Disney World 2022 and 1998

At the end of March Donna and I went to Disney World with our daughter Eileen and her family. It had been a quarter century since our last visit there, when we took our kids, the oldest then being 12. This time around, our grandkids were six, three and two. Disney World delivered on being a touchstone moment for children. It was amazing for Donna and me to see the kids enraptured – especially Corinne, the oldest. She was at the perfect age where it is all simultaneously very real and very magical, and an experience she won’t forget.

The rides

Corinne loved the roller coasters – Barnstormer, Runaway Railroad, and Splash Mountain -- the faster the better – and seeing the parades and the castle. She also loved Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, a new experiential ride similar to the Honey I Shrunk the Kids ride I remember. The young ones enjoyed It’s a Small World, Dumbo, the teacups, and especially the sensational aquarium in EPCOT (Claire, the youngest, makes me draw sharks for her constantly when I am around, and carries with her a stuffed shark). Three-year-old Cormac loved Speedway and Lightning McQueen’s Racing Academy.

A note about Cormac: He is obsessed with Lightning McQueen. He brought a miniature Lightning McQueen car with him to the park every day, against the unspoken wishes of his sage grandfather, to roll over every vertical and horizontal surface, indoor and out, that Disney ever created, and never misplaced it.

A casualty of the pandemic was access to the Disney characters. This was a big part of our trip a generation ago. Our kids were transfixed by Mickey, Minnie, Ariel, Cinderella, Aladdin, and the rest, who roamed the parks, offering to hug children and having their picture taken with them. The characters this time were mainly absent, except a few who waved from behind gated areas or were on parade floats. The good news: Disney announced that they are coming back later this spring.

The Disney World experience in 2022 was much different from the Clinton-era version, and we should have expected it. After all, the last time we ventured to The Happiest Place on Earth:

•  Cell phones and the Internet existed, but phones couldn’t access the Internet.
• There was no high-speed Internet access; most people still had dial-up modems. If someone picked up the ubiquitous wireline house phone while you were online, you were no longer online.
• Google? Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? Instagram? No, no, no, no, and of course not.
•  Nor was there GPS, so to get driving directions, you
• Unfolded an impossible-to-re-fold highway map from AAA, highlighted the route and then tried to follow it while driving, or
• Printed out a map with turn-by-turn directions from startup MapQuest and tried to follow them while driving. The Waze boy band wasn’t around to sing directions to you.

Logistics

Back in the dark ages of the tail end of the 20^th century, you bought your passes, booked rooms and travel, and packed your bags. Today, non-frequent visitors like us get an Authorized Disney Vacation Planner because of the complexity of the planning process. Our planner (Megan Grosso, very helpful and knowledgeable) helped us devise a strategy to ensure we got to the things we wanted to see and do, bought the services we wanted (photography, Lightning Passes, reservations), got the right passes (some restrict which parks you can visit and have other limitations). Seemingly everything needs to be scheduled: the rides you go on, your meals, and more.

Of course, everything now is digital: A remarkable app lets you reserve times for rides, shows waiting times for rides and height restrictions, what you have scheduled for the day and upcoming days, lets you order food from your hotel (but no room service!), provides information about your hotel and the parks, and obviously, lets you buy Disney merchandise.

In addition, just to make it a little easier to suck money out of your pocket and into Disney’s, you buy (at $10 or $20, depending on style) a wristband with an embedded chip that allows you to make purchases, gain entry into the parks, even unlock your hotel room door. Reported coming enhancements to the app will let you do all that from your phone, making the bands unnecessary. Just don’t lose your phone!

The hotel

We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. It’s a stunningly beautiful hotel with an African motif and abuts the Animal Kingdom Park (which like the hotel didn’t exist a quarter-century ago). Our adjoining Savannah rooms overlooked a clearing in the park and there were nearly always close-by giraffes, zebras, wildebeests, exotic birds and other animals I can’t name.

The lodge is on the sprawling Disney property (nearly 25,000 acres, half of which has been developed), but it’s a 25-minute bus ride to the Magic Kingdom. We had tried to get into a hotel on the monorail system for quick access to the parks, but it was impossible. After two years of quarantining, people are swarming to destinations like Disney. The parks were packed, the restaurants were packed, the hotels were packed. The hotel pool, which Donna and I foolishly thought would be a quiet getaway on afternoons while the rest of our crew rode rides, was packed.

Food

The restaurants and food are shamefully overpriced. If you think a family meal at a major-league ballpark is expensive, Disney will put a new perspective on that for you. Animal Kingdom Lodge does have a relatively low-cost venue with tables or for takeout that we used for breakfast and a couple dinners. The other hotel options are white-tablecloth restaurants that were booked solid six weeks before we got there and eye-poppingly expensive. You can buy snacks in the parks, but most of the restaurants require reservations. We splurged and reserved lunch one day at the Crystal Palace in the Magic Kingdom – and it was a wise choice. Our last night we used Uber Eats to order pizza from an off-property joint and had a fun pajama pizza party in our rooms.

Other observations

To me, Disney has a Las Vegas feel to it now. It’s booming, with sleek modern hotels going up all over the property to accommodate the rising number of visitors, although the park itself doesn’t seem to have much more capacity.

Also like Vegas, the focus seems to be more on adults than children, and we met couples and saw many more who were there sans kiddos. Disney Springs, opened in 1975 as Downtown Disney and renovated and re-branded in 2015, is a large, open-air luxury shopping mall with “signature” restaurants and a theater for a standing Cirque du Soleil act. Having failed to secure a dinner reservation in our hotel for some alone time, Donna and I took a 30-minute bus ride to Disney Springs for dinner at Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill. Great food, personable friendly service and ambiance similar to an airport restaurant. Donna looked amazing, by the way. Incidentally, the parks are dotted with kiosks hawking the Disney Vacation Club, its timeshare program.

Finally, the kids were impossibly well behaved. They waited patiently at the airport, for ground transportation, to get on rides, for food. They were like seasoned travelers on the plane (minus being jaded). They whined and complained less than their grandfather. They had their meltdown moments, understandably, but infrequently and of short duration. And they got to experience the magic their parents had experienced at the same time in their lives, with their parents and grandparents. And Donna and I got to see it all.