I am typing these notes on my phone from the Shades of Green hotel lobby bathroom. Ryan and I had to explain this practice — when and why you utilize a bathroom other than the one in your hotel room — when we got back from Epcot earlier today. The boys had immediately switched on the TV and were watching Spongebob in a trance, leaning on the furniture in a suspicious way. Soon the room filled with a poisonous smell. We barked at them, our shirts over our mouths and noses, and ordered them to go use the lobby bathroom. “What?” they asked, confused. When you stay in a hotel room with other people and you need to poop, you don’t stink up the room, we explained. You go to the lobby.
“We’re just farting.”
Visiting Disney World for the first time in almost 30 years has sent my brain tumbling down a lot of space-time wormholes, but some of the most potent memories are unearthed when I see bedraggled teens — sweaty, hair down, impractical-looking clothes and footwear, cheap makeup wearing off, a sour and dazed look on their tired faces — and I remember exactly how it felt to try and sustain your look, your weird armor, while on a summertime family vacation. It used to be so impossible to just dress for the weather and the day. What if you put your hair back and wore a dorky hat? What if you just had sunscreen on your face and comfortable sneakers on your feet? Who’s going to see you?
E V E R Y B O D Y
There are also a lot of pretty and put-together teens walking around with their families too, with perfect hair and skin and sensible but also stylish outfits. Obviously my sympathies lie elsewhere, with the civilians. Godspeed to them.
Every time I told people about this trip — Disney World in July with my family, including my parents, my sister and her family — everybody would shriek ORLANDO IN JULY??? and I would immediately apologize, like: Ha ha I know, it’s so stupid, we’re so dumb, we’re going to die! And then I would spool out this long explainer like: It’s just that the cousins don’t have the same school break schedules, except for winter break, but apparently it’s hell to do Disney over Christmas too because of the crowds, and I guess we could have just picked some other time in the fall or spring but honestly we didn’t want to have them miss school, can you imagine how annoyed their teachers would be if we yanked them out randomly in the middle of October and then they came peacocking back into the classroom in their Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and so yeah anyway I’m thinking we’re going to need some of those neck fans to keep us cool and blah, blah, blah
It is hot as balls here (95°) but it’s hotter back home in DC (105°). The heat feels familiar, unremarkable, like the unfortunate fact of life that it is. I should have responded instead: Did you not also pass through the crucible of relentless sun and humidity during your childhood summer vacations in the mid-Atlantic? What did your family do instead, retire to the fresh, breezy wilds of the north? Sounds nice tbh but no offense some of us are made of sterner stuff and/or are insane
The days start at 6:45 am, when I meet my mom and sister out on the hotel patio in the soft purple light, phones in hand, to strategize about who is going to do what when the clock strikes seven and thousands of other people begin to digitally jockey for a spot that day on Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind. Once Gus gets wind of these meetings he begins joining us, trying to find a way to be useful, hovering over our shoulders, double checking that everyone knows which ride they’re trying to book, offering to perform the countdown to 7am like it’s New Year’s Eve. My beautiful, doomed eldest child, who thrills to logistics, who loves the rush of a well-executed plan!
In one sense we are on our phones constantly, lost in the sauce of the Disney Parks App: First that early morning reservation high-wire act, then plotting our course across the parks, looking up wait times, checking to see whether our group number for the Star Wars ride has been called, putting in orders for chili dogs and fountain sodas, scrolling through our watermarked photos with Goofy and Max. But in another sense I am not on my phone at all. I take almost no photos or video with it, and I find myself going cold turkey on my one remaining social media vice because walking, planning, navigating crowds, using my Nikon, having fun, managing children and coordinating meetups among various family members (while also experiencing unpleasant levels of heat and humidity, okay fine) burns me out to such a degree that even when I have a moment to indulge my smartphone tic, the phone stays in my pocket and I just stare into space.
On our first night, the kids pass out at 8 and I take my phone out to a lounge chair by the hotel pool. I post a bathing suit thirst trap, have one good long scroll, then change my mind, delete the story and close Instagram for the rest of the trip. Soon thereafter I start getting thirsty push notifications from the platform about all the posts that I haven't been seeing. Check your stories? Check your stories tonight, queen?
Before we came here, I was grateful that we’d waited until the kids were old enough, brave enough and tall enough* to ride everything. In the years leading up to this trip I’d insisted that we would not be doing Disney until our two kids (one average height, the other always threatening to tumble off the short end of the doctor’s office bell curve) were big enough to ride Space Mountain, god damnit.
*the one exception being Tron and its 48 inch height minimum, which in the end Gordon was a hair’s breadth too short for, even as he strained with all his might against the measuring stick, willing his spine to elongate. It was a long but kind of heartwarming walk back down that winding ramp, with me rubbing his back, him wailing with the purest sorrow, and other Tron-goers passing by, literally putting their hands to their faces and/or hearts in a kind of rolling salute to this tragically thwarted 6-year-old.
Now that we’re here, though, I see the value of visiting with small children, because it shrinks the rides and activities that are available to you down to a manageable number. We have a four day pass, we decided to skip the Animal Kingdom altogether, and even so, a couple of hours into our first day it became clear that we would not be able to get to everything we wanted to do. Every decision comes with trade-offs. For a while I was confused about this sensation of extreme time scarcity. During our visits to Disney in my childhood, I didn’t remember getting to the end of the day and realizing we missed entire sections of the park. As long as we flexed our military family muscles and got up at the crack of dawn to be at the gates when they opened, it was easy to hit all of the big rides and then some, wasn’t it?
Then my galaxy brain kicked in and I realized it’s because there are still the same number of hours in a day but Disney has kept adding stuff. We didn’t have to give up Splash Mountain in order to do Tron in the nineties because there was no Tron in the nineties (but there still is Splash Mountain, aka Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which our nuclear family unit did not, in fact, get around to riding).
I see now that if we’d visited when the kids were sweet little toddlers, we would have done the Dumbo ride and the Mad Hatter teacup ride and the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride which is now Pooh-themed, and then we could have sing-songed “all done!” and called it a day. As-is we have given most of the little kid rides a pass; there has been no time for them. I’m trying to decide if this makes me sad, or what.
Actually it doesn’t because Gordon, our sweet Gord, is still young enough that he wants to do character meet-and-greets (Gus will do them too sometimes, but only while putting out Too Cool Dude vibes) and I have discovered an unexpected, almost maniacal willingness on my part to facilitate this desire. On our second day, as I stood in line with him and my mom to meet Pluto, he started panicking about how he didn’t have anything for Pluto to sign. My mom dredged up a piece of paper from her bag and I texted Ryan, who was taking his union break nearby, ordering him to go into the closest souvenir store immediately to see if they had autograph books (they did not). Later, back at the hotel, I would take the kids to the convenience store to see if they had any and there was a small selection: One autograph book with Mickey on the cover, one with Daisy and Minnie, and one with Stitch. The three genders.
Autograph book finally in hand, Gordon and I spent the back half of the trip gathering as many signatures as we could. We nabbed all the rest of the heavy hitters — Donald and Daisy, Goofy, Mickey and Minnie — and were somewhat chagrined to learn that Chewbacca and Rey will pose for a picture but won’t sign things (primadonna much??). On our last day, the two of us spent a truly blissed out fifteen minutes in some kind of long-forgotten, dark and extremely well air-conditioned pavilion at Hollywood Studios where you can browse through Star Wars paraphernalia and hop in a quick 5-minute line to meet an alarmingly legit Darth Vader. He does not do autographs either, but he does butter you up by complimenting you on your Impressive Power before asking if you will join the Dark Side. Gordon had already pledged his fealty to a couple of roving Stormtroopers so his “yes” came as no surprise.
Later, when I was showing Gus the photos I’d taken of his brother and the characters he’d met, the Cool Dude mask slipped for a moment. He’d declared waiting in line for Mickey to be for babies and went off with Ryan instead, but it was no average meet-and-greet out on the street, it was inside a fully kitted-out Sorcerer’s Apprentice set. “Oh wow,” he murmured, zooming in on the props, on Mickey’s hat, a note of regret creeping into his voice. “That actually looks so cool.” Hey quick question do you remember being a child, feeling your own childhood slipping away from you?
Fortunately for him, it’s possible to get it back someday: Wedged between your child and your niece, vinyl seat sticky against your thighs, rolling through the Haunted Mansion, hooting and hollering and watching the kids cheer for the ghosts and ghouls down below, waltzing and spinning for them exactly as they did for you, just the other day, it seems.
Recommended
Disney World! Specifically if your family includes grandparents who heavily subsidize the cost of the trip for everyone. Let’s hear it for Gramma and Grumpy (DJ airhorn)!!!!
By the end of our trip we had really gotten the hang of the delicate interplay between Genie+, Genie+ Lightning Lane, the other paid reservation system whose name I don’t recall, plus good old fashioned rushing to the most popular ride right at rope drop. It is an insane and very expensive logistical tapestry that you must weave these days if you would like to avoid trudging from one 90-minute line to the next and I would love to share all of our hard-won knowledge with you but they completely revamped the system like a week after we left. Anyway I do recommend playing their nasty, neoliberal little game because breezing past a bunch of bozos as you arrive for your 11:45 am Tower of Terror reservation is, unfortunately, an amazing sensation and worth the extra money.
That said I also really recommend filling your interstitial moments with the rides and attractions that nobody gives a shit about anymore. When you and your family are at the breaking point, when overstimulated and overheated do not begin to describe it, when the press of humanity is closing in and the sun is blazing down and there is no shade anywhere to be found, just check the app: The “Carousel of Progress” and its zero-minute wait will appear before you, a shimmering oasis in the desert. That, and the Figment ride, and the big theater at Epcot where we watched a 15 minute propaganda video about Canada — they all arrived, boring and dark and air-conditioned, at exactly the right moment. Bless them.
As far as the newer, big ticket rides go, I recommend visiting them without doing any research about them beforehand, if possible. When we arrived for our Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance reservation the kids kept asking what the ride was going to be like, and we kept telling them we honestly didn’t know. It was maybe a roller coaster? Actually maybe not, maybe it was a simulation type ride? We’ll just have to see! I realize now, writing this, that we were enjoying a very specific kind of privilege, which is having kids who are willing and able to journey forth into the unknown in this way. Anyway if you can swing it, give yourself the gift of being surprised, because I gotta be real with you? I entered that ride as one person? And I emerged from it as another. I walked out into the sunlight, hand in hand with my family, filled with pure delight and joy, tears in my eyes as I reflected on what we had just experienced together. I don’t even care about Star Wars! But it was so cool!! Don’t look it up!!!
“Oh wow,” he murmured, zooming in on the props, on Mickey’s hat, a note of regret creeping into his voice. “That actually looks so cool.” Hey quick question do you remember being a child, feeling your own childhood slipping away from you?
... 'Z'AMAZE, this hit all the disney notes i know
The sister co-signs all recommendations!