It’s a Faux World After All

The most direct way by car from greater Tampa to Disney World is by Interstate 4. I went that way with five other students back in ’82, and I have a couple of vague memories about that stretch of road, as it was then. Mainly, I remember long tracts of undeveloped roadside, either wooded or ranch land, which sometimes included cattle—an industry that’s still very large in Florida, but little known. I don’t remember what the traffic was like, but it couldn’t have been heavy, or I would remember it.

Twenty-three years later, there seemed to be much less open land, much more development along the way, and a lot more traffic. Miles and miles of the road were being rebuilt, widened to six lanes it looked like, and about 30 miles ahead of the Disney exits, we hit a traffic jam that added about an hour to our travels. It was, as it turned out, an omen for the day.

All the guidebooks advise preparing for the Disney parks in certain ways, but I’m not sure you can really be ready for the throngs of spring break. Lines for the rides, of course. Lines for food. Lines for the bathrooms. There were even lines to ride the tram that takes you to the lines to buy your ticket which are followed by lines to ride the monorail that takes you to the lines to go through the turnstiles.

If not the happiest place on Earth, Disney is at least one of the best organized. Exasperating as they were, all those queues were orderly, and it was mostly a good-natured crowded, unlike, say, the mobs waiting for buses in China, which likely as not would spawn fistfights the way hurricanes spawn tornadoes. I saw a couple of people screaming at their kids at Disney World—I couldn’t be completely unsympathetic to that—but that was about it.

So we rode some rides, nothing that required more than about a half hour wait. Once she learned it was a roller coaster, Lilly had no interest in the likes of Space Mountain, or even the log ride, so we mostly avoided the hour-plus lines of those amusements. People aren’t quite as willing to line up for rides like the spinning teacups, the faux Indy 500 cars, Aladdin’s “magic carpet,” the faux jungle cruise accompanied by the worst jokes in the park, the Tiki bird show (under new management! A sign said… is Disney outsourcing?), or It’s a Small World, which I’m glad to report still replies on positive stereotypes, practically every one you can think of. We did all those rides and some others.

Then there was the Pirates of the Caribbean. It had the longest line we put up with, artfully concealed from the outside by a maze of corridors done up in faux 18th-century stonework. I insisted on riding it this time. I went on it in 1973, at Disneyland; we were in the front seats, and got a little wet. I rode it again in 1982 at Disney World, and back at Disneyland in 2001 it was the first thing we rode after entering the parking at opening time, and there were no lines.

Four years ago, as I went through that ride, I came to appreciate Disney for its mechanical prowess. Whatever else you can say about it as a rapacious organization, it puts on an amazing show at a place like this—just one ride among dozens. The animatronics have to be set in motion and maintained, the lights have to work a certain way, the sound effects need to function flawlessly, the boats need to keep moving; thousands of things need to happen to take thousands of people through the ride every day. It’s hard to imagine the effort, the sheer man-hours, that go into making the thing run. Multiple that by a factor of who knows how many, and you get the whole park.

One other thing: Disney employees, probably by a combination of nature and intensive training, proved unfailingly helpful. Early in our visit, we stopped for ice cream on Main Street, and as we stood outside the shop eating it, Lilly’s scoop popped out and fell to the ground. A nearby Disney worker, Eric I think was his name, immediately came over and asked what Lilly had had, and went in the shop and got her another cone. I can’t imagine such a thing happening at Six Flags.