Zoe enjoyed a Nemo cupcake as a rare bedtime treat in her pajamas on our balcony. Definitely magical.... 
Lounging in bed watching around-the-clock Disney Channel could have satisfied Zoe for the duration of our stay. 
Walt and The Mouse. 
The magical walk up Main Street leads straight to the castle and Fantasyland on the other side. Our first ride of the day was Dumbo. Since we got there right as the park opened... and Dumbo is at the far end... and we went straight there... and it is not one of the "big" rides..., in theory we should have been ahead of the crowds. In reality, we stood in line for a half hour in order to spend 90 seconds on a simple ride. The magic quickly wanes...! Even more quickly in the withering June heat! (Temperatures were in the low to mid 90s all week.)
Winnie-the-Pooh's house was a huge hit with Zoe.
As we were getting off the teacups, we spotted Alice in Wonderland. In order to interact with any of the characters, you had to stand in a long magic-crushing line. We opted to stand beside the line and simply take a photo. 
The iconic castle.
It was late in the day when we discovered where the princesses hang out, which was probably a good thing or we may never have seen the rest of the park! Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and Cinderella were holding court for all the young princesses at heart. Zoe was in awe. She posed with each one and loved every single minute of it. The definition of Disney Magic!
With that, our first day in the park ended on the highest note possible. We took the boat across the lake to our hotel and met up with our friends from Winnipeg, Jila and Kiana who had just checked in.... to the room connected to ours! We shared the rest of our trip with them and thoroughly enjoyed their company. Zoe and Kiana got along splendidly and we adults enjoyed the pleasure of Jila's companionship all week.
Rested and refreshed we began Day 2 in the park (Day 1 for Jila and Kiana). First stop, the princesses. Of course. Same princesses, same level of excitement and awe.
Kiana and Zoe together with Sleeping Beauty.
Next stop, Mickey and Minnie.
For the most part, Zoe and Kiana entertained each other at meal times. Sometimes at the table, sometimes under the table, sometimes running laps around other tables. But they always had each other!
We like to think of ourselves as prepared travellers. We even packed rain ponchos for a trip to Florida in June, silly as that may have been. Even sillier is leaving said ponchos in the hotel on the day it actually did rain heavily for most of the day. We are now proud owners of matching Disney rain ponchos. 
Not every child is lucky enough to nap at Disney. But this isn't just any child. She happens to be Tiena, the daughter of a friend of ours from Toronto! Tiena is the youngest of two daughters that Diane adopted from Kazakhstan. We knew Diane and her family were going to Kazapalooza and spending a few days at Disney beforehand, but we had not coordinated any sort of meeting. And Disney is a big place, multiple parks with tens of thousands of visitors each day. So imagine our surprise when the crowds parted at one point and there appeared Diane and her family. Coincidentally, it was very near the "It's a Small World" ride.
The line for the Winnie-the-Pooh ride had our girls climbing the walls.
Peering out of Pooh's window.
On our fourth and final day in the Orlando area, we rented a van for the short drive to St. Petersburg and Kazapalooza.
Due to some poor planning on our part, we backtracked to the airport to rent the van and ended up driving right past Disney again on our way to the coast. Since we needed lunch anyway, Downtown Disney seemed the perfect place to stop. Never mind it was just minutes away from the hotel we had checked out of more than an hour earlier!
As long as we were there, the Lego store and all the fun Lego creations called for a visit. Here are the seven dwarfs made entirely of Lego pieces.
We visited Downtown Disney with Julian's parents and brother a couple years ago and took Zoe's picture by this same display.
We approached Disney with mixed feelings and departed having had all of those feelings validated. There is a part of us that loathes the effectiveness of Disney's marketing, particularly to children. In return, the prices that parents must pay to gift the magic of Disney are obscene. Yet people flock there in droves. 17 million people each year. We among them.
Seeing the slickness of the operation in action was awe inspiring, particularly through the eyes of an Operations Research professor. It is no surprise that Disney employs many OR graduates. At the hotel and at the park, everything ran like clockwork which requires a tremendously coordinated (and highly scripted) effort behind the scenes. Every single employee (a.k.a. cast member) from the hotel desk staff to the food service personnel to people operating the rides to the cast member picking up trash was happy and on script. "Have a magical day!" was a common way of ending a transaction or interaction. And there were staff, I mean cast members, everywhere! Where automation had taken over, such as the Fast Pass machines, there were multiple cast members available to answer questions and assist guests with the machines.
We were shown an example of the efficiency of one particular behind the scenes system when I lost my wallet on the first day. For the record, it was just a small card wallet containing my driving license, two hotel room keys (which double as Disney charge cards), and a small amount of cash. Once the room keys were cancelled, it would not have been a significant loss. But still. I noticed it missing about an hour after I last remembered having it. We retraced our steps to the ride where it might have fallen out of my pack. When the cast member did not find it in the temporary lost/found locker at the ride she told us to go to "City Hall" at the entrance saying it is their policy to have all lost items to that location within ten minutes. She guaranteed that if (big if) it had been turned into a cast member, it would now be at City Hall. And it was! While its return (cash and all) speaks volumes about the honesty of whoever found it, the fact that it made its way to the entrance within an hour of when it was lost also speaks highly of Disney's efficient systems.
But the biggest part of us vividly remembers the look on Zoe's face when Mary Poppins walked by on our first morning and Zoe turned to us wide-eyed and said in almost a whisper, "She's really real!" And later while scrolling through the princess pictures on my camera, Zoe again said, "Mom, they really are real!" THAT is the magic of Disney. We, no doubt, will return.
It was late in the day when we discovered where the princesses hang out, which was probably a good thing or we may never have seen the rest of the park! Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and Cinderella were holding court for all the young princesses at heart. Zoe was in awe. She posed with each one and loved every single minute of it. The definition of Disney Magic!
With that, our first day in the park ended on the highest note possible. We took the boat across the lake to our hotel and met up with our friends from Winnipeg, Jila and Kiana who had just checked in.... to the room connected to ours! We shared the rest of our trip with them and thoroughly enjoyed their company. Zoe and Kiana got along splendidly and we adults enjoyed the pleasure of Jila's companionship all week. Rested and refreshed we began Day 2 in the park (Day 1 for Jila and Kiana). First stop, the princesses. Of course. Same princesses, same level of excitement and awe.
Kiana and Zoe together with Sleeping Beauty. 
Next stop, Mickey and Minnie. 
For the most part, Zoe and Kiana entertained each other at meal times. Sometimes at the table, sometimes under the table, sometimes running laps around other tables. But they always had each other! 
We like to think of ourselves as prepared travellers. We even packed rain ponchos for a trip to Florida in June, silly as that may have been. Even sillier is leaving said ponchos in the hotel on the day it actually did rain heavily for most of the day. We are now proud owners of matching Disney rain ponchos. 
Not every child is lucky enough to nap at Disney. But this isn't just any child. She happens to be Tiena, the daughter of a friend of ours from Toronto! Tiena is the youngest of two daughters that Diane adopted from Kazakhstan. We knew Diane and her family were going to Kazapalooza and spending a few days at Disney beforehand, but we had not coordinated any sort of meeting. And Disney is a big place, multiple parks with tens of thousands of visitors each day. So imagine our surprise when the crowds parted at one point and there appeared Diane and her family. Coincidentally, it was very near the "It's a Small World" ride. 
The line for the Winnie-the-Pooh ride had our girls climbing the walls. 
Peering out of Pooh's window. 
On our fourth and final day in the Orlando area, we rented a van for the short drive to St. Petersburg and Kazapalooza. 
Due to some poor planning on our part, we backtracked to the airport to rent the van and ended up driving right past Disney again on our way to the coast. Since we needed lunch anyway, Downtown Disney seemed the perfect place to stop. Never mind it was just minutes away from the hotel we had checked out of more than an hour earlier! As long as we were there, the Lego store and all the fun Lego creations called for a visit. Here are the seven dwarfs made entirely of Lego pieces.
We visited Downtown Disney with Julian's parents and brother a couple years ago and took Zoe's picture by this same display.
We approached Disney with mixed feelings and departed having had all of those feelings validated. There is a part of us that loathes the effectiveness of Disney's marketing, particularly to children. In return, the prices that parents must pay to gift the magic of Disney are obscene. Yet people flock there in droves. 17 million people each year. We among them. Seeing the slickness of the operation in action was awe inspiring, particularly through the eyes of an Operations Research professor. It is no surprise that Disney employs many OR graduates. At the hotel and at the park, everything ran like clockwork which requires a tremendously coordinated (and highly scripted) effort behind the scenes. Every single employee (a.k.a. cast member) from the hotel desk staff to the food service personnel to people operating the rides to the cast member picking up trash was happy and on script. "Have a magical day!" was a common way of ending a transaction or interaction. And there were staff, I mean cast members, everywhere! Where automation had taken over, such as the Fast Pass machines, there were multiple cast members available to answer questions and assist guests with the machines.
We were shown an example of the efficiency of one particular behind the scenes system when I lost my wallet on the first day. For the record, it was just a small card wallet containing my driving license, two hotel room keys (which double as Disney charge cards), and a small amount of cash. Once the room keys were cancelled, it would not have been a significant loss. But still. I noticed it missing about an hour after I last remembered having it. We retraced our steps to the ride where it might have fallen out of my pack. When the cast member did not find it in the temporary lost/found locker at the ride she told us to go to "City Hall" at the entrance saying it is their policy to have all lost items to that location within ten minutes. She guaranteed that if (big if) it had been turned into a cast member, it would now be at City Hall. And it was! While its return (cash and all) speaks volumes about the honesty of whoever found it, the fact that it made its way to the entrance within an hour of when it was lost also speaks highly of Disney's efficient systems.
But the biggest part of us vividly remembers the look on Zoe's face when Mary Poppins walked by on our first morning and Zoe turned to us wide-eyed and said in almost a whisper, "She's really real!" And later while scrolling through the princess pictures on my camera, Zoe again said, "Mom, they really are real!" THAT is the magic of Disney. We, no doubt, will return.
2 comments:
It looks like you had a wonderful time!
I understand all of your feelings described at the end and avoid many large venues for the same reasons. We only went to Disney once, when our big kids were in 1st and 2nd grade, and they don't even remember the trip. They do remember the hotel pool, the plane ride, stuff like that, so I also understand how Zoey would have been happy watching tv all day; kids don't care about smooth operations.
Ruby
Pure magic!!!
Darlene
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