Final Hours at Walt Disney World

Sunday 1 June 2016. We've done it. We've reached the final article in this series which has lasted twice as long as the holiday itself! If you can remember from the previous article, we are having our final day in the Magic Kingdom.

Cinderella's Castle. Despite appearances it is not made of individual bricks, but is mostly reinforced concrete over a steel frame. Construction took 18 months and it employs forced perspective. The higher you look, the smaller the features such as doors to balconies and windows, which make it appear higher than it really is.

It is fairly tall anyway. Most sources quote 189 feet but that's measured from the foundations which are six feet beneath the moat. It's a bit of a mix of styles, looking like a medieval fortress castle, all sturdy windowless walls at the bottom, but Gothic Revival above.

Along one wall of the archway through the ground floor is a series of mosaics telling the story of Cinderella. Five panels set into Gothic arches were filled with over 300,000 pieces of hand-cut Italian glass and marble and rough glass traditionally used to make tesserae (mosaic pieces). Over 500 colours were used and some tiles are coated in silver or 14 carat gold.

The second and fifth panels have doors in them so the mosaic picture is concentrated to the space over the door with decoration to each side of the door. Here in the second panel, the Fairy Godmother does her stuff.

It went a bit busy for a while so I've had to include a couple of blurry people passing the mosaic on the third panel which shows our heroine fleeing the ball and losing her slipper on the steps as the clock chimes midnight.

Some license was used with the colours. You may have noticed that the Fairy Godmother was a touch purple of face. This helps explain her "other worldliness" as much as being due to her concentration levels. In the fourth scene of Cinderella trying on the glass slipper note the Ugly Sisters, one of whom is red with anger whilst the other is green with envy!

Oh... and I couldn't get a pic of the final panel which contains the door to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique where you can pay around $230 including tax for the basic package to have your daughter pampered for somewhere between one to two hours as she is transformed into her favourite made-up and coiffured, be-gowned and sequinned princess. You can pay extras for things like shoes. If you have a little girl who can't sit still or who gets fed up quickly then I'd forget it and just cringe at the state of someone else's kid...

As we emerge from the castle archway we are in Fantasyland. It has a medieval European feeling and facing us is Prince Charming's Regal Carousel. With a bit of artistic license, the Sword in the Stone can be found standing in front of it.

Gable ends and turrets and half-timbered buildings abound. They house merchandise, food outlets and rides. Most of Fantasyland is off to the right, but to the left you will find (darn, there goes that song again!) It's A Small World, Peter Pan's Flight, and Mickey's PhilharMagic, which is a 3D film with some good special effects.

At the back of Prince Charming's Regal Carousel is one of many stroller parks to be found in the park. You can leave your pram (or stroller as the Americans call them) here whilst you go on a ride or for however long you want. As prams are collected, leaving others standing isolated, they are moved to the nearest remaining prams by attendant Cast Members, which must make it fun for anyone trying to find their pram and finding an empty space instead. By early afternoon these parking lots can be fairly large!

It says ice cream, but if you are looking for something else, it's always worth checking a menu board. All the outlets sell a range of drinks from water to fizzy drinks and tea/coffee.

We head out of the park and across the ferry to the landing at the Grand Floridian where we have a meal booked at Narcoossee's Restaurant. They served bread with the starter that was just ordinary bread, not the sickly sweet stuff we have been given to leave untouched for the whole fortnight. Oh Bliss! But then the butter pats came with sugar crystals sprinkled all over them... The meal though was lovely.

Afterwards Gill and Eddie decided to take Grace back for a rest. It would certainly be a long day tomorrow. We caught the ferry back to the Magic Kingdom and headed into Adventureland.

It was starting to go dark and all the lights were coming on. The park takes on a different aspect in the dark, though the sky is still only just starting to lose its brightness.

We cross into Frontierland. Put the people in western dress and it would look really authentic!

It may be approaching evening, but the temperature is still way up there. We pass the Shooting Gallery and cross back into Fantasyland in the top corner of the park. The queue for Peter Pan's Flight is only 35 minutes and we head in there.

Yeow... The temperature of so many people in the small corridors of the queue takes the temperature up to sky high proportions. Like the Winnie the Pooh ride, the queue is full of cool things. You wander through the Darling children's bedroom. On one wall you can see your shadows, but there are also the shadows of lots of butterflies jigging about. If you are quick you can make your shadow catch a butterfly and it will then sit on your hand for a while! Then the butterflies turn into bells and your shadow can hit them and you hear them ring!

This is a very long 35 minutes... The guy before us in the queue was totally ignoring his wife and small daughter and was watching a baseball game on his phone. Something must have happened, requiring the ride software to be reset perhaps. We were in the heat of the queue for an hour. Then the two-minute ride and we came out into a darkened park.

We reached Prince Charming's Regal Carousel again. The number of prams in the parking area had reduced to a small number.

For some reason the sky at twilight always looks bright on photographs, probably because it is bright compared to things around you. But the carousel looked really good all lit up and I took a photo which looked like broad daylight with a totally white sky... Luckily I managed to bring the light levels down to something more like what we were seeing when I got home to my computer and PhotoShop. I don't agree with purists who insist photos should be straight from the camera. Cameras lie.

We came back through Cinderella's Castle and I took this photo looking down towards and along Main Street U.S.A. Only a few minutes separate this photo from the one of the carousel, but we must be looking towards the darkening sky here.

We wandered around the park for a bit as I wanted a chance to photograph the castle in darkness. But - wimps that we are - we were really tired and the thought of waiting another hour for the fireworks and then facing the crush of people waiting for buses to the resort didn't really appeal.

We gave a mental and heartfelt salute to all those Disney Imagineers and Cast Members who had made the Florida experience such a memorable one and walked out of the park for the last time.

Monday 2 May 2016. The following morning we had to be out of our rooms by 8:00am. We had ordered a taxi to take our luggage to the resort's Customs House where the front desk was, but we had to chase the firm up before they arrived.

Then a final breakfast and whilst the ladies looked round the shop for the last time Eddie and I tried out the machines in the small arcade. I won at pinball - he won at basketball...

I found a few minutes to sketch another bit of Barefoot Bay round by the side of Centertown. A cheerleader came jogging round and said "That's really pretty!" as she passed.

Then a small Japanese woman came to talk. She was a Cast Member and was waiting for a party to arrive for their bus to the airport. Although the time had been specified in the brochure, she said the bus would have visited several other resorts first and might arrive anything up to 15 minutes early. They had refused point blank to arrive any earlier than the stated time however - to the point of getting angry at her and she was worried the bus might not wait.
"The brochure time is the time the bus is due to leave, not the time they should turn up!" she worried. I guess there are stupid people the world over... "What is it you're doing?" she asked and I showed her the almost finished sketch. "Oh..." she said, then, "Oh! Is that the water???" You win some, you lose some...

We all congregated ourselves in timely fashion and caught the resort bus for the Customs House where we were reunited with our luggage very efficiently. On time, our bus arrived and we set off for the airport.

Orlando International is - as could be imagined - a very busy airport. There were long queues and frequent hold-ups because there were far fewer security gates than the preliminary security desks feeding them. Other queues may well have gone quicker, but I've long since reconciled to the fact that getting frustrated at airports only winds up yourself and the people in your party. So when another stop came just as we reached the front of our queue, I just shrugged and began to chat with the chap on the desk, as did the man at the front of the other queue that he single-handedly had to cope with.
"It's tough knowing that everyone is staring at you, believing you are just not working fast enough," he said, "but luckily at the moment I've got two friendly faces in front of me!"

We got onto our plane with no problem and then came the long flight home. I hope you've enjoyed this trip as much as I've enjoyed reliving it whilst writing the blog. Fourteen days holiday became twenty five blog articles over the space of thirty one days.

Disney World Holiday Index

Disney Dinosaurs and Disasters of The Ice Cream Kind...

Thursday 28 April 2016. This will be a dual-park day again for us, though with the bulk of photos coming from the Magic Kingdom. First we must go back in time...

We start the day at EPCOT in the science-oriented bits. The Universe of Energy has a show starring actress Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye, The Science Guy (?) looking at how fossilised fuels came about. This starts off as a film show, but then the rows of seats we are sitting in turn round like a train on a turntable and then move off into another huge hall with a literally breathtaking scene, glimpsed through the opening doors...

I didn't take any photos on the ride, but this is my sketch of the sight that awaited us with a whole herd of these gruntodons, one of which greeted us with a sneeze, spraying us with a mist of water! They were very lifelike with Audio-Animatronic movement. There were many more dinosaurs waiting to eat us or each other as our... er... cinema seats (!) moved through several scenes.

We decided to park hop on the Monorail from EPCOT to the Magic Kingdom. I still love the look of the Disney Monorail which goes all the way back to 1964. I remember how excited I was when I heard that Blackpool was to get a monorail in the Pleasure Beach in 1966 and then it looked as though they had made it out of origami folded cardboard... A bit like making a space ship that looked like a horse-drawn stagecoach...

By the time we got to the Magic Kingdom we were hot and thirsty and we decided on ice cream floats from a shop on Main Street U.S.A.

"You'll need to start drinking these straight away!" warned the man at the counter, handing over two large frothing drinks that threatened to explode lava-like over the edge. I took a big swig and Phew! mine was safe.

Miss Franny however was adamant she wanted to go outside before drinking and it erupted all over the cup, the ice cream carton that the man hastily thrust at her, her hand, several napkins that I grabbed, and half the floor before I could persuade her to take a gulp. We mopped up as best we could and left, safe in the knowledge that we couldn't be chased because everyone left in the shop was stuck to the floor...

I had been disappointed on our first visit here, this trip, to see that the Walt Disney World Railway was closed for refurbishment. But today - yahoo! - it was open. We got on at Town Square and did a full circuit of the park. There's not really a chance to take a good photo of the locomotive at the station as it pulls too far forward. It is, after all, the carriages which need to stop at the platform! I took this from behind the barrier as it steamed into the station.

The train stops in both Frontierland and Fantasyland. This is the view from the Frontierland station which overlooks the queueing area for Splash Mountain.

When we came back to Town Square and left the station, we found crowds had gathered for the daily Festival of Fantasy Parade. Oh what the heck! Let's watch again and just concentrate on faces.

We head into Tomorrowland for another trip on the People Mover. In the background you can see the stepless moving pavements that go up and down between ground and platform levels.

We met up with the family to eat at Casey's Corner. Well, the EGGs ate there. One look at the enormous hot dogs smothered in sauce was enough to convince us to look elsewhere but we all sat at the same table outside! By the time we made our way back down to the lagoon and the rows of bus stops, it was going dark and we could see but not hear flashes of lightning on the horizon.

This is one of the ferries that crosses between the Magic Kingdom and the nearest car parks. A fleet of land-trains (Disney call them "trams") run between the theme park and the car parks also. The car parks stretch for miles! Pay particular care as to which car park you leave your car in - it could take ages to find again if you forget!

Back at Caribbean Beach Resort. The sky is dark and cloudy and we can still see lightning. We don't hear any thunder or get any rain though.

Disney World Holiday Index

Disney's Caribbean Beach Resort, Florida

Thursday 21 April 2016. After two full days at the Magic Kingdom we were ready for a bit of a rest. We were booked for lunch at a restaurant in EPCOT, but we allowed ourselves a leisurely morning and Gill and Eddie let Grace sleep through until she woke - she slept through a full twelve hours!

So a chance to take a look at the resort where we stayed. This is the beach for the Jamaica segment, looking across the lake towards Old Port Royale.

Caribbean Beach Resort is large. It has six "villages" each themed on a different Caribbean island set around a 45-acre lake known as Barefoot Bay. There are seven beaches like this around the perimeter of the Bay. Swimming is not permitted in the lake itself. There are turtles in the lake which is given as a reason. I wasn't aware that they were all that dangerous, I have heard of snapping turtles of course but assumed that was the sound their beaks made rather than their victims' legs... Apparently turtles are carriers of salmonella bacteria. Usually mild, it can be deadly and in any case I would not want to be on a fairly expensive holiday and spend all my time running to the bathroom... Caribbean Beach has the best-themed swimming pool of all Disney's Moderate resorts at Old Port Royale village and each village has its own smaller pool.

The patio just in front of the Old Port Royale, Centertown building which houses the restaurant, shops, arcade, concierge and a large dining seating area facing a row of fast food outlets.

There is only one choice of cooked breakfast for the bacon and egg fancier and that has three scoopfuls of scrambled egg (around 6 eggs worth probably), three or four tiny half-inch strips of bacon so thin you can read through them and done to a crisp. There is hardly any meat at all on them, they are two-thirds fat. A "sausage" that was the same shape, same size, same appearance and exactly the same taste as a burger patty, an inch-thick slice of bread, so sweet to english tastes as to be inedible for Fran and I, a "biscuit" - a sort of cross between an english scone and a dumpling - also inedible for us, and a pile of rather greasy potato wedges. Asking for stuff to be left off earns you an incredulous stare indicating they think you are quite mad and sometimes they just simply refuse. There is a smaller breakfast but it's just for kids, they won't serve an adult with it.

On the plus side the fruit and danish pastries and croissants were lovely. If you are on a meal plan, a Quick Service meal is three items and unless you pick three they will take items off your snack allowance. Most days we opted for a cereal (a small packet plus a carton of milk classes as one item), either a tub of fruit or a croissant/danish and a fresh orange juice. The bottles of orange juice were large enough for us to share one and then we took the other back to the room and stuck it in the fridge to drink when we returned in the evening.

This particular morning I had got a mug of coffee and sat on a picnic table by the lake. It turned out to be a smoking area but this morning the smokers were absent and I spent some time sketching the scene before me. Fish were swimming along the bank of the lake just in front of the table.

In fact you can hire boats and go fishing for bass and other fish. This is the Barefoot Bay Boat and Bike Works. Besides the boats you could hire bicycles or a two-seater four-wheeled bike to terrorise walkers.

We saw a huge carp one day that someone in a state of excitement pointed out to us as we were crossing one of the bridges between Jamaica village and the island in the middle of the lake. The island is called Caribbean Cay and contains a kiddies' playground and a few pathways with gazebos. Signs proclaimed they were open for "your enjoyment from sunrise to sunset". So no going at night for a spot of outdoor nookie! Besides, one day we were walking along the path and turned a corner to come face to face with a black snake. It was about three feet long, with a body about an inch and a half thick and its head was raised off the ground. A group of us all exclaimed and came to a dead stop! Then someone made a move to cross its path and it turned like lightning and disappeared back into the plant cover at the side of the path!

Another sketch (I'm cheating - I did it on a later day during the holiday) of Caribbean Cay from the Jamaica village beach, showing two of the wooden gazebos along the pathways.

The Centertown building contains all the food outlets, shop and amusement arcade. If there's one thing I've realised and kicked myself for since coming back, it's the fact that I didn't take any photos of the interior. Sorry!

Well, apart from these which don't really show much of the interior at all anyway. On a desk facing the door was a Duffy bear. Duffy is a Disney character that I think has a programme on TV. I said I'd never heard of him which got me into trouble because Grace apparently already has one that I have seen and helped dress up in costumes. So I'm told (and with some severity...)

Anyway, this Duffy started every day in a state of undress and the first child to volunteer could dress him in a costume of their choice and he then stayed in that costume on the desk next to a certificate that said who had dressed him.

Grace had been disappointed for a week until we went over early and there he was, naked as a ...er... bear with no clothes on... She chose to dress him as Pluto (the dog not the planet) and she was given a copy of the certificate to keep. It says: "Duffy the Disney Bear. Duffy was dressed today April 26th 2016 by Princess Grace. Thanks for dressing me today. Your Pal, Duffy".

Disney World Holiday Index