Scott Beallis - Doing Disney: How To Spend a Week at Walt Disney World

How To Spend a Week at Walt Disney World

Scott Beallis

THEME PARK PRESS

www.ThemeParkPress.com

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6:

Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Chapter 10:

Chapter 11:

Chapter 12:

Chapter 13:

Chapter 14:

Chapter 15:

Chapter 16:

Chapter 17:

Chapter 18:

Chapter 19:

A lot has changed since the first edition of this book was published in 2013. Our spring 2016 week-long visit to Walt Disney World highlighted a number of differences in how guests experience the resort. Many changes have occurred. Disney now owns Marvel and all of the Star Wars properties. A new Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom is fully open. Construction on Avatarland (Pandora) is well underway at Disneys Animal Kingdom. And Disneys Hollywood Studios featured only five rides when we visitedtheyre all pretty good, but there just arent many of them. This will change once the new sections of the park are completed down the road. Downtown Disney has become Disney Springs. The Polynesian now features some pretty unique (and pricey!) Disney Vacation Club villas.

And then there is My Disney Experience and Memory Maker and Fast Pass Plus and MagicBands.

Our latest visit exposed us to a few restaurants that were previously not discussed in the book. We experienced a different Disney resort hotel, and we experienced rides that were not present on our last trip. We also had the chance to revisit a few attractions that we sometimes ignored.

Our vacation experience had become even more structured. It didnt seem like that would be possible, but oh, yes, it was completely possible. Because of the My Disney Experience app for our phones and Disneys overall My Magic Plus initiative, a Walt Disney World vacation has lost almost all its spontaneity.

Is that a bad thing? The answer isnt simple. Read on if youd like to find out our impressions.

There are tons of people out thereauthors, bloggers, travel agentswho know much more about Disney than we do. If you want the price of a meal at Victoria and Alberts or at Columbia Harbor House, if you want to know the location of each and every babysitting service on property, or if you want to know whether it is better to stay at Pop Century or All Star Music resort, there are plenty of sites and publications which can provide you with opinions and information.

What Ive decided to write about is what we like about Disney, what we plan to do when we vacation there, and what works best for usa family of four with two middle-school boys.

Most guidebooks are much more comprehensive than what you will find here. That is by design. Most people dont live close enough to Disney so that they can visit often. With an annual pass, you can do things like visit Epcot for dinner and drinks, watch the fireworks, and call it a night. If youre like us, your visits to Disney in either Florida or California are not structured like that. Your theme park ticket is expensive and you are there for a limited time. You need to make the most of it. Thats us. Thats who I am writing this book for.

We dont generally stay in moderate hotels or value hotelswe did stay at Port Orleans on our first trip to Walt Disney World in 2004, but since then it has been either deluxe hotels or Disney Vacation Club suites for us. This guide will not be able to offer too many valuable opinions or too much information about the moderate or value hotels.

What it will attempt to do is offer some insights into what we love to do when we visit Orlando or other Disney properties. We have our own ideas about how to do Disney, and we have always had lots of fun when we go, so maybe you can find something of interest or value to take from my comments and ideas. I hope so. This book is for the once-every-year-or-two Walt Disney World visitor who spends seven to ten days at the resort.

I will talk about rides, about FastPass+, about shops we like, how we get to and from Walt Disney World, our must-eat-at restaurants, a smattering of other Orlando-area places that have caught our attention, and the hotels we like. It isnt comprehensive, but it may help give you, a Walt Disney World potential or returning visitor, a template for your own visit and your own experience.

So, if you are thinking about your first visit to Disney in Florida, or you are not a seasoned visitor but are considering a return, please read on

The Disney company started as a studio making short films and animation. Walt Disney was a pioneer in the movie business. No one thought he could make a full-length animated film, but he went against opinion, spending his own (and his brother Roys) money to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

His boldness and confidence paid off and the studio was rewarded for Walts perseverance. Over the years, Walt Disney pushed the envelope, branching out into different forms of media before it was popular to do so. He devoted his studio to making animated features, then embraced television when others didnt quite know what to make of it. He didnt worry about what to make of it; he worried about doing the shaping of the medium himself. Walt had an uncommon ability to predict what entertained the average American consumer. (One can only wonder what Walt may have come up with in this age of the internet and social media, had he lived to see it.)

Likewise with Disney theme parks. No one had ever done what Walt Disney and his company did with this form of entertainment. In fact, his representatives were told by amusement park owners and operators at a meeting in Chicago, point blank, that there was no way that his ideas about amusement parks would ever work. He should go back to what he knew, making movies and television shows, they said. As was usually the case, Walt ignored the conventional wisdom and followed his instincts.

You see, what Walt had, and what no one else really saw up until then, was content. Walt saw the synergistic possibilities between the various media, and to him, the theme park was just another medium available to him to display his content. A lot has been written about telling a story in three dimensions, and perhaps Walt even said those exact words at some point. Whether he meant to or not, he hit upon another way of experiencing the things we (and he) loved.

Theyre still doing it today. Which came first, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie or the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride? For some, it might be hard to tell (which in and of itself is a mark of the genius of the company and the man), but the theme park attraction was there long before the movie. Walt wanted to tell a story of adventure on the high seas, with funny, exciting pirates, in a way that the tale hadnt been told before, and that was by letting his guests experience a pirates life up close through the use of animatronics and movie sets. Same with the Haunted Mansion. Long before it was a mediocre (at best) movie starring Eddie Murphy, it was a theme park attraction. It may be the reverse of their earlier methods, but it displays the same sort of synergismgiving the audience another way to experience the story.