A Frizzy Disney Diary About This Page:

[MissFrizz]

[Author’s note: What is this post? Well, I wrote this not knowing whether anyone else was ever going to read it. (I edited it for you though, aren’t I nice?) I wrote it because I needed to write. It becomes the story of how my first Disney trip came to be. I decided to share because I’m personally always looking for more Disney stories to read. If it’s not your cup of tea (it’s very long, and not yet complete) I get it. No hard feelings. However, I hope at least a few of you will find it entertaining.]

I’ve got a Disney trip planned for just a day shy of eleven months from now. You would think that, given that huge time gap, I would be capable of thinking about something other than Walt Disney World. However, you would be wrong. I’m living off of Passporter trip reports, Disney Food Blog updates, and reading The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World cover to cover (thankfully for my wrists, I’m reading the epic tome on my Nook). I’m also, however, driving my family completely insane with my ceaseless Disney chatter.

Generally, it is at this point in my obsession that I would start writing a pre-trip report, but with the trip so far in the future, my plans are premature. Nearly every aspect is unconfirmed, much of the detail waiting on whether or not I get the job I’m currently in the interview process for. I’m superstitious enough to worry about jinxing my chances by excitedly proclaiming a week-long stay at the Beach Club Resort. Even if I don’t score the job, I still plan on making it to the World, but it will be in more modest digs and involve more counter service meals.

My solution is this: a Disney diary. Separate from my other journaling, this will be a place to vent my excitement and my musings. I haven’t decided if I’ll make this public or not…I’m tempted to, because I love making Disney stories available to my fellow Mouse obsessed. I have a tendency to start things like blogs (and, indeed, trip reports) but never finish them. I’ve never gained enough of a readership for anyone to mind, but it’s still embarrassing.

I’ll start in the logical place: my conversion to the Church of Mickey.

I never went to Walt Disney World as a child, so my first trip is more easily remembered than some peoples’. It was only a little more than four years ago, in April of 2009. I was 17 and had just dropped out of high school due to an anxiety disorder and severe depression. At my lowest, I was thinking about death and dying every day, though I luckily never attempted anything. It was a bad time in my life, but don’t worry, this story is where it all starts getting better.

In early March, my parents and I were fine tuning the plans for our annual trip to central Florida.

Yep, that’s right. We went Florida every year, but hadn’t set so much as a toe on Disney property.

No, instead we headed a few miles further down I-4 (me looking forlornly at each Disney exit sign) to the town of Lakeland, Florida. Every year, the Lakeland-Linder airport is host to a six day long, Tuesday-Sunday airshow and fly-in. My father is a private pilot and lifelong aviation enthusiast and Sun ‘n’ Fun, as the event is known, is one of his yearly pilgrimages. My mother and I are not quite as fanatic about flying, but we enjoy it, and the event, enough to look forward to making the eleven hour drive from Cary, North Carolina to Lakeland every spring. We camp in a temporarily converted cow pasture for a week, taking a tractor pulled shuttle the half mile through the campgrounds to show proper every day.

Yes, seriously.

Campsites are assigned on a first come, first served basis. You show up, pay, and plunk your tents down. Because of this, those wishing to camp, say, in some of the sparse shade or away from the noise of the 24 hour generator RVs, do well to show up a few days early. So our habit is to drive down all day on Sunday, set up camp, and do something in the area for a day on Monday before the show begins on Tuesday.

In previous years we’d gone to the Kennedy Space Center or the nearby flying museum, Fantasy of Flight. One particularly soggy year (for which I was, blessedly, not present) my parents spent the day watching people attempting pull their massive RVs out of copious amounts of mud. As entertaining as that had been, we thought we might like to go a different route in terms of entertainment this time.

Every year my parents asked my brother (though he stopped coming once he went off to college) and I what we wished to do on that free Monday. Every year, I said “DISNEY!” without much hope. I’m the youngest in my family, I figured that if they hadn’t taken me by the time I was a teenager, there wasn’t much hope of me going before I was grown with my own little ones.

I didn’t know much of anything about Walt Disney World, at this point. I was still one of those people who messed up which coast Disneyland was on and which one Disney World was on. My view of the Mouse House was cobbled together from episodes of television I’d seen where they make the trek to Florida. I knew there were multiple parks, but I wasn’t sure how many. I knew that Epcot was rumored to be lame and the Tower of Terror to be, well, terrifying. I knew you could ride Dumbo, because this was the attraction in the background of every single Walt Disney World commercial I saw in my childhood. Most of all, I knew there was a castle. I used to say, “I would give anything, if I could just see the castle. I wouldn’t have to ride any rides; all I want is to see the castle.”

I grew out of a lot of things, but part of me never grew out of wishing I was a princess. (Don’t get me wrong, even at my littlest I was always a bada*s princess who knew how to sword fight. When I played pretend, I befriended the dragons the knights tried to slay and turned them into allies. I rescued princes while riding a unicorn, but I digress). There’s still something intoxicating about the idea that, secretly, there’s more to you than anyone suspects. That really you are very special and destined for greatness. I think a lot of women still hold onto a piece of that fantasy in their hearts. Why else would so many brides opt for a tiara and sweeping ball gown on their wedding day?

That year, I was particularly vulnerable, emotionally. I never though dropping out of high school was even possible for me. I had no real plans and was feeling a lot like I had no real future. The princess fantasy was more appealing to me then, at seventeen, than it had ever been when I was seven. So that year, when I suggested we visit Disney World for a day, I didn’t have any more hope than I’d had in previous years, but I had a much greater yearning.

Maybe my parents sensed that yearning. I’m not sure what made this year so different to them from other years that they were willing to try Disney. But they did. I was beyond surprised when they told me, a bit more than a month before we left, that we were going to Walt Disney World. I never thought it would happen.

You see, my family is not unfamiliar with theme parks. We’d gone as a foursome to Busch Gardens in Virginia and had a nice time. We rode all the coasters multiple times and came home exhausted from our long day. There were many parts of it we enjoyed greatly, but there were also things we didn’t like. The kitschy, platicky feel. The pushy sales. The low-quality, high-price food. We endured all that for the day and had a good time, but my parents, especially, could not comprehend people who made a week-long vacation out of visiting theme parks.

As the emperor of theme parks, they assumed the experience would be comparable to all their other theme park experiences, but magnified. More expensive. More plastic. More pushy sales. And what’s more, the horror stories of massive Disney crowds had reached my parents ears. “How is that fun?” (I imagine) they thought. “How is that a vacation?”

So I knew they didn’t expect much from our day in the Magic Kingdom, but they were going for my sake. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be sad to only go for a day and I told them what I had thought for so long, “As long as I get to see the castle, that’s all I need.”

From the moment they told me, I never confused Walt Disney World and Disneyland again.

I was elated. It was the happiest I remembered feeling in a long time. They saw me smile for the first time in months. Planning our day at Magic Kingdom was transformative for me. Like magic, I suddenly had a purpose. I was no longer the anxiety ridden, depressed, high school dropout, struggling to get out of bed and shower and pretend to be semi-normal every day. Now, I was the self-appointed family vacation planner. I threw myself into researching Disney so thoroughly, it shocked everyone, including myself.

The first thing I did was visit the official Walt Disney World site. I discovered there were, in fact, four theme parks, a million hotels, 50 zillion restaurants, and a bajillion “attractions” (NOT rides). Faced with the overwhelming data, I fetched my mother, and went to Barnes and Noble. It was here that I discovered, what I consider to be: “The Tome of Disney Sanity,” the “Bringer of Disney Clarity,” and “Salvation for the Disney Novice.” You might have heard it called a Passporter.

We bought another guidebook as well, though I don’t remember which one. I don’t own it any longer and it clearly failed to make an impression that could compare with the Passporter. I loved everything about it. Here was everything you needed to know about Disney, logically organized, with concise but complete details, and nifty organizing pockets to boot.

Best of all, it led me to the Passporter community, which is the best group of people you can find online. I became immediately addicted to reading other people’s trip reports. And wouldn’t you, if the first one you’d ever read was CalderCup’s “Return of the Son of CLT”?

I didn’t stop at lurking on the forums, though. I Tivo-ed every Disney special the travel channel could offer up and inhaled them. Often, my mom would sit in on parts of the shows with me and say things like, “Wow, that actually looks pretty cool.” And it did. It all looked, in fact, amazing. We were awed by Expedition Everest. The size of the yeti, the ingenuity of the track— we wanted to do it. Soarin’, too, looked like an experience you’d be crazy to pass up.

Can you see the problem yet? Neither of those attractions my mother and I were so impressed by were in the Magic Kingdom. The more I learned about the World, the less my “all I need to see is the castle” axiom was true. But still, I could never, ever, bring myself to go to Walt Disney World and NOT see the castle. No matter how many hang gliding simulations or audio animatronic yetis you wave under my nose. No, what I needed was simply more time. I needed another day at Walt Disney World. So I went to my parents. Here is a reconstruction of our conversation.

Me: So Disney is pretty big.

Parents: …

Me: In fact, the whole resort is the size of two Manhattans.

Parents: …

Me: There are four theme parks.

Parents: …

Me: And there’s a lot cool stuff in those other three parks, too.

Parents: …

Me: Imagine how much we could see if went down a day early. I mean, Mom, we could do the yeti ride and that Soarin’ thing.

Mom: We’ll think about it.

So that’s how the plan changed from driving down on Sunday and spending Monday in the Magic Kingdom, to driving down on Saturday, spending Sunday in Epcot and the Magic Kingdom, and spending Monday at Animal Kingdom.

Other than the extra day, we planned to spend the whole trip in our usual way. That is, camping in a cow pasture. This would mean driving from Lakeland to Walt Disney World and back every day, which took about an hour each way. We knew this wouldn’t be any great picnic, but we were fine with it.

My father was explaining this plan to his friend, Pete (also a pilot), who is huge Disney lover. He and his wife have been DVC members for years and were, at this time, making at least one trip a year to Mouse Mecca. I wasn’t present for their conversation, so I can only imagine the look on Pete’s face when my father told him we’d not only be staying off property, but would, in fact, be camping out an hour away from the Disney bubble.

And so Pete and his wife, Penny, decided that we needed a little pixie dust. They had some DVC points they’d banked in their previous use year that were about to expire, and they decided to give them to us. They asked Dad where we would like to stay, if we could, and my Dad said he’d get back to them. My parents talked about it and decided not to let me know about Pete and Penny’s offer until something was booked and definite. They didn’t want to raise my hopes only to dash them.

In all my Disney research, resorts, of course, came up. The most jaw-dropping, amazing, oh-god-if-only-I-could-stay-there-someday resort, for me, was the Animal Kingdom Lodge. The idea of seeing giraffes outside the window I slept next to was pretty much the most decadent hotel experience I could think of. So when, in conversation, my mom casually asked me which hotel I would most want to stay at if I could, I replied instantaneously. We had already discussed earlier how there was no way an on property stay was in our budget for this trip, so I had no idea there was anything but idle curiosity for this question.

So the lovely Penny booked us a night at AKL and a night at OKW, which was all that was available at this nearly last minute. Pete told my dad that people often cancel at the 30 day mark and that’s exactly what happened. Thirty days out, we had two nights in a savanna-view studio at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. To say I was stunned when my parents told me is a bit of an understatement. My original surprise at even going to Disney was nothing compared to the idea that we would be staying in the coolest deluxe resort on property.

Our plans altered again, ever so slightly. We now planned to leave on Friday and stay in a motel Friday night. Saturday morning we’d go to our campsite and pitch our tents to claim our spot. Then we’d grab some lunch and head off to the Animal Kingdom Lodge. Now all day Sunday and Monday could be spent in the parks. This final iteration of our plans came to be just a few weeks before we left. I spent the remaining time obsessively planning, writing touring plans, reading trip reports, and annoying anyone in my general vicinity with a daily countdown.

[Whew, long enough for you?! If you’ve made it to the end, I commend you. If there appears to be any interest, I’ll post more, but I figure that’s enough for now, don’t you?]

MissFrizz