Disney's Festival Of Fantasy Parade

Last time I ended with us hearing the music heralding the 3:00pm Disney Parade: The Festival of Fantasy. Although we were well behind the crowds lining the parade route, most of the main characters are riding on tall float vehicles. We'll see some of the dancers and other floor-level characters in a later entry.

Mickey and Minnie actually bring up the rear of the parade, but I thought I'd add them first as the first pic is the one picked when I post links on FaceBook etc. Anyway, no one epitomises or represents Disney better than Mickey Mouse!

Giving some idea of our restricted view is this shot of the approach of the parade. The first float carries Belle and her Beast.

The The Festival of Fantasy has been running since March 2014. The parades are updated every so often but there is no hard and fast length of time that a certain parade will run and the interval can be as short as one year (where parades are themed around an anniversary event for instance) to five years.

The way that the soundtrack is handled is really rather clever. There is a general soundtrack which forms a basic rhythm and each float has it's own soundtrack that fits over the rhythm. Each float has loudspeakers and there are also speakers along the route on lamp posts etc. A special system picks up the approach of the parade and each individual float so that the music starts to build up as the parade approaches and then the appropriate music for each float "follows" it along the route. It works very seamlessly so that for instance a snippet of Be Our Guest, as Beauty and The Beast pass by, segues effortlessly into a quick blast of every young girl's favourite Let It Go! as Anna and Elsa from Frozen come by.

And so on. Ariel proves that whilst mermaids have tails instead of legs there is still some semblance of knees, and we get to sing a bit of Under The Sea!

Most of the floats have a troupe of dancers preceding them. The costumes for the dancers for The Little Mermaid float represented sea creatures and were fabulous. We'll get to see them on another day. On the ground before Peter Pan and Wendy are a few dastardly pirates with Mr Smee whilst below the ship on the float old Captain Hook himself is swinging on the anchor and keeping a wary eye on Tick-Tock Croc who is following behind the float.

Pinocchio (no thank you, AutoCorrect, I didn't mean "pincushion"...) rides atop Monstro the Whale. There is no room for the full set of Disney cartoon heroes but somehow Pinocchio has survived where Bambi, Mowgli, Duchess and her kittens and many more have fallen by the wayside.

The Sleeping Beauty element of the parade though, is devoted to Maleficent's dragon as a gloriously worked steampunk version. The driver is visible within the creature's neck and every now and then it raises its head to breath fire.

And it does breathe fire! Even several rows behind the crowd we could feel the heat from the jet of fire it breathed out. Ferocious looking attendants with masked faces and long, long legs (saying stilts would spoil it...) add to the fun. Donald and Daisy Duck followed with Mickey and Minnie bringing up the rear, draw the parade to a close. It takes about 12 minutes for the full length of it to pass you.

People start to gather by the edge of the route from about an hour beforehand and some spots, particularly the roundabout before Cinderella's Castle and from there, the full length of Main Street U.S.A. down to Times Square get particularly crowded.

We had been in the park since early morning and we decided to head back to the Caribbean Beach Resort for a cool down and a rest before it was time to eat again. The buses for resorts leave at least every 20 minutes and we found that we seldom had to wait so long. It does feel like it, in the heat, sometimes! Our bus stop (each resort has it's own buses and stopping place) was almost the furthest from the exit from the park, but it was a pleasant walk with a large pond to the side opposite the rows of bus stops.

Something large buzzed past my head and I ducked. "What was that?" Then looking up into the trees between us and the pond we saw what it was! Huge dragonflies clung to the top branches. These were four-inch (10cm) whoppers! Eew!

Disney World Holiday Index

Aberystwyth Evening

This week included a trip to Wales for work, starting on Tuesday evening as I arrived in Aberystwyth on the west coast.

It must have been about the - oh, let's see - the first mild day of the year... I dumped my bags in the hotel and set off to look for somewhere to eat, no coat, hat, mittens or anything!

It was quite pleasant to walk along the promenade - Marine Terrace, they call it there. The pier juts out into Cardigan Bay and I passed by, seeing the unmistakeable walls of a castle in the distance.

Just before the castle was an impressive building that turned out to be the Old College of the university. This had been built as a hotel but the owner had problems and sold it to the then University College of Wales in the 1860s. A most impressive building with a tower and three-panelled frieze. I suspect the crazy golf course is more for the benefit of holidaymakers in the town rather than the students, but you never know!

Two dragons stand guard over the doorway, perhaps as a warning to students. One is named "Error" and the other "Darkness". A trifle harsh perhaps... do we not learn from mistakes? Anyway I had occasion to visit the new campus of today's Aberystwyth University the following day and managed to run a workshop for university and college managers without being shrivelled up by dragon fire!

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Uffington, Horse and Dragon, King Arthur and St George

Thursday 30 May 1998. Leaving Oxford behind, we drove on to Uffington, the site of our last white horse of the week and a place of considerable mystery.

The horse is thought to be the oldest of the white horses of England and is not a true representation, but rather a cartoon, loose formed, styled for speed and grace, picked out on the crest of the highest hill in the area as though galloping for the safety of the hill fort a few yards away.

We parked the car and started walking towards the horse, but meeting a white sheep first... As we approached the hill we could see... something...

There is a problem here. The horse is on the crest of the highest hill... There was someone else, a couple walking down from the horse.
"Where can you see it from?" the chap asked me in a puzzled voice. I pointed at the sky.
"Up there," I said. The only way you can see the entire drawing is from the air. From the ground you can only see bits of it.

This could explain why it looks so little like an actual horse of course... You have to wonder what contemporary opinion was at completion. Did the commissioning king or chieftain exclaim "Bloody Nora, what a pillock! How is anybody supposed to see it?!?" and have the unfortunate artist put to death on the spot? Or is it a horse at all?

Just below the horse is a smaller flat-topped hill with a large white spot in the middle of it. This, according to an ancient folklore, is where St George slew the dragon. It is said that the dragon's blood, being spilt here, inhibits the growth of grass, leaving the white spot forever to mark the place. Which is fine except that there are no records to show that St George ever came to Britain at all.

"Yuck!" his page said, "Britain? Why would you go there? Full of blue-painted twits and dragons all over the place! They'll take you for a dragon slayer!"
"They'll take me to their hearts or not at all..."

There is a school of thought that says the drawing is of the dragon, not a horse. Another that it is St George's steed.

We left the horse and turned to have a look at the near by hillfort. Turning away from Dragon Hill (that's really its name so someone believed in it!) we saw another natural feature. The Manger. Formed by melting ice as the ice age ended (always a good time for ice to melt...) it is the supernatural feeding place of the white horse which on moonlit nights (this is the legend you know, I'm not making it up!) canters or rolls down the hill (alright... I did make that bit about rolling up...) to feed. Three sets of brackets in a single sentence, by heck, that's not bad!

And here's Miss Franny trogging along the rampart wall of Uffington hillfort. It's quite a large hillfort and has been suggested for the site of King Arthur's Battle of Badon, mentioned in the Annals of Wales. It's in a strategic position as it protects the ancient trackway known as the Ridgeway. But there are so many contenders for Badon and it is unlikely we shall ever know.

So another school of thought is that the horse is that of King Arthur. The scouring of the white horse, to stop grass growing to obliterate it, was turned into a festival that occurred every seven years and included games such as wrestling and cheese rolling. Cheese rolling sounds a crazy sport doesn't it? You can't help wondering if it started by accident when some twit dropped his cheese and had to hare off down the hill after it and everyone laughed and rolled their own cheeses after him in an attempt to knock him down, thus inventing the game of skittles...

Where are we going next? Blimey, this holiday is almost done!

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