…..*cough* is this thing on?
Yeah, it’s been awhile. Although I’m not sure I’ll be getting back to regular writing — whether on this site, or somewhere else — I’m resurrecting the ole’ Nerds in Wonderland blog for a minute to put out some thoughts far too long for Twitter.
The impetus? An impromptu, sleep-when-you’re-dead three-day trip to WDW last week. My girlfriend is in school to finish her BA, and when we found out she was accepted for transfer admission to a good school near Orlando, we figured she should see the school before deciding whether or not to attend. For a moment, we considered not doing Disney. And then she asked to go, and well…who am I to say no?
When it comes to Disney, I’m the first to admit I’ve been awfully spoiled these past few years. Because of a traveling job that had me in Florida several times a year, since 2010 I’ve been to WDW more times than I can count for afternoons, long weekends, and multi-day actual vacations. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Disneyland twice in this period, too. I’ve been an AP holder, a D23 member, and mistaken by some CMs for a local. I knew WDW inside and out, and was on top of every change, from the littlest attraction adjustment to the rollout of MyMagic+.
I say these things not to brag, but to offer some context for this trip. Last week, I felt like a newbie. I hadn’t been on property in 14 months, had no annual pass, and had been less attentive to Twitter and thus less aware of what was in store. While visiting anew felt comfortable in some ways, I also felt like cold water had been thrown at me. I definitely saw things with new eyes. Some of it was quite pleasing. A good deal, however, was not.
To wit: ten things I observed over the course of three days.
1. You can’t get there anywhere from here
After 14 months away the first thing I noticed was construction…everywhere. In Orlando proper, on highways and toll roads and surface streets and WDW exit ramps, central Florida is growing and changing. WDW in particular looks like a war zone, and I found my navigational muscle memory stymied in the face of road closures and new traffic patterns. However, I’m not complaining. Truly. I have groused for years about the lack of capital improvements on property, but I can’t say that now. From Disney Springs to the resorts to DAK and DHS, things are happening. It’s disruptive right now, but you can feel the promise of good things ahead.
2. Commerce Springs eternal
Our first stop on property was to meet my grandparents at Disney Springs for lunch. While I saw a lot of new things there on my last trip in January 2016, my jaw dropped when I saw how DS looks now. I’m not a fan of malls, but if we have to have a mall, this one works. There’s variety of shops and restaurants. More public spaces in which to roam and sit. Fountains and interesting architectural details. Parking that’s actually convenient. I think Universal finally has a worthy competitor vis a vis nighttime entertainment, and that’s long overdue.
3. I’ll be needing another Disney Visa card
After an early-to-mid 2000s Disney hiatus, I visited property in 2008 and was pretty dismayed by the lack of quality and variety in WDW merchandise. I started changing my tune a few year
s ago, when a (bear with me here) ‘Sup Bro t-shirt made me wonder if the merchandise team was branching out. Would I buy that shirt? Nope. But like me, there are many people who don’t want to wear a generic Mickey or WDW t-shirt or slap a 2017 magnet on their fridge. Luckily, we no longer have to. There is variety, thoughtfulness, and sometimes cheeky humor in today’s merchandise unlike what I’ve seen in past years. Whatever your interest — Orange Bird, the Haunted Mansion, Epcot, retro travel, Tsum Tsums– you’re pretty much guaranteed to find something you like. I actually bought a Stitch dress that is subtle enough to wear in public when at home. My girlfriend – an unlikely Disney fan to begin with – bought a baseball cap she’s been wearing since we landed. I had my eye on mugs, pins, artwork, pajamas, notebooks, coasters. This is all great! Except…
4. I’ll also need a billionaire to pay off my Disney Visa card
…you probably can’t afford all that you want. Or your park ticket. Or your hotel room. Or a cocktail to make these high prices go down a bit better. Do you know the analogy about the frog who’s thrown into the pot of hot water? That’s what I felt like on this trip. After not visiting for 14 months – and now not having annual pass discounts or Tables in Wonderland – I got a glimpse of what it must feel like for the typical WDW visitor, one who can only rely on public discounts, if they’re even available. It was sticker shock, and it hurt. Badly.
I paid over $700 for the two of us to park hop for three days. I paid $152 a night, with tax, to stay on property at what amounted to a Disney-themed Motel 6. (More on that in a minute.) A desperate Dasani purchase from a Pop Century vending machine set me back almost $4. Even average meals – we never ate at a signature restaurant – crossed the $100 threshold with little more than two entrees and a drink each. Speaking of drinks, prices are uniformly up all over property, while quality has plateaued or declined. And merchandise? Those costs were perhaps the greatest shock. I was hot one afternoon and looked for a tank top; most started at $28-30. No thanks. My simple Stitch dress set me back $45. My favorite example, however, was a five-pack of mini highlighters, each themed to a different park trash can, like the salt and pepper shakers that debuted a couple years ago. Creative, whimsical, and….$16.99. For five mini highlighters. Unless they’re highlighting with diamond dust, I’m out.
For our longer family trip in November I’ll bite the bullet and pay $1400+ for us to have annual passes, which with Tables in Wonderland (another $150, right?) will make merchandise and food/beverage costs a bit more tolerable. But with the prices as I saw them on this trip, even a 20% discount won’t reduce the pain by much.
5. Stop trying to make “Value” happen, Disney
Because the main point of this trip was my girlfriend’s interview/campus tour at a nearby school where she had just been accepted, this trip was last-minute and left me planning with what scraps I could find during Spring Break season. Airfare was surprisingly cheap, but hotel room inventory off-property was pretty bleak. Hotwire had a few appealing options, but I couldn’t stomach $15-25/night “resort” fees, especially not knowing where we’d end up. Low-end Hilton and Starwood properties started at expensive and ended at ludicrous, and even the “cheap” offsite properties were either prohibitively expensive or booked up. I was in a bit of a pickle. On a whim, I checked the WDW site and found that the Values surprisingly appeared as good a deal as anything else. (And surprisingly available.) I’d sooner campaign for Trump than stay at an All-Star, so I forked over a few more dollars for a couple nights at Pop Century. I had stayed there three years ago for a weekend trip and didn’t hate it, so I figured why not? We’d hardly be in the room anyway, and getting free parking at the parks would be nice.
Well, here’s why not. For $152 per night — and that was with a discount! — we experienced rude Cast Members, peeling wallpaper borders, malfunctioning air conditioning, a lack of outlets or outlets that worked, and an alarming wet spot in the carpeting that appeared and grew at random, even though we were on the top floor and it was nowhere near the bathroom or the window. Worst, however, were the beds. If you want to ensure you’ll never sleep again, put two people in a tiny Pop Century bed with painful, saggy springs and see how well you do. Your insomnia will also be helped by the paper-thin walls: I mean, who doesn’t love random 3am yelling and the constant flushing of toilets?
I wasn’t expecting the Polynesian. I wasn’t even expecting Coronado Springs, or the Disney Springs Doubletree, or the Hampton Inn from our first night. But no amount of on-property amenities can justify for me the offense of paying so much for so little in return. (We’ll save the ridiculous cost for all on-property resorts for another time, except to say that $200+ for a Moderate isn’t moderate, in the same way that $140+ for a Value is no value at all.) I think the Value resorts were a worthy enterprise at the time they were created, but it’s time to revisit this experiment. If Disney doesn’t want to spend enough to best the standards of nearby Hampton Inns and Motel 6s, it could at least meet them. And if Disney won’t do that, it should change the category name.
6. March Madness
For the middle of March – on days when most crowd calendars had forecasts of 8 and above – crowds weren’t a problem. At all. Entrance turnstiles had no lines. Soarin’ had midday waits of 35 minutes. ADRs at popular restaurants were readily available on the same day, to say nothing of securing a Pop Century room with a discount less than three weeks out during Spring Break season. I know we visited midweek, but higher costs are keeping attendance down, and people who do visit are paying more on property for tickets, food, and merchandise, and thus are staying less on property. I think a lot of us predicted this, and it’s happening. You can feel the difference. If I were a Disney exec, I’d be a bit worried about a tipping point.
7. In which I eat some MyMagic+ crow
This is where Twitter is going to beat me up. For as vocal a MyMagic+ critic I was in the beginning, I’m softening my stance. I even like parts of it! You’ll never convince me that the FP+ system is a net positive, and you’ll never dissuade me from my concern about what Disney will do with all of this data, but the system worked pretty seamlessly for us. I liked having my room key on my band. Room charging was flawless. FP+ could be manipulated pretty easily on the fly. I predicted MyMagic+ would be a failure, and it’s not. I’m chagrined, but such as it is. Go ahead; I can take it.
8. Old friends don’t disappoint
DAK remains my hands-down favorite and I’m glad my girlfriend is in the same camp. We had a beautiful day there, day drinking in the sunshine, listening to Burudika and taking one of my favorite-ever safaris. Flower and Garden seems to get better with each passing year, and IllumiNations still makes me ugly cry.
Sanaa bread service remains a crowd-pleaser, and Boma brunch and The Wave dinner were as good as I remembered. In-park Starbucks remains the corporate partnership I’ll defend to the death. There are certain things you do at WDW that make you feel like you’re visiting an old friend, and I was glad that my favorites still felt that way.
9. New things make me happy
With only 2.5 days on property, we still managed to encounter some new things that we both enjoyed. Geyser Point at the Wilderness Lodge didn’t wow me with food, but the drink selection was pretty solid and I could sit with that view of the lake for hours. (Also…construction at WL seems really promising!) Skipper Canteen surprised me both with its beautiful interior and the cheeky-but-believable schtick of its servers. Sadly, I liked my 2.0 MagicBand – for one, it’s purple, and it’s also a much better fit than the 1.0 version. And lastly, I was almost alarmingly, over-the-top thrilled by the new traffic patterns and garages at Disney Springs. I used to loathe driving anywhere near Downtown Disney, but this was easy and daresay pleasant.
10. New things can also make me sad and grumpy
Looks like how it tastes.
Let’s get the little one out of the way: for as much as I liked the interior and the ethos, the food at Skipper Canteen didn’t wow me – it’s a pretty small menu to begin with, and my food was fairly dry and bland.
But my two big – no, yuuuuuge! – disappointments were Rivers of Light and Soarin’. The former, while beautiful, just didn’t….work. It felt like it was trying for an IllumiNations-style narrative but it just couldn’t get there. The water projections
I just….what now?
paled in comparison to what you can see at World of Color in California. It felt like something was missing, and given reports of scrapped elements, it makes you wonder what could’ve been. For me, the order is now IllumiNations, Wishes (we’ll see what happens I suppose), Fantasmic, and then Rivers of Light. Considering that DAK is my favorite park, this is a huge disappointment.
And then there’s Soarin’. I summed up my response on Twitter thusly: cheap, with cheap thrills. Instead of the real footage captured for the original version, the new film employs obvious and infuriating CGI. For reasons passing my technical knowledge, several landmarks appear oddly curved on the screen….there’s no realism. The smells don’t hold up to the original. The gliders also move with more jarring, pronounced motions; I was really struck by how fast you descend at the end of this film compared to the original. My girlfriend nearly screamed a few times because of the sudden glider movements as we dipped and banked. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Soarin’ wasn’t meant to be a cheap thrill ride but that’s what we have now. I’ll pass.
(For the record, this was my girlfriend’s first time on any Soarin’, and she enjoyed it quite a bit. If you don’t know what you’re missing, it’s probably not so bad.)
So there you have it. Lest you think the trip was a bust — or that I’ve suddenly become a Universal fan — I think you can see from the ridiculous smile on my face that I had a great time. I was a Disney kid, and now a Disney adult. That won’t change. I’ll be back in November (if I don’t move to Florida before, but that’s a story with no ending as of yet) for 8 days to further observe and experience, and I’m looking quite forward to it. (You just won’t find me at Pop Century!)
Nerds in Wonderland 