The Marquis

The eyeballing game.  LIttle browser game that you make geometry estimations.  Find the midpoint of the line, bisect and angle, etc…  I think woodworkers have an edge on that, but it’s pretty fun.

Mightygodking.com » Blog Archive » MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits

Awesome photoshop friday-like take of old sf/fantasy favorites

Last week we loaded up the car and headed down to mickeyville, staying at my brother’s place (thanks Ed!)

Sunday is definitely the best day for the magic kingdom.  low crowds. and if you get your tickets through AAA you get a voucher to park in the diamond parking area, which tends to be over near disabled parking and a lot nearer to the park.  you still have to pay for the privilege of parking, of course.  The Small Daughter’s favorite ride at magic kingdom was a tossup between Splash Mountain, and Big Thunder Mountain. She is still too short for space mountain. 

Oddly enough, pirates of the caribbean has just about zero line to ride it, but they added a cool effect near the begining. There’s a “screen” of mist across the path of the boat onto which they project an image of a waterfall and davey jones talking to you, so it really looks like you’re about to plunge through a waterfall and get wet, and then it’s just vapor as you go through it. 

Epcot, which we were going to skip but decided to do anyhow, was a LOT more kid friendly than it used to be a decade ago.  Primarily through the addition of more character-greetings scattered around for pictures and autographs, plus kidcraft areas in each country pavilion with a table that had an ink stamp for the country and a paper cutout for the kids to color on.  So Small Daughter was happy to find the next table to get the next stamp and paper thing to attach to the mask on a stick they gave out.

Two of my favorite rides were at epcot.  The Test-Track was a roller coaster in car form, and Soaring, was one of those bigscreen movies, but you sit down on and buckle onto bench seats, which then get pivoted forward and up so the rows are stacked on top of each other (extreme stadium seating?) and hidden vents blew on you while the movie (and the seats) dipped and banked like you were swooping around. The blowing air really helped prevent motion sickness too.  It certainly made it seem like you were soaring.  And they piped in orange blossom scent when you are flying through an orange grove.  It was really nice.  (come to think of it, Mission to Mars also blows cool air on your face while it’s spinning you to simulate g force.  Speaking as someone who can be prone to motionsickness if I get too hot, it was very nice and I didn’t feel sick at all.)

We lucked into a Dream FastPass at epcot.  Fast passes were new about 9 years ago. Popular rides let have an option to scan your ticket and give you a voucher to come back in a specified time window.  For really popular rides it can be several hours later.  When you come back at that time, you get to cut to almost the very front of the queue.  It’s really nice, but can result in a lot of running back and forth across the park with all the “ok, while waiting for that time window, lets go ride that thing way over there”.  And you can’t get another pass until the time window for your existing pass arrives.

The Dream FastPass is a badge with breakoff tabs, one for each ride that does fastpass.  you walk up, break off the tab, and hand it over.  No waiting for the right time window.  That was really cool.  They had a dream squad who seem to go to kinda out of the way ride exits for a while, and hand out a certain number.  I bet they enjoy their job.

We actually got Dream fastpasses at TWO parks (which has made our neighborhood friends jealous when they hear about it, since they didn’t get any).  It was cool

We had bad luck with Disney Hollywood studios (was MGM, name’s changed), though.  we got there a bit late because we were planning on taking that day off and decided another day would be better at the last minute.  And then we got fastpasses for the roller coaster instead of the toystory ride, which turned out to be more in demand.  Then the toy story ride broke down after we’d been in line for 40 minutes or so.  And when we came back later it was fixed, but all the fastpasses were given out for the day, and the line then was up to an hour.  aiyiyiyi…  
Daughter got picked to say welcome to the crowd at the little mermaid show, though, and got a certificate for it. 
Oh, and it started raining, too.
The big problem at Hollywood is there are more shows and fewer rides.  Shows have set times and durations, and you’re always just missing something.

We took the next day off and relaxed and read lots of books (my sister-in-law is a preschool teacher, so has a whole lot of age appropriate stuff around the place).

Then we went to Animal Kingdom.  The Everest coaster was fun, and we rode the raft ride (I got soaked and pretty much didn’t get dried out all day long, which is always the problem with those, innit?)  They had an outstanding musical adaptation of Finding Nemo (sort of Cirque de Soleil style) with big puppets and special effects and things.  That was great.  There was a dinosaurs coaster closed for refurbishment that looked like it would have been fun, though.  And we got our other Dream Fastpass, although that park didn’t really need it the day we were there.  They seemed to give out more of those on less crowded days.  we hardly saw anyone with one on friday.

Friday was back to Magic Kingdom to get certain characters autographs (princess, natch), ride the coasters etc…, before having dinner with Cinderella and co. over at the grand floridian resort.  Friday was a lot more crowded than sunday had been.  And yes, earplugs help when riding “It’s a Small World”
The wicked stepmother and stepsisters were at the character dinner, and you just know they were having a ball, because they got to be rude to people, since they’re badguys after all.  One of the sisters asked a girl (in a princess gown and wearing Crocs) at the next table over if she’d been feeding chickens, because Cinderella wore shoes like that when she fed the chickens.  Princess girl was not pleased about that comment.

Saturday was drive drive drive all the way home.
Followed by recovery day.