My senior year of high school was the trip to Walt Disney World. The choirs, orchestra and band all went down the week before Spring Break to their competition.
Before I begin, let me state that the competitions are a joke, in our case, anyway. Every single group from our high school won first prize in their category, mostly because there were all of two or three schools entered, all from pretty much around the area.
We went, though, because the band director thought it was this great idea and in order to get the district to toss some funding that direction, they had to have a certain number of students participating.
Anyway, I was 18 and skeptical of Disney theme parks. Disney movies were pretty crap, Pixar had released Monster's Inc, but I had been unimpressed with Bug's Life and when they released Toy Story 2 I decided Pixar was just the same crap Disney model in a new style of animation. I watched a lot of Snow White and Bambi and, more than that, a lot of Don Bluth.
I couldn't believe that there was anything magical about the Magic Kingdom. But I went. They dropped us off to spend the day at the parks at Epcot, before nine AM, because of course the most exciting place to be at Disney World is Epcot at nine in the morning in the off season.
Nothing was open, no one was around. My friend and I wandered all the way around the lagoon and discovered it was all "look, pay for this!" And went to Hollywood Studios, which was slightly less lame, but, again, a lot of "pay for this!" and the Tower of Terror (I waited, my friend rode, I'm a huge fraidy cat when it comes to falling from heights. I will never be an astronaut and that's fine with me.)
So, another theme park down, we decided to head to the Magic Kingdom, since both of us agreed that going to Walt Disney World to go to a zoo (Animal Kingdom) was the stupidest idea ever. Animals are animals: unless they were singing and dancing, Disney really can't do much to improve on the idea.
Remember, we're jaded high schoolers. (Although, if the park had gone ahead with Beastly Kingdom, it might've been worth it for that.)
So, to Magic Kingdom. It was really quite a let down. I mean, there's a souvenir shop in Cinderella's Castle. We couldn't work out how to find the Haunted Mansion- in fact, the only two rides we could find were Snow White's Scary Adventure and the Dumbo balloon race type ride.
OK, we thought, we came all the way here and only found one ride, we're going on the Snow White ride.
It was awesome. We rode it four more times. Highlight of the whole trip, right there. It really made me want to go check out Disneyland someday, since I know that Walt was actually still alive when that whole place was engineered. I like him, it's the twisted things that have been done to the company since that I'm not a fan of.
But, there was still one thing missing. Ever since I was a little kid, I'd wanted a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. I understood that the only place they could be obtained were at a Disney theme park. OK, I was at a Disney theme park, I wanted my ears. We looked all over the whole Magic Kingdom, and we saw versions of ears, but mostly on base ball caps. These were not the ears I was looking for. We finally found them, and I was, again, disappointed.
The ears, which I did buy and wear and still have, are plastic. Not even heavy molded plastic, more like ear shells, similar to the stuff that plastic Halloween masks are made of. They're stapled into a thin felt beanie with a paper Mickey Mouse logo slapped on the front. At the time, I didn't know that the ears traditionally had a Mouseketter symbol on them, but a paper sticker?
It was a let-down, and my brain does not allow me to remember how much I paid for them, because it was probably too much. Someday, I think I will have to make myself a proper pair of ears, out of thick felt and wire, and maybe it'll feel the same.
I think maybe someday I'll be able to go back, but the happiest place on earth was just too disappointing, in the end.
Of course, we also went to Sea World on that same trip, and I remember practically nothing about Sea World other than standing around in the heat waiting for my friends to ride both Kraken and Journey to Atlantis. I also remember penguins.