Okay, I know that I have occasionally carped about too much WDW. My problem with people who go to WDW every year, to the exclusion of any other vacation (and I know way too many people who fit into this category), is the total lack of imagination involved. To be honest, I feel marginally the same about people who go anywhere every year, over and over again. Last I heard, the world out there was rather large (provided you don’t try to fly to it with a bottle of water in your hand, and you can overcome your fear of Bietz on a Plane), so foregoing taking in as much of it as you can strikes me as missing a good bet. The thing that makes Disney just a little higher on the scale of bad ideas for endless rinse and repeat is the nature of the beast itself. It is mostly a passive experience, and not much of a challenge to any part of your spirit; it’s just fun (if you like that sort of thing) where somebody else does all the work and you just sit there and look at it. Or ride through it. Life, being short, should include only a limited number of boat rides through It’s a Small World. Substitute a boat ride along the Seine, just once in a while. Or down the Mississippi. Or across San Francisco bay. Usually the waiting line is a lot shorter, and you won’t have to listen to you-know-what. So my brief against WDW isn’t critical, a la Baudrillard, but more mundanely based on the fact that it’s too easy, and you need to broaden yourself. That said, I will be going to WDW in May. And yes, I’ve gone a number of times before. The problem with the Disney drug is its success at doing what it does, while you just sit there and go along for the ride, but I do try to limit my intake to no more than a single dose every 5 years, which gives everyone in Orlando enough time to build enough new rides to make the enterprise worthwhile for me.
The thing is, we do travel a bit these days. Seen a lot of places, done a lot of things. And when we went on our last trip, to three central European cities we had never seen before, I spent a good couple of hours figuring marginally acceptable daily plans to cover what needed to be covered, and that was that and it all worked out fine. Going to WDW, on the other hand, requires at least as much planning as Eisenhower put into D-Day. The planning has already begun. I just ordered the 2007 Unofficial Guide (an invaluable resource for avoiding lines, which is the rationale for all this planning in the first place – if you could just walk in and do whatever you want to do and not run the risk of standing around doing nothing, you could just pick up a map on your way into the park and that would be the end of the angst) and some ancillary materials (don’t ask), I’ve already laid out a day-by-day plan (which Kt, who is on-board for the trip, has already revised), and I’ve even spent a few minutes staring at flights from White Plains in order to avoid the hassle of LaGuardia (a comparison could be made of the two comparable to the Orient Express in off-season Venice and the Times Square Shuttle during rush hour). Did you know that you can fly from White Plains to Orlando via Detroit and some other city I can’t even remember, and extend the trip for a full 10 hours! Boy howdy, that sounds like fun.
Of course, WDW also includes Universal, and the news that Back to the Future is closing is tantamount to learning that Mickey is a member of Al Qaeda. Oh, the humanity! Sigh. In any case, one does need a day each in US and IOA (the former of which has changed a lot since our last, the latter of which should be much more desirable in warm weather than in January, given the amount of water one gets splashed through). Probably also a day in ShamuWorld. So there is some time spent off the grounds, but to say that these places aren’t Disney is so say that linguini isn’t spaghetti; it’s true, but who really cares unless one happens to be a chef?
No doubt I will bore the VCA to tears with further discussion of all of this until the deed is done. Forgive me, and remember, I only do it twice a decade. As for you, you shouldn’t do it at all until you’ve seen Dubai, Siena, Bruges and a couple of Norwegian fjords, at the very least. (Me, I’m saving Dubai until they build an interesting building or two.)
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