So the diet was going well on Day Two of the family vacation. Because we were in a condo unit, we could shop and get my cans of tuna and spinach. I was carrying the shakes and mixing them on the fly…the diet part was really no problem.On day two, we hit Disney’s Hollywood Studios. This was a new name for the park. It used to be called MGM Studios. Someone at MGM must really have pissed off the mouse for them to spend all that money rebranding a whole theme park. We left the condo and started on our way to the park. The extended family had all stayed at a different condo than us. We were using a timeshare slot we own and they were all in timeshares owned by my wife’s aunt. She had cashed in three weeks worth of units for the family trip so they could all be together. I like togetherness as much as the next person, but I really liked having our own secluded place in Kissimmee. We visited them when the family was gathering, but we had a built in escape clause if things got tedious.
So we started on our way to Hollywood Studios and drove over to the park Parking Lot. Yeah, real tiny place…it looked like the pictures I have seen of Area 51. They should give you a map for the Parking Lot, never mind the theme park. At least the theme park has signs and recognizable landmarks and attractions. The Parking Lot is a desolate wasteland as big as 30 football fields and all the vehicles look the same. As a side note, you ever notice how many people drive Toyota’s? No wonder GM is going out of business. I will say this, at least they help you by naming the lot sections…”you are now parked in Goofy Seven…remember that!!”
We had the $10 fee for parking already out and pulled up. The money collector looked at our one day pass and waved at us to go through. The one day pass, however, had been for yesterday. But they never looked. Oh wait. What was this? A flaw in the Disney Order? So we told them about their mistake and gave them the money anyway….WRONG!!! I took off like I just got the green flag at Daytona. Now this was a ride. We saved our SECOND $10 now from our $130 one-night stay at the Disney Resort. My wife started with the math. Total cost of Disney Resort stay was now down to $110 for the night. I can tell you one thing…that pass was staying on the dashboard all week.
I was really in a great rhythm with the diet. I had no problems. I kept mixing the shakes and clocking the walking miles. I fully expected to lose more weight on this vacation than if I was home!
We did a lot of great rides in Hollywood Studios. This park, of all of them, is typically the least crowded. On a slow day, you can see everything if you plan right. Planning is really the key to a Disney World vacation. You have to go online or buy a book and get all the tips. My wife has a Disney Ph.D. If the Army had let her plan the D-Day Invasion and had given her the Intelligence gathering capabilities she uses to plan family vacations, the U.S. would have been in and out of Normandy in 8 hours. So she tells us what shows are happening when, knows the proximate location of each major attraction, and always has a checklist of “must see’s”, “nice-to-have’s” and outright “time-killer throwaways.” My kids are even in tune to the whole battle plan…so much so that they barely even say anything beyond “what’s next?” They are excellent forward scouts and can always see unexpected trends breaking out like unplanned and unmarked Disney parades and Character autograph sessions. They don’t even have to talk…they use hand-and-arm signals. This is effective because the place is really noisy. This was tough when they were little but now that they are 11 and 13 (Disney aged ‘adults’), they are tall enough to be able to point and wave you off a potentially bad situation (like a closed ride).
One thing I noticed on this day was the “help”, the Disney employees. They used to be young eager kids with happy faces. They were excited to be working in the Happiest Place on Earth. What did I see this time? Foreign “twenty-somethings” and the elderly. What the heck happened here? This is the epitome of a ‘buck-saving’ scheme. I can understand doing this when you have a seasonal facility and you do not want to take on full-time year-round permanent help. But Disney World is a full-time park in the nicest environment (barring the usual Hurricanes) in the U.S.! This was a money making scam of the highest order. And did they care about the consumers? No way, not one iota. The foreign workers…well they must have failed the ‘Always Smile 101’ course at Disney University. They were all smirking at the guests and speaking their foreign languages to each other. They didn’t care if you were happy, sad, hot, cold…just “keep moving” so I can get to my break. The funny thing is that THEY weren’t the worst part! I expect them to be miserable after they were practically kidnapped out of the Ukraine with some Disney Magic. The real killer here was the “oldies but moldies” they had hired. There is nothing more cranky on a hot day that a 70 year old man or woman forced into mouse slave labor because they didn’t earn enough to retire. This visit, there were more of them than ever. Hey, it’s a real park perk to be able to go on the American Adventure with people who have actually been there in 1920! I thought the old guy on the ride was an animatron…until he walked off the stage. So here’s a hint. If you are going through the park, and Pluto is sitting peacefully on the park bench, he isn’t sleeping. It’s probably a senior-citizen dead from heat exhaustion. Call 911.
So we had a pretty good day. The “must do” attraction was the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular. It was number one on my son’s list. We had it on the battle plan for the first show of the day, but the House of Louse had cancelled it. It had caused a major remapping of our plan at the last minute. Thank God my wife had done so much pre-planning. She was able to put alternate plan Bravo into action. That called for us to Fast-Pass the Indian Jones show and be at the last show of the day. The Fast-Pass meant we were at the front of the line and, due to the morning cancellation, this show would probably be mobbed. So we were in front of the line and, to my son’s delight, had great seats in the 3rd row, center. While we sat there, I noticed that none of the overhead fans were working. This was a 90 degree humid August day. I was slowly getting used to the belt-tightening that was going on in Happy Land. 5 minutes before the show begins, out comes a cranky old fart to yell at us. He wants us to move in tightly to make room for more people. Yeah right. 90 plus degrees, no fans…I am not sitting on top of anybody. So it was very funny to see full-grown adults all thinking the same thing at the same time. Everyone shifted left a little, then right a little, and then sat right back on their spot. Still no extra space and just the way we wanted it. So two minutes later he is back. Now he is yelling at us. We “better move in” or we will be kicked out of the event. I start looking around…because I know I am no longer in the Disney World resort. I have just been transported to some kind of street carnival and we are all back in 3rd grade. Now, I can see the crazed look in the eyes of the rest of the people around me. We can all play this game. We do the full-tilt shift one more time…but this time, we all flare our elbows out a little to give the appearance that there is no room. This was funny to me because I was dieting to get thin and now here I was trying to be as fat as possible. Now the guy is back and he starts picking on individual people in spots and berating them until they move. “It’s a small world afterall, it’s a small world…tra-la-la-la-la…this sucks.” If he points me out in this heat I am going to knock him on his ancient ass in front of the whole crowd. I will probably get a standing ovation. One thing you know about Disney is that they start their shows on time. Thanks to their adherence to at least that one time-honored tradition, the old fart stopped and left the stage area. Good riddance.
We went home that night exhausted. It felt good to eat, lay down and just watch some TV and go to bed early.
The rest of the week was spent with family, tolerating the crowds and heat and just having more laughs.
We did Blizzard Beach. Great water park with an awesome drop on one of their runs called the Summit Plummet…the 120 foot drop will you get up to 70 miles per hour and an unbelievable “wedgy.” We also saved $10 on parking…ka-CHING!
We did Animal Kingdom…loved the Expedition Everest roller coaster, the Kali River Rapids and the Kilimanjaro Safari ride. We also saved $10 on parking…ka-CHING CHING. The resort hotel cost was now, by my wife’s estimate, a bargain at $90 for that one night!
We did Epcot. We pulled up to the Parking Lot and there he was. Every so often you find one of these people. You find a person who HAD an important job and is now reduced to THIS job. This guy was about 65 and looked like a retired CIA agent. He had that glare that lets you know that HE believes everyone is a terrorist. He looked the car up and down, in and out. He looked very close at us. He gave us very slow, detailed explanations of how we were to behave in the park I looked out my rear-view mirror. Traffic was backed up all the way to Jacksonville. “Dude, they check all the bags at the park entrance, you are the PARKING LOT ATTENDANT!”, I thought. Then it happened.
“Let me see that Parking Lot pass”, he said.
“What, no ‘please’?...gulp”
“Sure, here you go”, I said.
“Hey, this is expired.”
“Yeah, ugh, we know, the kids wanted it as a souvenir…let me have that back”, I said as I snatched it out of his hands. He was going to keep it but we might need it to further fleece the ‘Money Grubbing Mouse.’ I threw the Gestapo his $10 and flew out of there. Whew! That was close. Score one for the House of Louse.
All in all, it was a very fun time. As an epilogue, I lost about 6 lbs that week! So you can ‘have your cake and eat it too” when you are on a diet in Disney World. Just as long as you have your cake with Spinach!
Next: How diet soda kills you AND makes you fat.
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