A Walk in the Park

Every busy season, Universal likes to send to folks from behind the scenes out to work in the parks.  Ostensibly it’s to pitch in and help with the higher attendance levels.  But I actually suspect it’s to make us grateful we’re not out there dealing with that madness anymore.

Because you have to be a little crazy to want to visit a theme park in Florida during spring break or summer.  If you don’t have kids and therefore don’t have your vacation time dictated by school being out, there’s really no earthly reason to put yourself through that.  Unless you really enjoy the communal experience of standing in line with a bunch of sweaty people for two hours for a ride that lasts five minutes.  And I do mean sweaty.  We’re barely into spring and it was pushing 90 today.  As I walked through the area I was helping to sweep up, I saw people sprawled out in any spare bit of shade they could find like they’d just dropped out of the Bataan Death March.  And some of them do treat it like a death march, where it’s not about enjoying anything, but seeing everything.  If people have to get left behind, so be it; sacrifices must be made to cross the next ride off the map.

And of course you’re battling a few thousand other families who have the same thing in mind.  Thus waiting roughly the length of a Spider-Man movie to go on the Spider-Man ride.  But they don’t seem to ever get tired of it, because every year the crowds return, even though they know better, even though they’ve been warned, even though common sense would dictate that it might be a tad busy during peak vacation season in the tourist capital of the world.  And they’ll still manage to express shock and disbelief that there’s so many people.  As if no one else could have possibly had the idea of coming to Florida when their kids have no school.

So I wove my way through hot, weary tourists, working my way towards hot and weary myself, until it was time for my shift to end and I could head back to the air-conditioned paradise that is my cubicle.  I put in eleven years out on those front lines.  Which I think is the combined amount of time people waited in line today.  But hey, keep coming. All that revenue keeps me in that air-conditioned cubicle, thank you very much.

The Welcome Wagon

My sister and her clan are visiting this weekend, so I spent yesterday getting them into Universal and providing them the benefit of my all-too-extensive theme park experience.  And I’m completely exhausted.  We weren’t even trying all that hard — they’ve been before and they’re hitting the parks again today, so there was no need to rush– but I got home and collapsed on the bed until Hannah shooed me off to get in the shower.

We still had a good time, which is a lot more than I can say for some of the tourists I saw.  Let’s face it, theme parks are essentially traps now.  The idea is to make it so that it’s completely impractical — if not impossible — for you and your family to do anything else but spend time there.  Most of them don’t even advertise single-day tickets anymore, and honestly, most of them couldn’t be seen in a single day anyway, either due to their size or the twenty thousand other sweating captives marching along with you that cause a simple kids ride like Peter Pan to have an hour wait.  Your vacation turns into the Bataan Death March, grimly crossing ride after ride off the list, dragging your kids from photo-op to photo-op, and so determined to see everything that you end up not really enjoying it, just accomplishing it.  But the parks don’t care, as long as you accomplish it on their property and not someone else’s.

As such, it takes a hell of a lot to get me to go to one of the places now.  I’m more than happy to help people get in, but if they want to play Dante, I feel no need to be Virgil.  Family is different, though.  We Dicksons have a proud tradition of acting as unofficial theme park hosts for visiting relatives.  When Disney World first opened back in 1971, we were pretty much the only part of the family not up in New Jersey or down in Miami, so we instantly became a prime vacation destination.  I remember a good stretch of two or three years where it seemed like we had a non-stop rotation of relatives staying with us so they could visit Uncle Walt’s new park without having to pay for a hotel.  We were glad to have them, of course, but we ended up accumulating so many half-empty ticket books from the park we never had to buy any more until they finally did away with them.  And back then, you could actually see all of the Magic Kingdom in one day, so a trip out there wasn’t anywhere near the slog it is today.

So having been so many times — and having worked at another park for so many years — the whole theme park thing just isn’t a big deal anymore.  We’ll go every once in a while for a specific special event, like the Food and Wine Festival at EPCOT or a decent concert at Universal’s Mardi Gras, but for the most part, the parks are just these things that help keep us from having a state income tax.  There’s plenty to do in Orlando that’s closer, cheaper, and less of an ordeal.

Of course, I still get a little rush of childlike glee when I get off the monorail and walk onto Main Street for the first time.  Despite the seemingly obligatory way I made our visits sound, the Magic Kingdom was still a pretty big part of my childhood, and it’s still a pretty neat place to visit.  And since my three-year-old grand-nephew was one of the people I was escorting around yesterday, I suppose the tired feet just might have been worth it in the long run.