Disney World: Final speech

Dave gave his final speech today, and the conference ends tomorrow. (Hooray!) He learned a great deal, and I think he helped others learn what they need to learn about ACG and SMART grants.

Doesn't he look so fancy? Wouldn't you trust him to give you financial aid advice?

Today I did some more shopping and a little sightseeing, but all in all it was a pretty uneventful day for me. (I have been taking the deep breath before the plunge - tomorrow and the next day we're seeing the Magic Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom! Insert spastic ramblings here.)

I did buy some cute scrapbooking supplies, including a album and some stickers, and my plan is to make a scrapbook of all three of my visits to Disney World. I remember some pretty cute photos from when I was three, not to mention some zany ones with my family when I was 12, and then this one at the age of 26.

Part of my afternoon was taken up trying to get pictures of Spaceship Earth at the Epcot Center - you know, the gigantic golf ball. (Maybe that's just what my mom and I call it.) Our hotel is near enough that we can see the golf ball, but only a tiny sliver, like an eclipsed moon over the trees, or maybe some Godzilla monster lurking in wait to destroy the tiny hotel-village:


However, I did get a closer look with Dave in the Boardwalk shopping area:


As you can see, it has been quite a rainy, gloomy day. We thought about heading to Epcot or some other park in the evening, but the nasty weather made the $71 admission price rather undesirable.

Instead, we paid for a movie to watch in the hotel room, and I think it was a good choice, given the occasion. What movie, you ask? Why, Enchanted, of course! We both thought it was really cute, although given my ambivalence toward Patrick Dempsey, I think she should have headed home with her prince.

Tomorrow we're slated for free admission, courtesy of Dave's aunt and uncle, to the Magic Kingdom! Holy crap holy crap holy crap. I made a list of the rides that, for sentimentality reasons, I simply must experience again:

• Swiss Family Treehouse
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• Splash Mountain
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
• The Haunted Mansion
• It's a Small World
• Peter Pan's Flight
• Snow White's Scary Adventures
• Dumbo the Flying Elephant
• Space Mountain
  

Alas, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride no longer exists at Disney World, replaced with The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I love Pooh Bear as much as the next person, as evidenced by Sunday's photo, but this is just unforgivable.

However, I did speak to one of the workers at the Christmas Disney shop at Downtown Disney about the switch, and she commented that the track and rooms are the same, they just switched Mr. Toad stuff with Pooh stuff. This means that the room that used to be Hell, in Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, is still inexplicably balmy in Winnie the Pooh world.

Gone also is the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride, replaced yet again by that maniacal POOH BEAR. Clearly, the happy honey-loving bear is destroying everything in its path. (I did not know it, but my family would be one of the last to ride the underwater submarine. It closed in 1994, a year after our visit.)

Anyway, back to the list. For the record, this list is essentially all the rides that are burned into my memory forever from the first two times I visited Disney World. The only ones I remember from the first time, when I was three, are Dumbo, Small World, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and the former two were incidentally the only rides that were closed the second time I was there. I will ride them all this time, and no one can stop me! BWAHAHA!

So, as you can see, tomorrow and Thursday are sure to hold some embarrassing and frantic moments for yours truly, so keep on the lookout for the fabulous and memorable pictures that are sure to follow in tomorrow's post.