And, as are all my pages, this one is forever undergoing construction, improvement, reinvention, etc. Gots lotsa links!
My parents took Fletcher and me to Disneyland for three days a couple of years ago; it was Fletcher's first time there, so he didn't really know what to expect, but I sure was excited. It was pretty crowded, and crowds tend to get me agitated and irritable, but taking my son to the park was easily worth the trouble.
Being Disneyland, the whole experience was, to use the obvious cliche, magical, but there were at least a couple of points that stood out. One was when we were able to sit with the driver on the Monorail; I'd wanted to do that my whole life, and here we were was doing it for the first time together. It was a little weird, though, since at the time they weren't making round trips because of the DCA construction, so the trip over to the hotel was made in reverse, as it were; backing up, we could only see where we'd been, not where we were going. I'll tell you what, though, the air conditioning in the driver's compartment works pretty good, especially compared to the open-air passenger cars.
Another attraction he really enjoyed enough to go on more than once (probably because it's so low-key) was the Astro Orbiter, which if you're unfamiliar with it is just two-passenger cars that go up and down while revolving (or "orbitting," I guess) around the retro-futuristic central tower thingy. What was really exciting about the second time we rode was that the world famous Maynard (pronounced mayNARD, at least according to Maynard) was running the ride; he was rambling out some amazingly twisted story about Bobo, King of the Monkey Planet, and how everything on the Monkey Planet was made of gold, the cars, roads, everything, but being monkeys what they really wanted was bananas, so the mission of the Astro Orbiters was to go to the monkey planet and trade bananas for gold, and then take the gold and put it in Maynard's car. It was really impressive how he could interrupt this fantastic, impressively detailed story to load and unload the ride, then continue exactly where he left off, assigning a commander for each mission. Anyway, standing in line listening to this epic unfold over the loudspeakers, I knew who the storyteller was.
"That's Maynard!" I told my brother-in-law. "Who's Maynard?" he asked, so I explained about how this particular Cast Member has fans all over the world, and web pages dedicated to him; I think Jamie thought I was nuts. I hadn't even considered being lucky enough to run in to Maynard, but there he was. So he loads us on the ride, and I'm just kind of watching him. As the ride starts, he sees me looking at him and pokes his head out of the control booth. "What's his name?" he asks, quietly enough to not attract Fletcher's attention. "Fletcher," I said, as we floated by. He resumes the story, and over the loudspeakers we hear: "Your mission will be commanded by Captain Fletcher, and his first mate Daddy-o." "Did you hear that?" I asked Fletcher. "You're the commander!" He talked about that for hours. "Gramma, I was the commander!"
Several attractions I thought he'd really enjoy we didn't go on because he got scared waiting in line; Jungle Cruise,Haunted Mansion,Star Tours. He also got pretty frightened in "Honey I Shrunk The Audience" when the cat morphed into a ferocious lion and lept out of the screen. Because of this relatively low fear level, I was pretty apprehensive when we went on Rocket Rods. He sat in the very front seat; if you never went on this ride, only the rear-most seats were side by side, the rest were single seats in line. The impression of speed was pretty strong, especially around the turns in the dark, and I was concerned he might not have been strapped in quite securely enough (what a dad, huh?). When we got off, though, he wanted to go again. Too bad they won't be there when we go back.
We went to Tom Sawyer's Island, which I have no recollection of having ever visited before, alhtough my parents said I had. I think this may have been Fletcher's favorite attraction; he and his cousin Nathan just ran all over the place. He especially liked Fort Wilderness, and the rifles that make a firing sound when the trigger is pulled. If we hadn't had to catch a plane, he'd probably still be there, hiding in the caves.
Just as a side note, Michael Eisner was walking around the park the last day we were there. He didn't ask me what I thought, even though he and his entourage walked right by us; probably would have told him to get the submarines back in operation, for starters.
I grabbed this logo from somewhere and forgot to write down who it was.
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