The Dark Side of Disney

by Leonard Kinsey

  Tip: If you do run out of alcohol from the grocery delivery place (or never ordered it to begin with and are rapidly running out of cash) you can walk over to the Hess gas station across from The Boardwalk and buy beer for cheap there, although their selection sucks. There is also a Hess station across the street from Downtown Disney. You can take WDW buses to either DTD or The Boardwalk, and from experience even though the bus drivers will give you dirty looks when you hop on board with a case of Heineken, they won’t stop you from getting on.

  Of course, grocery delivery assumes you’ve taken my advice and are staying in a swank DVC room, and thus have at least a fridge, coffee maker, toaster, and microwave to store and reheat your leftovers, snacks, and breakfast food. But maybe you’re scared of renting points or just really love Pop Century, and you don’t have any of that stuff in your room. Turns out you’re not exactly out of luck: both the Value and Moderate resorts have microwaves and toasters available for communal use in the food courts, Moderates have fridges and coffee makers in the room, and if you’re staying at a Value you can rent a fridge from Disney for $10/day, although that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to eat cheaply.

  Or, you can participate in a “fridge swap” via an online forum like Disboards (in the Budget Board subforum). The way a fridge swap works is that a group of people staying at a particular resort in the near or distant future pool together $10 or so each to purchase a small fridge from Walmart, which is shipped to the resort, addressed to the first person in line for the swap, or picked up from the store if the person has rented a car. That person keeps the fridge for the length of their vacation and then brings it down to Luggage Services, where it is stored until the next person in the swap arrives and picks it back up (alternately, if the two families’ trips overlap, they can make the swap in person using a luggage cart). This way, everyone in the swap gets a fridge for the length of their vacation for $10 total, instead of $10/day! Sometimes other small appliances are purchased and stored inside the fridge between swaps, such as toasters and coffee machines.

  For the most part this works out really well; for whatever reason Disney hasn’t cracked down on it yet, and Luggage Services seems to be more than happy to store and cart around heavy appliances as long as they get a decent tip. However, there have been fridge swaps gone wrong, resulting in some hilariously epic threads where a fridge gets lost (i.e., someone leaves it in their room without bothering to bring it back down to Luggage Services) and the rest of the people in the swap group who already chipped in for it get screwed. You’d think their firstborn had been kidnapped the way these swap participants freak the fuck out about a missing fridge! I’ve also heard reports of Luggage Services CMs who don’t get tipped appropriately and then purposefully switch up fridges or damage them, resulting in mass confusion and chaos on the boards.

  Also, as opposed to the fridges and coffee makers that come stock in the Moderates and Deluxes, the swap appliances don’t get cleaned on a regular basis. And you never know what weird shit people store in their fridge or run through their coffee machines. I heard a story of one lady who cleaned her daughter’s underwear in the coffee maker using shampoo because she didn’t pack enough pairs and didn’t feel like buying more at the gift store.

  But this one takes the cake: I was heading back to my room one morning and started talking to a CM while waiting for an elevator. She looked really pissed off, which is rare at WDW, since some really bad shit has to go down for the CMs to break their façade of bliss.

  “Tough morning?” I ask, holding a cup of coffee and staring at some really weird-looking stains on the CM’s outfit.

  “Um… no,” she says, following my gaze down to the stains. She sees them and curses in Spanish.

  I nod, a bit taken aback (I learned Spanish curse-words by imitating Mouth from “The Goonies” as a kid), but try not to show it. “What are those stains?” I ask. They’re glistening in the overhead lights.

  “You do not want to know!” she shouts, looking on the verge of a breakdown.

  “Sure, I do!” I respond cheerfully. The stains look suspiciously like… Oh Christ. I figure it out before she says it.

  “I open fridge someone leave in room, and it is filled with used… condoms!” She chokes back a sob. “They fall on floor and spill everywhere, and I have to clean!”

  “That’s some fucked up shit, right there,” I say, legitimately disgusted.

  “Yes, I will quit!” She looks down and sighs. “No…. I won’t quit.”

  I hand her $20. “I hope your day gets better.”

  Her face cracks a smile. When I get back to my room the next day there are at least a dozen towel animals placed all over the room.

  SOUVENIRS AND MERCHANDISE

  WDW Merch is a Rip-Off:

  T-shirts shouldn’t cost $30. There is no reason why anyone should pay $15 for a coffee mug. Yet, I’m consistently amazed when I walk into Mouse Gears at Epcot and see people queued up with piles of merchandise in their hands, waiting to massively overpay for moderate-to-low quality Disney-branded crap.

  Just a few years ago WDW merchandise used to be so cool. Each park carried completely different products, and even individual stores had their own theme and neat stuff for sale that you could only get in that one store. Anyone remember the kick-ass Magic Store on Main Street? But now everything is pretty much the same no matter which park or store you’re in. Just like the food, Disney has made all of their merch ultra-generic and bland so they can order larger quantities for cheaper and spread it out across all of their retail outlets all over the globe. But of course none of those volume savings are passed onto the consumer; instead prices are actually jacked up to almost laughable rates.

  On the rare occasion I actually see something I really like at the parks I’ll take a picture and order it when I get home. I’ve found 90% of that expensive crap significantly discounted on eBay, and I’m able to get a great deal on it by using a bidding sniper like the one at http://www.bidnip.com. If it can’t be found on eBay oftentimes a wide variety of park merch is highly discounted at the Outlet section of Disney’s own DisneyStore.com. At the very least I’ll have to pay the same price as I would’ve at the parks but won’t have to pay tax, will be able to use a coupon for free shipping, and will also get cashback by shopping through Mr Rebates (http://www.MrRebates.com). So if your kids just have to have those mouse ears in the parks, go ahead and order them ahead of time from DisneyStore.com, get the cashback, and avoid waiting in yet another line during your vacation.

  Tip: Cast Members get up to 40% off merchandise! This rate fluctuates, and goes higher during the holidays, but it actually brings the prices down to a reasonable level. So, again, befriend a CM, give them some cash, and get them to buy a bunch of merch for you!

  PhotoPass Shares:

  One of the best mementos a family can take away from WDW is a set of photographs they can look at forever to relive their (hopefully) wonderful vacation. But the annoying thing about family photos is that you either have to bug a stranger to take the picture for you (thus risking an annoyed stranger, a shitty picture, and possibly a snatch and run camera theft) or someone from the family has to take the picture themselves and not be included in what might have otherwise been a perfect group photo for the mantle.

  Luckily, Disney offers a service called PhotoPass which solves this problem: they hire photographers to roam the most picturesque spots in the parks, just waiting to take a once-in-a-lifetime picture of you, your wife, your eight kids and grandkids, and Crazy Uncle Billy, who just got out of prison and will probably be back there a month from now, all smiling in front of Cinderella’s Castle.

  The first time you run into one of these well-marked (they’re almost always wearing khaki vests) if not exactly well-trained photographers they will hand you a plastic card with a number on it. Every time you want a picture, you hand that same card to the photographer, they take your picture, and then they scan the card. Everybody in the family can get th
eir own card, too, in case you get sick of Crazy Uncle Billy and decide to strike off on your own and get Photopass pictures of you drinking various alcoholic beverages around the world at Epcot. Then when you get home you type each card number into http://www.DisneyPhotoPass.com and all of the pictures from your entire vacation are there for you to preview! You can then edit the photos, delete incriminating ones, add fancy borders and other such nonsense, and then have them all put on a CD and shipped to you!

  Unfortunately, in typical Disney fashion they also charge out the ass for this service. Regardless of how many pictures you actually had taken, the cost is still about $120 for the CD. So if you only had eight pictures taken, and only one was actually in focus and properly exposed by the decidedly amateur-level photographer, you’re going to pay $120 for that one picture. Conversely, if you were there for a month and had 800 pictures taken, it still costs $120 for the CD (or multiple CDs if needed). The only catch is that you need to enter your card numbers within 30 days of having the pictures taken, and then you have 30 days after that to order your photos.

  Hopefully you’re starting to see how this system is ripe for exploitation. Some brilliant Dark-Sider realized that if a) you can enter as many cards as you want into the PhotoPass site, and b) they’ll send you as many pictures as you want, then c) multiple families visiting within a 30-day period can type their card numbers into the site and share a single CD. And thus was born the “PhotoPass Share”!

  I use TourGuideMike.com for my PhotoPass shares, but they’re organized on any number of WDW fan boards. The way it works is that someone becomes an “owner” for a particular group, meaning that this person will be the one who purchases the CD, makes copies of the CD for everyone in the group, and mails out the copies. Then people sign up for a particular group, depending on when they’ll be visiting WDW. Once there are enough people signed up (usually up to 10 families) the group is closed and everyone sends in the money for the PhotoPass pre-order via check or PayPal, the cost of which is split equally between the families. It usually ends up costing about $20 per family, which is a huge discount over the initial price and actually makes this service a bargain! When each family gets back from vacation they type their code into the site and wait. Once all of the families in the group have come home and entered their codes the “owner” orders the CD, makes copies, and sends out the copies to everyone in the group! The only downside is that you end up with a CD full of pictures of people you’ve never met before, but sometimes that ends up being interesting in a voyeuristic sort of way.

  HAVING FUN WITHOUT SPENDING A DIME

  Did you know that you could have an entirely fun-filled vacation at Walt Disney World without ever setting foot in the parks? While this isn’t something Disney advertises (because they want you to spend a ton of cash on park tickets), the resorts in particular offer enough amenities to make even the most jaded traveler squeal like an infant. Hell, you don’t even have to stay at one of the resorts to take advantage of some of these activities; just stay at a fleabag offsite, make a dining reservation at your favorite resort, and then drive over and park there!

  I’ve had many fun days just going around to the various WDW resorts, checking out the architecture, visiting their restaurants and food courts, and getting completely blasted at the various themed bars. The busses can take you from any park to any resort, or if you don’t want to buy park tickets you can use Downtown Disney as a hub for catching busses to the resorts. Alternately you can do “themed” tours, such as the Resort Monorail tour of The Contemporary, Polynesian, and Grand Floridian, or walk around the Epcot Resorts (Yacht and Beach Clubs, Boardwalk, and The Swan and Dolphin).

  Here are my Resort Hopping highlights:

  Monorail Bar Crawl:

  There are some massively awesome bars on the Resort Monorail loop at The Magic Kingdom, and if you start at around 6PM you can work in a whole night of boozing that rivals any hotspot nightclub locale on the planet.

  I like to start at The Wave in The Contemporary. Over to the right side of the restaurant there’s a super-cool blue-lit area that is something straight out of Star Trek. If you time it right you can go from there to the bar at The California Grill and watch the Magic Kingdom’s fireworks. Disregard what everyone says about this place: you do NOT need to check in at the lobby to get access to this restaurant. Just take the elevator up to the 15th floor, walk past the host/ess, and take a seat at the bar. Order some sushi while you’re at it!

  After that it’s over to The Polynesian for tiki drinks at The Tambu Lounge! This place is crowded earlier in the evening with people waiting for their reservations at Ohana’s, which is right next door. But after the fireworks it clears out a bit and you can sit back with a Mai Tai in a shelled-out pineapple (the Lapu Lapu) and listen to a Don Ho impersonator while eating tasty appetizers. Heaven. And if you want, you can even take your drink out to the beach and watch the waves lap against the sand while you lap up some more rum concoctions.

  A Mai Tai from the Tambu Lounge at The Polynesian

  The final stop is Mizner’s Lounge at The Grand Floridian. Wind down with one of their fine ports while listening to the big band or lobby pianist. This place looks a little stuffy, but don’t let that stop you; there’s a great view of the GF gardens, and most importantly (and rare for WDW) FREE MOTHERFUCKING NUTS! As long as you’re ordering their overpriced drinks don’t be shy about requesting more and more nuts!

  Unfortunately, Mizner’s, along with the rest of the WDW bars, closes at 12AM. So if you’re still in a party mood at that time you’re going to have to go elsewhere. Fuckers.

  Free Boat Rides:

  For some reason, even though I’m not a big fan of going boating in the ocean, I absolutely love riding around in the boats at WDW. And luckily, most of those boat rides are free, and very scenic. Two in particular are pretty outstanding. First is the Sassagoula River Cruise from Port Orleans to Downtown Disney. It’s nice and long (2.5 miles – about 25 minutes), goes past a lot of woods (and the new Treehouse Villas), isn’t choppy at all, and there aren’t a ton of stops to break the calm (just one at French Quarter).

  The second is the ride from The Magic Kingdom to The Wilderness Lodge. It’s a little choppier since it’s on a lake and not a canal, but during this ten minute ride you get to see up-close a lot of Bay Lake that you’d never get to see otherwise unless you rented some sort of watercraft. The big plus of this boat ride is that you get dropped off at a very quaint and rustic dock with a lovely walking trail to the backside of The Wilderness Lodge, which is fun to explore in and of itself (especially the geyser and hot springs).

  Pool Hopping:

  Why bother paying $50 to get into Typhoon Lagoon when there are bunch of resorts full of kick-ass pools, lazy rivers, and water slides available for free? Each of the resorts has multiple pool areas, and each has one “themed” pool. It’s not really fair to say that the Deluxe resorts have more interesting or better themed pools than the Moderates or Values, because they’re all pretty cool. However, Stormalong Bay, the water area at The Yacht and Beach Club, definitely takes the cake with its sandy bottom, lazy river, and a slide that goes through the broken mast of a shipwrecked boat.

  The lazy river at Stormalong Bay

  The shipwreck slide at Stormalong Bay

  Of course, “pool hopping”, as it’s known, is not technically allowed by Disney. You’re only allowed to do this if you’re a DVC member. However, the only place where they actively check your room key to see if you’re staying at the resort is Stormalong Bay. And to be honest, there are so many entrances to Stormalong Bay that it’s easy to bypass this “security”. For example, the simplest way to completely get around Stormalong Bay’s key-checkers is to start your visit with a ride on the slide! Yep, just climb the stairs to the slide, go down the slide, and BAM, you’re in like Flynn. They do give you a wristband to wear, but just tell them it was pulling on your arm hair so you took it off. Alternately, you can buy a pack of multicolore
d Tyvek armbands at Party City, look to see what color they’re giving out that day, and slap one on!

  Path from the Epcot area to the shipwreck slide, down into Stormalong Bay

  I’ve never had anyone check for a room key at any of the other pools, although technically it’s possible, I suppose. But if you tell them that you’re there for a meal and decided to swim beforehand, I seriously doubt they’re going to kick you out, because they want your money!

  Probably the best area to pool hop if you don’t have a car, aside from the Stormalong Bay/Boardwalk combo (creepy clown slide at The Boardwalk!) is the Monorail Resort loop, where you have quick access to at least one awesome pool (the volcano @ The Polynesian) and two pretty decent although less exciting pools at The Contemporary and The Grand Floridian, all within minutes of each other via the monorail Resort loop. Get bored at one, and just hop on the monorail and go to another one!

  However, if you have a rental car and don’t mind using it, you could easily spend two days visiting all of the resort pools (and their associated waterside bars!) and having a helluva time going down all of the different slides, sitting in the hot tubs, and just generally enjoying life!

  Chapter 2

  Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll