Does this count as the first or the second blog of the twelve blogs of Christmas? Math, including counting, was never one of my special skills. So who wants a little story from Disney? Okay, kids, gather round.
Disney World has often been thought of as a magical place, unlike anywhere else in the real world, and for the most part, I agree. My family and I love to go to Disney, and we have a relatively new tradition to go there for Thanksgiving. Every year, we yank our children out of school and take off the whole week to spend in sunny Orlando, where dreams come true. It started as an excuse to not spend the holiday with my crazy mother, who liked to up the nutbag ante every year, to the point where none of my extended family chooses to spend Thanksgiving together, just so we don’t have to spend it with her. When, at six or seven, my daughter E told me she hated Thanksgiving, I knew I had to come up with some way to make it fun instead of dysfunctional. What’s more fun than going to Disney World, I ask you?
You may not feel the same, but I love Disney. I love the hotels, piss poor values that they may be. I love each of the theme parks in their own way. I love to go to the different restaurants, ride the rides, look in all the stores, and especially people watch. If you took any one aspect of Disney, though, and looked at it individually, no doubt you would want your hundreds of dollars back. What we tolerate in that magical world we would never settle for in the real one.
Let’s start with the hotels, which are far from perfect. The rooms are relatively small, Internet access is not included, the towels and water pressure are shitty, and every other television channel is an infomercial for Disney. I’m already at your property, so stop selling it to me. Every year that we go down to Disney, we like to stay at a different hotel. We mostly stick to the deluxe ones, since my husband is 6’2” and takes up most of a double bed on his own. The deluxe hotels are the only ones with queen sized beds, and at Disney prices, we can’t really spring for two rooms, so we cram ourselves all in one room and then fight over who has to sleep with whom.
Unfortunately, I am very popular as a bed partner in my family. Everyone wants to sleep with me. I usually don’t snore, I don’t require an entourage of stuffed animals, and there is little risk of a Dutch oven on my side of the bed. Quite frankly, I don’t care which family member chooses to sleep with me, as long as I don’t get kicked too much or have mouth breathing right in my face. The constant bickering over it, however, is more than a little annoying.
The hotel themes are the essence of Disney magic though, and that’s where the added value comes in. This year we stayed at the Boardwalk Inn, which is like a beach resort in the Northeast, circa 1920’s. The lobby had the right amount of old fashioned beachy details, down to the replica of the wooden roller coaster and the knickers worn by the bellmen. You almost expected to see men with handlebar mustaches escort women in long woolen bathing suits down to the shore.
I loved it. The rooms themselves were nothing special, and since we didn’t feel like paying extra each night for a good view, ours was of a service road behind the hotel. We had plenty of pillows and even a towel sculpture of a Mickey head, because if it’s good enough for Carnival Cruise Lines, then it’s good enough for Disney. Outside the hotel was a boardwalk complete with restaurants, bars, shops, and even a surrey bike rental. More on that another day and another blog. The best part of the property, without question, was the swimming pool.
Each hotel has a quiet pool for old people and an over the top killer pool for the rest of us. At Coronado Springs, it looks like a Mayan temple. At the Polynesian Hotel, it has a volcano. At the Boardwalk, the pool had sculptures of elephants and the carousel bar, only without horses you could ride, although that would have been a nice touch. The best part was the water slide that looked like an old fashioned wooden roller coaster. At the bottom, where you land in the water, you first passed through a Bozo the clown type face, complete with creepy eyes, curly red hair, and a big pink tongue. The morning we decided to go swimming was the day we flew home, and the air was a chilly seventy degrees. All the Disney pools are heated, which make them bearable for Yankees but still too cold for normal Southerners.
It wasn’t too cold for children, unfortunately, which meant that my husband and I shivered in the water at the bottom of the slide while our girls took turns slipping down that creepy clown’s tongue. My husband commented that it looked like they were being born, and we joked that I should have had a makeover down there for childbirth, just for giggles.
If any of you readers are knocked up, maybe you might want to try it. Dye those pubes bright orange, get them nice and curly, and draw on some clown eyes, maybe add a red nose and some exaggerated clown lips on your, well, you know. Imagine your delivering doctor’s surprise to see you push a baby right out of a clown face. Just maybe, if your doctor is a big Disney fan, he or she might say, “Hey, your snatch reminds me of that slide at the Boardwalk Inn!”
Making memories. Isn’t that what it’s all about?
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