Meg and Greg’s Tag On Holiday

This is a two part entry. After attending the conference today, we decided to make a road trip with some of the other Australians. We drove towards Orlando to have a night out at Disney World. The infrastructure to support the several theme parks in the area is amazing. Roads, car parks, monorail and on/off-ramps everywhere.

Wednesday: We were greeted at the gates to Disney Magic Kingdom by “Jesus”. I joke you not, the name of the mexican guy at the booth collecting the parking fees was Jesus. So I’ve met Jesus at the gates and he charged me $10 for parking.

There are over 10,000 car parks at Disney so we took stock of our car parking spot and made the trek to the Disney ticketing office and onto the monorail which transports people between all of the parks.

Ryan and Brent (the other Australians) had never been to Disney, we went to Disneyland in Anaheim a couple of years ago so we made a plan and headed towards the most popular rides to get a “fastpass” ticket. Fastpass tickets allow you to schedule a time on a ride without waiting in line.

We got the big rides done pretty quickly and then did space mountain. This is a roller coaster, in the dark. We liked it so much that we did it 3 times. Comparing the left and right circuits. My favourite is the left hand side.

Typical Florida weather kicked in at 9pm with a torrential downpour. We stayed in the park until closing. It still amazes us that people are too lazy to walk to their cars and insist on using the buses to get to their cars.

Thursday: Our tickets were still valid for Disney so we returned to go to Epcot. Epcot is best summarised as both a science and cultural theme park. My favourite ride was Test Track. This is a ride sponsored by General Motors. This ride simulates a testing facility and ends with a high speed driving loop.

What amazed us both was the number of kids (up to 13) in prams/pushers. Disney has fibreglass prams big enough to push these kids around the park. Initially we thought they had some disability. When we saw them get out to go on a ride or get food from the plentiful food courts we could only conclude that these overweight kids aren’t fit enough to walk around the park all day so Disney provides parents with these pushers. The parents were also typically significantly overweight too. We also saw many obese adults using gopher type cars to get around the park. We’ve never seen anything like it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 5:44 am and is filed under USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.