretending to be Mary Poppins, and that just makes the whole thing…awkward. But she was very adorable.
- Wizarding World at Harry Potter. I’m aghast at myself for putting this here and not in the Awesome category below. They did a fantastic job with the architecture and building facades, and Hogwarts is built to a pretty awesome scale. But there wasn’t a lot of content. The entire place is essentially one big store (shocking, I know) but I was disappointed to see that some things weren’t pushed far enough. Like the candy store from the books (the name escapes me). The candy in the store is your generic grocery store candy: peach rings, Swedish fish, jelly beans, etc. I was really hoping for an actual confectionary, where they make the candy right in the store and you can watch. The joke shop was cute but you can’t play with any of the stuff so you can’t really tell what’s inside the boxes. I didn’t get on the rides because I’m a chicken and they didn’t have any mild versions from what I could tell (no 3D virtual immersion type rides, although Subie tells me the Hogwarts castle ride was close enough). I felt very silly for doing this but of course I tried the “butterbeer” and “pumpkin juice.” The butterbeer was cream soda with extra foam (whipped cream I think) and the pumpkin juice tasted just like pumpkin pie. Very cute and silly. Finally they had an acapella group made up of “students” and of course they sang the "toil and trouble" song, and a few other things. I love acapella so that was a neat surprise. 
The AWESOME- Everything else. But I really should elaborate.
- THE FOOD. Oh my god, the food. I really didn’t expect the food to be all that great, for some reason, and to be honest some things were pretty unremarkable (like all of the quick service/fast food counters in the parks), but we went to some pretty awesome restaurants. My favorites were the ones in the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we stayed. There was an Indian-inspired restaurant (Sanaa) and an African-inspired buffet (Boma) that made me sad I couldn’t keep eating.
- The pool and hot tub at the hotel, and the water park. I’m so glad I got to do some actual swimming this summer. I want regular access to a pool so badly. We only went to Blizzard Beach (not Typhoon Lagoon) where we rode a really fun raft ride.
- All of the parks. I’m trying to rate them but I really can’t. All of the parks feel different enough that I just can’t compare them.
- Epcot: I loved Epcot’s Soaring ride even if I was freaking out for the first few minutes, and Spaceship Earth is very cool (though the storyline ends with Jobs building the first Mac so Disney really needs to update this and add some more scenes at the end…I can’t really get misty-eyed over the first Mac when I have a much better computer that fits in my pocket). World Showcase was very neat but we didn’t have time to see any of the live performances. We did see the belly-dancer in the Morocco restaurant; she wasn’t super authentic but, as Subie pointed out, it is a family restaurant.- Hollywood Studios: this was the smallest park and it doesn’t offer a ton of rides. I loved the Indiana Jones stunt show, more so than the Sinbad stunt show at Universal Studios, but overall Hollywood Studios paled in comparison to Universal. I also loved the 50’s Cafe, which really feels like you stepped into someone’s house from a 50’s TV show. And they had amazing fried chicken and s ‘mores :-) I’m also very glad I got a FastPass for the Toy Story ride because, while it was extremely cute and fun, it does not justify an 80-minute wait in line at all (the standby time for the queue when we redeemed our FastPass).
- Magic Kingdom: I loved this park more than I expected to, I think because it has the most stuff out of any other park. We bought tickets to Mickey’s Not-So-Very-Scary Halloween party, which ended up being absolutely awesome. When I planned the trip, I didn’t devote a full day to MK, thinking it would be mostly kid stuff. So at the last minute we bought tickets to the Halloween thing, which was a trick-or-treat event at the park from 7 to midnight, but the rides are also open. It was awesome because, while everyone else stood in line to get candy, we got to just walk onto all the rides. We walked straight up to the Haunted Mansion twice (best ride ever!). In the end, we went to MK three times: one night for the Electrical Parade, again for the Halloween event, and on the day we left for another three hours. The Halloween parade was more fun than I expected, especially because the crowd was pretty small so we got front row seats (as opposed to the Electrical Parade where it was packed and we had tons of people in front of us). - Animal Kingdom: Rock didn’t really like this one, and I admit I didn’t like how confusing the layout is, but I absolutely love seeing animals and the whole place is essentially one giant zoo. I wasn’t convinced that the Safari felt like a real safari, like other reviewers have said, but as far as zoos go, it was great to drive through all the animal habitats. Different, at least. The Lion King show had acrobats, singers, and dancers, so obviously that ranked high with me. I was upset I didn’t think to get FastPasses for the Dinosaur ride, because by the time we wanted to ride it, the line was 45 minutes long. At least we rode the Jurassic Park ride at Universal.
- Universal Studios: this place is huge! And I think the themes are even more cracked out than Disney’s. They have a Dr. Seuss section where everything (even the trees) looks like the books. They have an ancient temple section that has the Poseidon ride and this restaurant that resembles a cave. I liked the Jurassic Park section, I was not expecting that big drop at the end of that ride but it was fun. They have a comic strip section which had great buildings but I didn’t really recognize the comic strips (it’s older ones like Hagar, Popeye, stuff like that). The superhero section was fantastic and my favorite pictures will forever be Rock posing with Cyclops, Wolverine, and Captain America. Shame there was no Spiderman. The Spiderman ride was my favorite of the entire trip, hands down, even if I had to shut my eyes for a few seconds cause I was getting motion sick. We did the obligatory Jaws and Rock got soaked :-) and saw the Terminator 2 4D show, which is a 3D movie with some parts played by live actors. Very cheesy but very fun. And I think Universal does the movie theme much better, they have entire streets that really feel like actual movie sets, and Disney doesn’t really do that. So I rambled for thousands of words and there are still other things I could talk about. It was a great trip and we were pretty lucky, the weather was great, the crowds weren’t too bad (most of the time), we got on a lot of rides, and I think I ended up seeing about 90% of the stuff I wanted to (which is way better than I expected). And we rode the Haunted Mansion ride four times all told :-) That’s enough of a win right there.
