The House of Louse (Part Two)

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.

The House of Louse (Part One)

The diet went great for the first three weeks. I lost about 18 lbs, 8lbs in the first week. Diets work best when you can establish a rhythm to your life and just stay in the pattern. For the first three weeks, I had done that. One style of discipline carries over to other styles of discipline and everything seems to work in sync. The times when you feel challenged are when the patterns have to break. It makes you nervous and then you have to figure out how to work within that change. It’s not easy, but that’s life.

My first real challenge to my new pattern was week four. It was August and time for the family vacation. It wasn’t just the wife and kids this time. It was my wife’s entire extended family. Because if you are going to break a rhythm pattern, why just break it? Why not shatter it? Her brother, two sisters, and their entire families were along for the ride. 19 of us. And where were we going? Why, the happiest place on earth of course, Walt Disney World. Really, is there anything more fun in August than standing in long lines with ten million sweaty people in 105 degree heat and humidity? I think not! It’s the American dream vacation. This year, we will spend August tied to wooden stakes in a hot Costa Rican jungle! In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this wasn’t my first choice. Given the democratic system that exists on my wife’s side of the family, my 1/19th percentage of the vote doesn’t carry even 1/100th of the weight. This is because I am considered one of the ‘non-blood’ out-laws. So the clan choice had been made. We would all trek down to Orlando to visit the House of Louse (my version of Toon-Disney’s ‘House of Mouse’).

I used to be a huge fan of Disneyworld. When my wife and I got married 20 years ago, we actually went there two years in a row without kids. When the kids came along, we went twice again, and then also did a Disney Cruise. So over the past 20 years, we had done Disney quite a bit. I always loved it. But over the past 10 years or so, and I am sure you have all noticed it, they have become a little less about your good time and a lot more about their money. They seem to have evolved the ‘Disney Magic’ into a new trick that consists of moving money from YOUR pocket into THEIR pocket. POOF! And they have become highly skilled at it. They used to be very good at making the trash in the theme parks disappear. Now they did it with your bank account. I think this really started happening as Michael Eisner became more entrenched in the business and the Disney family was pushed out.

In the late 80’s, Disney started the empire rolling again with the re-emergence of their cartoon movie empire. Remember when “The Little Mermaid” came out? It was like seeing a family friendly Broadway show. The artistry, the music, the funny snappy dialogue, it was real family fun. You could watch these movies over and over again. When they were released to videotape (can you remember those?), the kids DID watch them over and over again. Speaking of patterns, they had gotten their own little one going. “Beauty and the Beast” (the first animated movie ever nominated for an Oscar!), “Aladdin”, “The Lion King”, “Pocahontas”…every year you could count on it. Famous stars doing voice-overs, catchy songs you would sing to yourself, it was infectious. The House of Louse was on a roll and really building to something great. They got more TV exposure…their own cable channel! It was endless. Then, as patterns do, the public shifted to other areas of interest. The movies started being OK but not great. They seemed to be the same thing over and over. So Disney shifted gears. Did they get more creative? No. They decided to take the exceptional characters from the backlog of the big successful movies and make new sequels. Only they did not make new high-quality movies for the theater. They went for our wallets. They made crappy sequels with substitute star voice-overs, terrible songs and third rate artwork. They found Mel Gibson’s brother to replace his voice in Pocahontas. His brother?! I didn’t even know he had a brother. Where did they get this guy…some swamp in Australia? They slapped this stuff together and sold it ‘Coming Soon – Direct to Video.’ This was the beginning of the end. It wasn’t about us. It wasn’t about high quality entertainment. It was about the money.

My opinion on Disney has evolved, obviously, to a defensive posture. The game now is, “How can I keep the House of Louse from extracting money from my wallet that is over and above the value they are giving me.” With that in mind, the vacation was on!

Now I also had a diet to consider here. I couldn’t just throw away three weeks and kill the progress I had made. There were people in the diet class who had done exactly that. They had gotten out of the normal pattern and just said, “I will go back to my old habits for a week and then return to the diet.” One thing about this diet that I had agreed to up front…this was a life-style change for me. I wanted to change my habits and that meant ALL THE TIME, not just when it suited me. I decided to look at this positively. I brought a box (24 count) of powdered shakes. I figured that I could carry them in the park and mix them with water and that would be lunch. It would be phenomenally cheaper than the “cheese” the mouse would be trying to sell me. I could go with salad at dinner and then add the meat protein when I got back to our condo. Also, exercise was a critical component to the diet. If you have never been to the House of Louse, know this. You will walk. And walk. And run. And sweat. And walk. In the heat, you will cover about 5-8 miles per day in those parks. Run here, run there…”my ‘Fast Pass’ is for the Tower of Terror and it is on the other side of the park…RUNNNNNN”! If I had one concern it was this…”how do I endure this on 900 calories per day?” My doctor told me I should bring an extra shake for each day. Really? ANOTHER 160 calories? Thank God. I thought I was going to have a problem here.

We had all rented condo’s in Orlando. If you have never done this, you should look into it. It is as cheap as hotels and a lot more comfortable. There are also an amazing number of deals out there if you turn vacationing into a science, like my wife’s side of the family. The first night, a Friday, we stayed on Disney property at one of their park hotels. The condo stay started on Saturday night, so we needed one night at a hotel. It was OK. A small hotel accommodation with a lot of Disney art sprinkled around for effect…I think Tinkerbell does that stuff while people are sleeping. I did notice that the place wasn’t as clean as it had been my previous visits. Very few employees were around to smile and make sure everyone was ‘happy.’ It cost about $130 for the one night. The best part of this was a parking pass for the theme park. The theme park parking was free. Yippeee! We had our first savings of the week! We saved $10 for parking.

We had the 5 day base ticket. 4 Adults for $231…each. I know what you are thinking, because I thought the same thing. I have a 5th and 6th grader with me…where are my “Children’s” tickets? Oh no. Not at the House of Louse. They have slightly different standards. They consider you a child only if you are actually so small that you cannot go on 95% of the rides. They consider that to be the 5-9 year old range. So I have to tell my 10 year old son that he is now a “man”. “Go hunt something…like the stinking ‘Money Grubbing Mouse’ running around the theme park. Bring it back in a body bag”.

The whole family decided they would go to the same park the first day, the Magic Kingdom. It was the last decision all day that would be made peacefully ‘together.’ Did you ever try to do something like this with 19 people?

“Do you all need to sit together on the ride”, asked the attendant.

“Welllll, no…not really”, someone would reply.

The attendant did not have to be a linguist to know that that was double-speak for, “yes, can you go extremely out of your and all the other patrons’ ways to get all 19 of us together?”

I had sucked down my shake in the parking lot and had been running from ride to ride with the mob known as my extended family. The whole time, I was making sure I was fully hydrated. Around 12:30 in the afternoon, while I was in a mad sprint from Space Mountain to somewhere in Frontierland, the park started to lean sideways. Or was it me? Nope. It was the park. So when the park leaned sideways, so did I. And then back again. This was interesting. Usually you have to actually be ON a ride to experience vertigo on this level. Time to sit down and have my lunch. Yessiree, the vertigo was going to be cured with a 160 calorie fixer upper. Lunch was the breaking point for ‘family time.’ Starving sweating people who have different budget constraints for park spending have a knack of completely forgetting the democratic processes that got them to this lovely place. My daughter and I stopped at the first outpost we could find in Frontierland so she could get a hot dog and soda and I could mix my shake. Everyone else was scattered somewhere between our spot and Thunder Mountain. Thank God for cell phones.

The diet was fine after that. We went on many rides, had our fun, and left the House of Louse at about 5PM. We were tired (me, more than usual), hungry again, and out of patience. I didn’t want to see another extended family member until Christmas. If we hadn’t committed to 5 days of this, we might never have returned.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Next: Vacation and Diets - PART TWO