Happy Place?

There were a few things I knew from the outset.  It would be long and painful. I would be off the bike for nearly a week. It would be expensive, and I would probably end up sick.  I'm talking, of course, about a visit to the happiest place on earth, Disney World, and I was correct on all four counts.

We headed out from New Orleans for the long drive down to Orlando at around 6 am on a Monday morning. Meanwhile Danielle and Shannon were flying from Seattle to meet us there. I almost never make long drives on weekdays, and was a little surprised how easy it was. Even the notorious I-4 stretch was relatively sane as we approached Orlando at around 4:30 pm.

Just checking.....

This was the first time I'd been to Disney World since they started using RFID chips for everything. My little wristband held the key to our hotel room, our park admission, Fastpass reservations, etc.  We decided against linking our credit card to it, but that was also an option. Since Candy had bought the park "tickets" online through Orbitz when she'd arranged for the flights from and to Seattle, and then had added an extra day of room reservations at the last minute, things got a little confused and we had to get new wristbands after the first day, which involved multiple locations and multiple people, but it finally got done.  Our first day was actually at Universal Studios rather than a Disney park, although they are practically indistinguishable. The crowds weren't very bad, which I found surprising since I had been expecting the worst. Still, there were the usual long periods of standing in lines. Day two was mostly at Animal Kingdom, followed by Epcot, which was actually quite nice. We didn't really have much of a plan, but Danielle had downloaded the Disney App (which is pretty impressive) and gotten Fastpasses for some of the key attractions. I was amazed that the entire park had solid cellular, data, and even wireless connectivity, and I can't even begin to imagine how many point-of-sale transactions they are processing every minute. The behind the scenes data network infrastructure is always the most amazing part of Disney World to me.

We stopped to eat at the English pub, where I had a stout along with my hamburger and chips. The hit for four people was over $100, of course. We returned there for the fireworks show because there's a little patio area down behind the pub that's right on the water and is one of the best places to watch the fireworks show since few people know about it and even fewer can figure out how to get down there. All this time I'm thinking how the parks are less crowded than I'd expected, considering the holidays.

Spectacular as usual

Well, Christmas day we got up early and took the Disney bus (they run about 400 buses!) to the Magic Kingdom.  It was packed. I've been to Disneyworld a few times over the years, but this was the most crowded I'd ever seen it. After a couple of hours Danielle and Shannon bailed and went back to the hotel for a while while we soldiered on, waiting in some long lines since the only Fastpasses we had were for later in the evening. We ended up eating a dinner of hot dogs and fries, sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for one of the parades to start, where we met back up with Danielle and Shannon. We were able to knock out a couple of rides like Space Mountain with our Fastpasses before the big electric light parade started, which was nice but of course really, really crowded. Then we hit a few more rides before finally heading back to the hotel around 11 pm. We didn't stay for the midnight fireworks.  There was a fair amount of traffic for the drive back on Saturday, but it wasn't too bad and we were back home by 5 pm.  This morning I woke up with a sore throat.  I knew my chances of making it through the trip without getting sick were slim. Aside from the thousands of snotty-nosed kids running around the theme parks, Candy, with whom I'd spent about 18 hours in the car, had been working through a cold for the past week and Danielle was kind of sick on Friday. All I can do now is hope for the best, but at least the Christmas in Disneyworld trip is behind me.