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I am a Disney Convert–Post 1 of Many

November 26, 2010

I never wanted to go to Disney World.  When I was ten years old my parents took me on a family trip to The Magic Kingdom.  I am sure they spent thousands of dollars to do this.  I was there for forty five minutes and demanded to be returned to the safety of the hotel pool, safely away from the crushing crowds.  It was the worst vacation ever.
As time went on, I became anti-everything-mainstream and shunned Disney for a number of reasons:  it was too commercial, Walt Disney was a communist, princesses are so not feminist…and so on.  But it seems, like so many things in my life (Paris, I’m looking at you…again) I was wrong.
Disney is awesome.  It is clean and beautiful and everyone is nice and there are ample public toilets everywhere.  Even the giant hoards of children aren’t screaming or mewling, as they are entertained.  It is cheaper than Vegas, more fun than D.C., and more convenient than, well, anywhere I’ve ever been.  I love Disney World.
We only managed to visit two parks–the Magic Kingdom one morning and Epcot one evening.  I visited Animal Kingdom for a little over two hours one morning as well, before the pre-convention sessions.  I cannot decide which park I liked more–Epcot was a food-and-drink-filled adventure, Animal Kingdom was amazingly well designed, and the Magic Kingdom was everything I’d hoped it would be and more (the ‘more’ being ‘freaking unbelievably empty’).
Our hotel–Disney’s Beach Club Resort–was hands-down the nicest place I have ever stayed and likely the nicest place I will ever stay.  I looked at the regular, non-convention prices upon returning home and there’s just no way we’ll ever be able to afford to stay there on our own.  But I’m glad I’ve had the experience at least once.  My actual words, upon returning to the hotel lobby on our third day there, were: “there’s something wrong with anyone who can find fault in this hotel”.  It was perfect.  There was a man in the lobby who’s only job was to look you in the eye and say “have a magical day”.  I mean come on, how great is that?
I cannot believe we’ve been back for almost a week and I’ve not posted detailed trip reports, but to be fair I’ve been crazy busy.  I’d like to do individual posts for each park, and I absolutely will…as soon as I get a free moment.  As for today, I was busy booking my next trip back, which is officially 159 days away.  Seriously.  But more on that later.

EDIT–This awful formatting is what you get when you start something on a PC, email it to yourself, finish writing it in Pages on your mac and then copy/paste it into WordPress.  Sorry!!!!  It’s killing me, but there’s nothing I can do about it!