95 Days: Every Role a Starring Role

Working for Disney. It's a dream for many a Disney Geek, and I am certainly one who shares that dream. Due to the wonders of social media, I've heard all the criticisms of Disney as an employer......they pay too little, value employees not enough, make unreasonable demands. But if I do it, it will be a retirement gig, so I hope to not care much what I'm paid, and after the career I've had, unreasonable demands are a big ho hum. I'm ready, sign me up, put me in coach.

I always figured I could do about anything that didn't require a ton of skill or special knowledge. I'm not above anything, really. I wouldn't turn down a chance to be the barf scooper in Town Square if it meant I got to work....OH MY GOD!!!!....IN Town Square. I have a CDL and good driving record, so I thought maybe a bus driver or a tram driver. Then, on our trip last September, I saw THE DREAM JOB. Amphicar Driver (or captain, I guess). Those things are the coolest. And the driver gets to wear an old timey captain's hat. I am a sucker for a hat. I would be great, too. I would chat up the guests, tell them all about Disney Springs, flirt with old ladies. I was born for that gig. Now, I just have to retire comfortably, move to Florida, and convince Disney Casting I'm their guy.

I would look SO good in that. And the HAT!

If you've ever dreamed of a Disney Job you might want to check out the Every Role A Starring Role video series from Disney Parks Blog. I stumbled across it last night looking for the Live Streams saved on YouTube and got completely sucked in. I haven't watched all 70 videos, but have seen most. They are short and cover the gamut from Show Director for all of Disneyland Parks to the dude who sells balloons. There are resort jobs and park jobs, behind the scenes jobs and on stage jobs. I particularly enjoyed the Stage Tech video about the people who do for Fantasmic what I've done for our local community theatre. The series is limited to Disneyland, so there's no Amphicar Driver segment, but it does feature tram driver, monorail pilot and Mark Twain Riverboat captain.

As expected, it's all unicorns and rainbows from these people, they all say they love their job. The thing is, they really seem to mean it. And these are mostly not actors. They don't all even say the name of the series correctly in their little introduction. Some are comfortable on camera and some less so. I loved it for it's authenticity, taking into account it's Disney PR. It's very well done PR, and I respect that and can relax and enjoy the chance to dream of a DISney job for myself.

96 Days: #DisneyParksLive Streams

Tonight is the last of four live streams of events at Walt Disney Parks. It just so happens that tonight's is the Paint The Night Parade at Disneyland and since it happens at almost midnight my time, I'll miss it. Truth be told I also missed last week's stream of the Galactic Spectacular fireworks show from Disney's Hollywood studios. We were floating in the pool in the back yard and forgot. Oops. But I did see the first two streams and the entire concept is totally cool and looks to have been carried off wonderfully.

The first live stream was on Independence Day and featured the Fourth of July fireworks from Disney World. The town next door hosts the Official North Carolina Fourth of July Festival complete with huge fireworks display. It's fun but also features a huge traffic jam trying to get home. As I get older, I'm happier on my couch, and if I can watch Disney's fireworks from there, so much the better! We managed to hook my laptop up to both our shiny new embarrassingly large tv and our old, but still amazing Bose radio, so it turned out to be a pretty spectacular show right in our living room.

I ended up at home alone for the second live stream as it happened in late afternoon before the family got home. I have more flexibility and got done in time to thoroughly enjoy the performance of the Mickey's Friendship Faire stage show. It has a bit of a renaissance fair flavor, especially in the costumes, and since we are huge ren faire fans, I loved that aspect. I'm not much to watch the stage shows at Disney World normally, but might just need to make time for this one, especially since they've added Louie Gator from Princess and the Frog. Suppose enough time has passed....

So if you can mange to keep your eyelids open until 11:50 pm Eastern, be sure to check out tonight's live stream at the Disney Parks Blogs website!

PS. I tried to find past live streams on the Disney Parks Blog YouTube channel to no avail. I did, however, get completely swept up in a 70 episode series on jobs at Disneyland.......

97 Days: Return to Coronado Springs

The ceiling of Coronado Springs' Lobby

There's really no question any more of us staying anywhere but on the Walt Disney World property. There are just too many advantages for us and the way we like to vacation. So the question was which resort for our next trip? My original idea was to rent an RV and stay at Fort Wilderness, but even as far ahead as January, all the sites were reserved for Halloween weekend. Lesson learned there. That left us thinking of which resort we'd like to book, and we decided on Coronado Springs.

We are in our hearts moderate resort people. We had a great time last fall at Pop Century, and I'd go back with just Lisa and I, but I didn't want to chance fighting crowds for transportation on this trip. We were wowed by Animal Kingdom Lodge the one night we got to stay there, and all the deluxe resorts we've visited look great, but they are just so much more money than the moderates. We've stayed at all the moderate resorts with the exception of Port Orleans Riverside and actually Lisa and I like Port Orleans French Quarter the best, but John really loved Coronado Springs last time we were there and we've not been in ten years so decided we'd head back this trip.

Coronado Springs gets a bad rep sometimes among the Disney Geek crowd because it's so big. It is really large, but a good bit of it is dedicated to conventions and conventioners, so it really seemed to us not too spread out at all. On our last trip we stayed directly across the lake from the main buildings housing the restaurants and shops and such. There was a bus stop right behind us and a bridge along the lake to take us to El Centro (the restaurants and such).

The night view on the walk to El Centro

And during the day

That bridge, and the walk along it, became one of our favorite things about this resort. The place is absolutely beautiful, especially at night. The lights reflecting in the lake are mesmerizing. And staying a bit of a walk away was nice. It was like we stay "here" and the stuff is "there" and we like that separation. Besides, if walking bothers you, you would probably do best avoiding Walt Disney World in the first place.

The Dig Site Pool water slide

Another plus to Coronado Springs is the pool. It's plenty big enough and features a huge pyramid water slide with a spitting jaguar at the end. It is super cool and I think one of the reasons John was so impressed.

We have such great memories of Coronado Springs we're excited to be going back and making new

I can't wait to find this sign and re-take this photo with 17-year-old John

ones.

98 Days: Disney Food Blog's Guide To The Epcot Food & Wine Festival

The lovely and talented Miss Lisa and I are sitting on the couch torturing ourselves with the DFB Guide to the 2016 Epcot Food and Wine Festival. It's approaching lunchtime and everything in this e-book looks delicious. The descriptions alone would have done it, but the folks at Disney Food Blog have photographed everything so well we are dying here.

I like to pride myself on being good at researching all things Disney, on planning well even for things we've never attended. I hesitated buying this because I thought why spend money on information I could just as easily track down on my own. But I was interested in the e-book format, in how it would work, and I also love the Disney Food Blog for its photos and well-written reviews, so I went ahead and bought this guide last week. I am so glad I did!

First off, the convenience of an e-book really can't be beat. I was worried it would be a hassle (or impossible) getting the book on several devices, but nothing could have been easier. After purchasing the book via a link on the Disney Food Blog website, we simply used another link sent immediately in an email to download the Guide onto my PC laptop, my wife's iPad Air and a shared Kindle Fire. It comes as a PDF and works well on all three devices. I've found myself actually using the laptop to read it more often because the photos are so great and I like seeing them really big. It's fun looking at it together with Lisa on different devices and shouting out the things we've found to each other, but then we're geeky like that.

The Guide itself covers everything you need or want to know about the Food and Wine Festival. There are schedules of guest chefs and demonstrations and special events along with instructions and advice on booking everything. All the booths are described with info on all menu items and photos of many of them (did I mention how great the photos are?). There are sample itineraries for visiting for one or more days or just an evening or doing the Festival with children. I'm particularly fond of the "crawls" section with everything from a beer crawl to a wine crawl to a sampling of each continent crawl and more. Basically, if you want to know it, you'll find it here along with lots you never even knew you'd want to know.

We will only be at the Food and Wine Festival one day during our trip. We didn't plan on it at all, really. The Festival happening while we are going to be in Disney was a pleasant surprise. But since it's happening I want to get the most out of it and the DFB Guide is going to help.

If you'd like to purchase a Guide for yourself, I'd use the above link to the Disney Food Blog website because they have a code for 20% off up right now. The regular price is only $14.95 and it is worth every penny of that, but hey, a deals a deal, right?

99 Days: We Love The Monorail

One of the first things I saw this morning, checking Twitter before I left for work, was a photo of the monorail. Monorail Yellow, I think it was. It being Friday, and nearing the end of July, I am pretty exhausted and thought how much I'd love to be riding the monorail rather than heading out to work. So I decided to make today's blog post a bit of a tribute to our love of the monorail via links. Easy peasy for a Friday night :-)

Last September Lisa and I took a "just us" anniversary trip to Disney World. We only went for the weekend and never entered a park, but we DID enjoy a Monorail Bar Tour and you can read all about it here.

And here we have A Teen's Eye View of the Monorail Loop, shot by my son John out the window as we, well, rode the monorail loop.

This is a short one, but it's still kinda cool....the Avengers Monorail. I'm hoping they have wrapped a monorail during our trip, maybe Rogue One?

That's all I have in me tonight. Sweet dreams :-)

100 Blog Posts Til Disney

Today marks 100 days until the Stites Family returns to Walt Disney World! Since I've been terrible about my promise to myself to return to writing on Pooh Sticks regularly, I've decided to issue myself a 100 Blog Posts Til Disney Challenge. I will write something each day until we leave for the Dis. It may not be long or particularly  profound, but I will post something each day. I've read a couple good Disney related books, so there may be some reviews. There has been and will continue to be planning and scheming about what we shall do and when and how and why, so that will find its way in no doubt. Maybe I'll get all nostalgic and write about past trips. I may share cool posts and fun news from other blogs. Some non-Disney stuff may creep in because it's my blog, my rules :-)

Anyhow, follow along if you like as I merrily march toward my happy place!

Disney Memories

Walt Disney World's marketing slogan this year is something along the lines of "Memories Are Made Here." Wait, it's for Disney Parks in general and it's "Unforgettable Happens Here" (I just Googled it). It's tough to quibble with that. My mind is full of Disney moments. I remember River Country vividly, along with 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the Skyway and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. That last one, Mr. Toad, came up the other day on a car ride home from Durham after seeing The Lion King musical (which was unbelievable, by the way.) We were talking about past trips, about what were some of our best times, and Lisa and I went back to this one night in 1993 that will be hard to beat for Disney Magic.

The trip was pretty great all around. It was a graduation gift to Lisa and I from my parents. We stayed in Fort Wilderness in a cabin with Lisa and I, my mom and dad, and my sister, then about 13. We spent a lot of time together all five of us, but sometimes Lisa and I struck out on our own. This night we'd stayed in the Magic Kingdom after the rest of my family left and we planned to "close out" the park. Boy did we.

I don't remember the entire evening vividly, but the incredible part began during the later of the two runnings of the Main Street Electrical Parade (or maybe it was SpectroMagic then, but I think it was MSEP). We hadn't planned to watch the parade, instead using the opportunity presented by everyone else watching the parade to ride Splash Mountain with very little wait. We were happily surprised to find that we had a great view of the parade from the higher portions of Splash Mountain! It looked incredible from that vantage point, and wonderfully new and different from the usual ground-level viewing. We hadn't planned our ride to coincide with the parade passing through Frontierland - I don't know if we could have - but it worked out that way and it was magic.

Well, that had us on a high. We cruised around Frontierland congratulating ourselves on how awesome we were to have such a great experience. Truth be told, Lisa and I do A LOT of congratulating ourselves on our awesomeness. Is that wrong? Anyhow, as the park closing time neared we found ourselves in Fantasyland, willfully as far from the entrance as we could get. We were in no hurry and wanted to be in the Magic Kingdom as long as we could, if I remember our thinking correctly. Attractions began closing off lines and we figured we might have one shot at one more ride, so we headed to Mr. Toad, because it was one of my favorites and Lisa loves me.

We squeezed into line as some of the last passengers and as the cars came around......Wait, let me stop here and explain a few things. I loved Mr. Toad because it was kind of hokey. It was a glorious, unapologetic, in-your-face kind of hokey. Part of the fun was that the cars were named for characters from the Wind in the Willows stories. It was fun waiting to see, and counting cars and people in front of you as you neared the front of the queue, which character's car you'd get. The crown jewel of course was Mr. Toad's car. It seemed harder to get. Maybe there was only one named for Mr. Toad? I don't know. But anyhow, there we were nearing the loading place and I was counting people and looking at the cars emerge ready to load and.....and....there it was. Mr. Toad. And we got it.

I of coarse, being the cool-as-a-cucumber person I am, let out with an exuberant and very loud, "IT'S MR. TOAD!!!!" Lisa was charmed. The cast member loading cars, who's likely been at her post for many hours and was quite ready to go home, was completely confused and a bit shocked at my outburst. Lisa gave her a "it's ok, he's just like that" look and off we went for what would turn out to be our very last ride through Toad Hall. Hated to see Mr. Toad's Wild Ride go, but what a way to end it.

So, after riding Mr. Toad's very own motor car through the very gates of Hell themselves (what, you didn't think Satan made an appearance in Disney World?), we followed the last of the stragglers down Main Street USA and out of the Magic Kingdom. More self-congratulating was happening. We were on such a high there was no way we were ready for this night to end. So instead of hopping on a boat for Fort Wilderness, we got on the monorail headed to the Polynesian and the Kona Cafe in search of ice cream sundaes.

Sundaes were acquired and eaten. Magic was re-lived. Much laughing and talking happened. Then it occurred to us that as magical as Walt Disney World was, it was unlikely they'd run boats from the Poly to Fort Wilderness 24 hours a day. We headed down to the docks and caught what turned out to be the last launch back to the Fort. Turns out that night they ran until 2 am. It WAS 2 am. This deposited us at the front of Fort Wilderness where we were lucky enough to find one of the internal buses waiting. We were the only passengers on the very last bus of the night. The driver, looking as tired as the Mr. Toad attendant, asked us what site were staying at and took us straight there, right to the door of our cabin, rather than to the bus stop near-by. Disney cast members are the best, even at zero dark freakin' thirty in August.

The family was sound asleep, as one might expect at 2:30 am, and we snuck in and bedded down without waking anyone up. Being only 22 years old and crazy in love and happy, we were up and at 'em with bounces in our steps early the next morning for breakfast with the whole crew.

Best. Night. Ever.

So far :-)