Vacation tips for the family

Sorry that I haven't been posting for the last week. I was with my family at Disneyworld. It was a pretty good time, and as a result, I thought I'd share a few nuggets of wisdom. Now, I know there are a few billion pages written about what to do at Disney. So I won't try to do that. My humble submission isn't meant to be exhaustive. I just noticed a few things that I wanted to pass along.

First, if you want to know what it's like to be a white man in America, get any Fastpass that's offered. It's a special ticket that permits the holder to jump to the front of a ride line during a specified range of time. During the interim, you can eat, ride other rides, or stroll around, but you don't have to stand in line at all. When your time rolls around, you just stroll past everyone standing in line like a big white man and hop into the cab of whatever ride it is.

Second, never, and I mean never, stand in the park entry line behind a family from the south or North Dakota. For some reason, Disney's advanced technology escapes them. To get into the park, you have to slide a key card into a reader, and put two of your fingers on the top of the same machine. People from the south just don't get it. They stand there. They look in the hole where the key card disappeared. They call over Uncle Jimmy to look at it. Uncle Jimmy looks in the hole. The friendly Disney gate worker tells them how to do it. They try again. They bend over to look in the hole again. The friendly Disney worker explains it again but more slowly. Uncle Jimmy lays on the ground and looks up at the card reader like it's some kind of friggin' Buick. Uncle Jimmy shouts out, "It looks like it's workin' allraaat." The friendly Disney worker puts the card in the hole. Uncle Jimmy tries to look again, but the friendly Disney worker gently shoos him away. Then she takes the hand of the lady from the south and places it on the scanner. It works. Pandemonium follows. The whole family of chinless freaks comes over and takes turns peering in the card reader to see what it will do next. The mom starts cackling some bullshit about "what will they think of next?" Uncle Jimmy starts telling some horseshit story about some weekend at Guard duty when he fixed a jeep. About ten minutes later, the mom, the dad, Uncle Jimmy and the whole family figure out how to get through the gate.

The next day, I spent the ten minutes on the monorail and walking into the park, bitching to my wife that there was no way I was going to stand in line behind a family from the south. She almost got in the wrong line behind some guy wearing a "Roll Tide" baseball cap, but I shepherded her to a line that just had one family in front of us. The dad was wearing a shirt that said, "Thank God I'm from North Dakota." Incidentally, he and his wife and kids all had chins. So, despite the shirt, I thought my prospects for a speedy entry were good. They weren't. I went through the exact same drama, minus Uncle Jimmy. Even though I was pissed off but good this time, I found myself kind of missing Uncle Jimmy. No one crawled under the machine to check it out. The whole family just meandered around asking rhetorical questions. I was gonna watch until they figured it out just to write something nasty about them, but unlike Tosca, there's only so much I'll suffer for my art.

Third, the hazelnut torte at Tony's Ristorante in the Magic Kingdom is pretty good.

Fourth, do NOT, under any circumstance miss MGM's "The Voyage of the Little Mermaid." It's a 20 minute mixed media retelling of part of "The Little Mermaid" with film, puppets and actors. The kids will love it. Plus, it's air-conditioned in the theater, but most importantly, dads (and you lesbians and bi-sexual women), Ariel---the Little Mermaid has some really big gourds. So big, that even my wife turned to me and mentioned it during the show. That shocked the hell out of me. We met all the Disney princesses during our visit, and generally they were young and very wholesome. Most were very modestly dressed. Ariel had big jugs covered by a couple of big seashells and a cut stomach. My guess is that she's done a little pole work in her career. I pondered that all the way back to the hotel for dinner. Then I started thinking that the other poor schmucks, who work at Disney for the summer, probably all try to bag a princess before they go back to school.

Oh yeah, the fireworks are nice too.