Is it just me... or did he just about miss the point entirely?
Disney World
No fun? Are you taking the Mickey, dad?
In Disney World even Captain Hook had a sunny smile. There were fairy-tale princesses, amazing 3-D movies - and tons of sugar. His daughters adored it...Then Tim Adams was told he couldn't buy two glasses of wine at the same time
Sunday May 28, 2006
The Observer
Early on my fifth morning at the happiest place on Earth, I lay awake staring at the ceiling of our concrete log cabin wondering if I would get through the week. Outside, I could hear the small army of Disney workers organising the exact geometry of loungers, practising their upbeat greetings, preparing for another day of fun.
My daughters in their bunk beds, high on princesses and sugar, had slept fitfully but were now stirring for another round of Cinderellabration™. Lisa, my wife, was apparently having unsettling dreams of grown men dressed as Tigger. I was thinking about all the day's pleasures ahead - the choice of fine dining at one of 500 themed restaurants, the photo-opportunities with Aladdin's girlfriend, the fireworks in the bright afternoons, the hotel cafe in which every so often you were required to shout 'Yeeeharr!' and get involved in a hobby-horse race with vacationing American businessmen - and deciding whether it would make me an irretrievably bad dad if I feigned illness.
As a parent, I've always had a slightly troubled relationship with Disney. Leaving aside the vast corporate excesses, the manipulation of childhood imaginations and the sinister global standardisation of happy endings, for me, this has something to do with the decision to add characters to Winnie the Pooh - a beaver, notably, with a lisp - as if AA Milne's original cast didn't quite cut the mustard.
There's always been something about the idea of that decision, made no doubt in some blue-sky concept meeting ('Let's see if we can bring something new to the mix') that has filled me with dread and despair. As always with Disney, there is a manifest absurdity to this overreaction: it's for kids, after all; consider it not so seriously, grow up. And it is, of course, entirely redundant, having such worries; however you feel about the world's largest entertainment corporation, as a father of girls you will inevitably watch your house filling with trademarked cuddly toys and pink plastic and your cupboards stuffed with fairy dresses and console yourself, over and over, with the undoubted joys of Mary Poppins and Baloo the Bear.
Here at the heart of the empire, in the distended belly of what Florida's greatest chronicler, Carl Hiaasen, likes to call Mousewitz, such concerns, though, and the absurdity of them, are cruelly magnified. Disney World is, moment by moment, the best of times, and the worst of times. Every day had been a carnival (and still three to go). Each afternoon in the Magic Kingdom there have been parades, Broadway shows, princesses emerging from a fairytale castle and dancing with a handsome prince. You could have your face painted. You got wet sometimes, and everyone laughed.
For the legions of mouse operatives, nothing had been too much trouble. Everyone greeted us with a sunny smile, even Captain Hook. Why then, I was wondering, did I not want to get out of bed that morning? In a small way I wished I could capture the attitude of a man I had stood behind while waiting to purchase a pack of painkillers in the hotel shop the previous evening, a collector of the latest limited-edition memorabilia who insisted that the assistant unpacked a presentation box containing moulded plastic princesses while he inspected the craftsmanship with his wife. Was it a fatal flaw in my own make up that prevented me from partaking fully in all that magic? (Answer: almost certainly.)
Half-awake, and trying to work out how so much extravagant happiness should seem like such hard work, I went through a little list of the previous days' irritations. For a start, Disney loved rules. You needed rules to guarantee the Perfect Vacation Experience. My favourite was the one-drink rule. On our first evening I had queued up for 10 minutes at the hotel bar to buy two glasses of wine. I was told, with a smile, that since the bartender could not see my wife from where he was standing I could only purchase one alcoholic drink. I tried to point her out across the other side of the swimming pool, but the craning of necks was apparently not part of the rule. I wondered if he could put the wine in a very large glass that we could share. He smiled. I explained that I was 40 years old. He smiled. I bought a glass of wine and took it over to my wife. Then I queued up for 10 minutes and bought another glass for myself.
In a way, I had been telling myself, the rules were part of the fun. On the second day, walking out of the Magic Kingdom, I had stepped one foot through the exit then turned around to try to take a photograph of my daughters with Minnie Mouse, who had suddenly appeared, and put her big mouse head between theirs. I was prevented from capturing this image by security, who had been watching my subversive manoeuvre closely: 'No re-entry to the park without bag search,' I was told. And when I laughed a little: 'We all have to make sacrifices at times such as these, sir.'
Had these rules taken the edge of fun off things? Well, a little. Were they the same for everyone? Yes, of course. There had been plenty of compensations for this regimentation: no drunks, no fights (unless you counted those standard struggles with merchandise-desperate children). Furthermore, we got to stay in possibly the biggest concrete log cabin on earth, Wilderness Lodge, on the edge of a lake. Guys were swimming, guys were sailing! We could take a boat over to the Magic Kingdom or a bus to the three other theme parks and two water parks on site. Best of all, for a couple of days we'd had a brilliant, enthusiastic VIP Disneyguide, Tracey, who, along with the authority to queue-jump, had a sixth sense for the proximity of a princess and knew all the back ways into every corner of the park. On the first day, she got us the best seats in an amazing 3-D movie where you felt you could reach out and touch Peter Pan as he sat on Big Ben. Next day she had made sure I was picked out of the audience to snuffle like a warthog in front of a couple of thousand people in a truncated version of The Lion King. We loved Tracey. The following week she was going to be showing Jordan and Peter Andre around.
But still, Tracey had long since gone. The organisation of fun, it seemed, was now down to me. Three days stretched ahead. Perhaps, I wondered, my anxiety at this prospect had something to do with the food. Being at Disney World was a lot like being a kid in a sweet shop. Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where they go for a ride on a chocolate river and eat whatever kind of candy they can find off trees and all the gobstoppers go on for ever and no one has heard of diabetes? Every day so far had been a bit like that. We had seen grown men licking lollipops as big as their heads; children demolishing Danish pastries the size of hubcaps for breakfast. In the afternoon you could, after your Mickey burger, buy ice creams in buckets and eat them with spades. I'd watched my children's eyes light up with joy - they love me! - as I'd tried to appease them with the occasional stick of Mickey candyfloss or box of Mickey nuggets. Hey, we were on holiday after all. They had marvelled at how their drinking straws had Mickey ears.
After a couple of days, though, I had begun to fear I could sense pure sugar coursing through the veins of everyone in the park. It was possible to hire buggies for toddlers. You could also hire motorised wheelchairs. Many enormous people wearing gargantuan shorts opted for the latter to propel themselves between fast-food franchises. It was, on the plus side, a very long time since I had been on holiday and felt relatively thin and fit. As the week had progressed, I had become uncomfortably obsessed with the sheer scale of some of the sugar-seekers, slugging at their quarts of Coke, every bit as extraordinary a sight as a six-foot tall duck or a pair of enormous chipmunks.
I had started fearing for the load-bearing capacity of the rides; the queues seemed to be getting longer because everyone was squeezing vast buttocks into two or three seats. The previous two evenings, in a bid to avoid fries and induce sleep, we had found ourselves mainlining plastic cups full of crudites in the hotel bedroom, and trying to sell the idea as a family picnic.
The combination of the sugar and the frustration of queuing had the effect, I imagined, of heightening the sensation of the rides themselves. The previous day I had, with some foolhardy bravado ('It'll be fun!'), taken Daisy, who is six, on the newest and scariest of these, Mount Everest, which cranks you up to the top of the north face of a vast sunlit peak and sends you hurtling backwards in to the darkness where you feel like you are travelling upside down on a runaway train deep inside the earth. As in the moments before a car crash, I found many thoughts circulating in my brain on that journey. Not least of these was: you are much too old for this, you are going to die, and your affairs are not properly in order. Even above the roar of the train on the tracks and my own screams I could hear my daughter yelling in all seriousness: 'I want to get off! I want to get off!'
Going round one bend, pursued by a yeti, I caught her eye and she gave me a look of pure terror. I began to fear my teeth might fall out; then that her teeth might fall out. How could I have brought her on here? Because she was tall enough? What kind of reason was that? When we got off, finally, I wondered, quietly, if she would like to go on it again, perhaps with her mum. But no, she decided, that was the scariest thing that had happened to her ever, ever, and for the rest of the week she was going to refuse even to look at the snow-capped, man-made mountain.
That, of course, was the good part. There were so many other possibilities as yet unexplored. Perhaps, I thought, Eeyore-like, it was the display of choice itself that was getting to me. You want to experience the Cresta Run in your swim suit at 55mph under clear blue Floridian skies? No problem. You want to eat perfectly cooked fish inside an aquarium? Step this way. Over here we have recreated in painstaking detail a mountain village from the foothills of the Himalayas. Just round the corner you will find the authentic ruins of a Buddhist temple, complete with tigers. A choreographed two-week safari crammed on to a single Jeep ride? Just wait here for 10 minutes. The whole place had begun to seem like a temple to attention deficit. No expense had been spared and no ingenuity denied in pursuit of the most indelible American gift to the world: fun. All that conspicuous effort, perhaps, was making me a little tired.
I was still troubled, too, by a note that had been slipped under our door the previous day. For unspecified reasons, movement around the site would, the note said, be limited. The reasons turned out to be the fact that President Bush was visiting for an afternoon. No one would say why. Space Mountain? I asked.
The arrival of the leader of the free world had made for an odd holiday atmosphere. There were helmeted motorbike cops with automatic weapons scanning tour buses on every junction. Security had been stepped up to an even higher level than 'normal'. At the entrances to the park we had spent several fraught minutes trying to get Georgia, who is three, to put her fingers in the right place on a fingerprint machine while a woman with mouse ears grinned impatiently. Georgia was, of course, getting used to these procedures by now. At Orlando airport she had been required to remove her shoes and walk through the metal-detector scanner alone while a fearsome immigration guard yelled at her sister to wait in line.
On the plus side, I supposed that the girls were learning something about the world, and not just America. I brightened a bit, lying there, when I thought about Epcot, the futuristic park. You could see the Leaning Tower of Pisa on one side of its lake, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben on the other. The Moroccan souk was properly bustling, the Mexican market had a great mariachi band. Our two girls had both stood mesmerised in an Imax cinema while a camera panned along the Great Wall of China. They had loved drawing their own kabuki masks and exploring Viking ships and had forgotten about all about the possibilities of sugar for a while. Georgia had fallen asleep on my shoulders while the Beatles played beside a red phone box outside a London pub.
Despite the attractions of the whole world, however, the best fun we'd had so far, I decided, was of the old-fashioned kind: with buckets and spades on the man-made beach near the hotel, and a bike ride on a carefully constructed nature trail. I wondered if I could persuade the girls that the best way of spending the coming days might lie in these more homely pursuits. (Although even on the beach it had been difficult to escape the pursuit of Vacation Perfection: we had been shadowed at a safe distance by a young man on a tractor raking over any footprints we had made or holes we had dug. On the bike trail, when a deer had emerged from the woods or you saw a red-winged blackbird I couldn't help but wonder if they had been coaxed there by tireless Disney operatives in the foliage.)
My daughters were awake now, sitting together on the top bunk, bright-eyed, scanning the park map for places we could go, talking up the possibilities of Thunder Mountain.
'Do you think,' I ventured, 'it might be fun just to spend the day playing in the sand by the water today, quietly, maybe taking a picnic?'
They looked at each other, and, prompted by their mother, shouted the week's most familiar refrain: 'One, two, three!' they yelled. 'CHEER UP DADDY!'
I got up to face the day.
Essentials
Tim Adams travelled to Walt Disney World Resort in Florida with Virgin Holidays (0871 222 1232; virgin.com/holidays). A week costs from £1,169 per adult, from £389 per child, including flights with Virgin Atlantic from Gatwick or Manchester, seven nights room only at Disney's Wilderness Lodge and car hire. A seven-day pre-booked Disney park ticket costs from £149 per adult, £129 per child through Virgin Holidays. You can book VIP guides for $125 an hour from Disney VIP Tour Services (00 1 407 560 4033). For general information on Disney World call 0870 242 4900 or see disneyworld.co.uk.
Disney World
No fun? Are you taking the Mickey, dad?
In Disney World even Captain Hook had a sunny smile. There were fairy-tale princesses, amazing 3-D movies - and tons of sugar. His daughters adored it...Then Tim Adams was told he couldn't buy two glasses of wine at the same time
Sunday May 28, 2006
The Observer
Early on my fifth morning at the happiest place on Earth, I lay awake staring at the ceiling of our concrete log cabin wondering if I would get through the week. Outside, I could hear the small army of Disney workers organising the exact geometry of loungers, practising their upbeat greetings, preparing for another day of fun.
My daughters in their bunk beds, high on princesses and sugar, had slept fitfully but were now stirring for another round of Cinderellabration™. Lisa, my wife, was apparently having unsettling dreams of grown men dressed as Tigger. I was thinking about all the day's pleasures ahead - the choice of fine dining at one of 500 themed restaurants, the photo-opportunities with Aladdin's girlfriend, the fireworks in the bright afternoons, the hotel cafe in which every so often you were required to shout 'Yeeeharr!' and get involved in a hobby-horse race with vacationing American businessmen - and deciding whether it would make me an irretrievably bad dad if I feigned illness.
As a parent, I've always had a slightly troubled relationship with Disney. Leaving aside the vast corporate excesses, the manipulation of childhood imaginations and the sinister global standardisation of happy endings, for me, this has something to do with the decision to add characters to Winnie the Pooh - a beaver, notably, with a lisp - as if AA Milne's original cast didn't quite cut the mustard.
There's always been something about the idea of that decision, made no doubt in some blue-sky concept meeting ('Let's see if we can bring something new to the mix') that has filled me with dread and despair. As always with Disney, there is a manifest absurdity to this overreaction: it's for kids, after all; consider it not so seriously, grow up. And it is, of course, entirely redundant, having such worries; however you feel about the world's largest entertainment corporation, as a father of girls you will inevitably watch your house filling with trademarked cuddly toys and pink plastic and your cupboards stuffed with fairy dresses and console yourself, over and over, with the undoubted joys of Mary Poppins and Baloo the Bear.
Here at the heart of the empire, in the distended belly of what Florida's greatest chronicler, Carl Hiaasen, likes to call Mousewitz, such concerns, though, and the absurdity of them, are cruelly magnified. Disney World is, moment by moment, the best of times, and the worst of times. Every day had been a carnival (and still three to go). Each afternoon in the Magic Kingdom there have been parades, Broadway shows, princesses emerging from a fairytale castle and dancing with a handsome prince. You could have your face painted. You got wet sometimes, and everyone laughed.
For the legions of mouse operatives, nothing had been too much trouble. Everyone greeted us with a sunny smile, even Captain Hook. Why then, I was wondering, did I not want to get out of bed that morning? In a small way I wished I could capture the attitude of a man I had stood behind while waiting to purchase a pack of painkillers in the hotel shop the previous evening, a collector of the latest limited-edition memorabilia who insisted that the assistant unpacked a presentation box containing moulded plastic princesses while he inspected the craftsmanship with his wife. Was it a fatal flaw in my own make up that prevented me from partaking fully in all that magic? (Answer: almost certainly.)
Half-awake, and trying to work out how so much extravagant happiness should seem like such hard work, I went through a little list of the previous days' irritations. For a start, Disney loved rules. You needed rules to guarantee the Perfect Vacation Experience. My favourite was the one-drink rule. On our first evening I had queued up for 10 minutes at the hotel bar to buy two glasses of wine. I was told, with a smile, that since the bartender could not see my wife from where he was standing I could only purchase one alcoholic drink. I tried to point her out across the other side of the swimming pool, but the craning of necks was apparently not part of the rule. I wondered if he could put the wine in a very large glass that we could share. He smiled. I explained that I was 40 years old. He smiled. I bought a glass of wine and took it over to my wife. Then I queued up for 10 minutes and bought another glass for myself.
In a way, I had been telling myself, the rules were part of the fun. On the second day, walking out of the Magic Kingdom, I had stepped one foot through the exit then turned around to try to take a photograph of my daughters with Minnie Mouse, who had suddenly appeared, and put her big mouse head between theirs. I was prevented from capturing this image by security, who had been watching my subversive manoeuvre closely: 'No re-entry to the park without bag search,' I was told. And when I laughed a little: 'We all have to make sacrifices at times such as these, sir.'
Had these rules taken the edge of fun off things? Well, a little. Were they the same for everyone? Yes, of course. There had been plenty of compensations for this regimentation: no drunks, no fights (unless you counted those standard struggles with merchandise-desperate children). Furthermore, we got to stay in possibly the biggest concrete log cabin on earth, Wilderness Lodge, on the edge of a lake. Guys were swimming, guys were sailing! We could take a boat over to the Magic Kingdom or a bus to the three other theme parks and two water parks on site. Best of all, for a couple of days we'd had a brilliant, enthusiastic VIP Disneyguide, Tracey, who, along with the authority to queue-jump, had a sixth sense for the proximity of a princess and knew all the back ways into every corner of the park. On the first day, she got us the best seats in an amazing 3-D movie where you felt you could reach out and touch Peter Pan as he sat on Big Ben. Next day she had made sure I was picked out of the audience to snuffle like a warthog in front of a couple of thousand people in a truncated version of The Lion King. We loved Tracey. The following week she was going to be showing Jordan and Peter Andre around.
But still, Tracey had long since gone. The organisation of fun, it seemed, was now down to me. Three days stretched ahead. Perhaps, I wondered, my anxiety at this prospect had something to do with the food. Being at Disney World was a lot like being a kid in a sweet shop. Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where they go for a ride on a chocolate river and eat whatever kind of candy they can find off trees and all the gobstoppers go on for ever and no one has heard of diabetes? Every day so far had been a bit like that. We had seen grown men licking lollipops as big as their heads; children demolishing Danish pastries the size of hubcaps for breakfast. In the afternoon you could, after your Mickey burger, buy ice creams in buckets and eat them with spades. I'd watched my children's eyes light up with joy - they love me! - as I'd tried to appease them with the occasional stick of Mickey candyfloss or box of Mickey nuggets. Hey, we were on holiday after all. They had marvelled at how their drinking straws had Mickey ears.
After a couple of days, though, I had begun to fear I could sense pure sugar coursing through the veins of everyone in the park. It was possible to hire buggies for toddlers. You could also hire motorised wheelchairs. Many enormous people wearing gargantuan shorts opted for the latter to propel themselves between fast-food franchises. It was, on the plus side, a very long time since I had been on holiday and felt relatively thin and fit. As the week had progressed, I had become uncomfortably obsessed with the sheer scale of some of the sugar-seekers, slugging at their quarts of Coke, every bit as extraordinary a sight as a six-foot tall duck or a pair of enormous chipmunks.
I had started fearing for the load-bearing capacity of the rides; the queues seemed to be getting longer because everyone was squeezing vast buttocks into two or three seats. The previous two evenings, in a bid to avoid fries and induce sleep, we had found ourselves mainlining plastic cups full of crudites in the hotel bedroom, and trying to sell the idea as a family picnic.
The combination of the sugar and the frustration of queuing had the effect, I imagined, of heightening the sensation of the rides themselves. The previous day I had, with some foolhardy bravado ('It'll be fun!'), taken Daisy, who is six, on the newest and scariest of these, Mount Everest, which cranks you up to the top of the north face of a vast sunlit peak and sends you hurtling backwards in to the darkness where you feel like you are travelling upside down on a runaway train deep inside the earth. As in the moments before a car crash, I found many thoughts circulating in my brain on that journey. Not least of these was: you are much too old for this, you are going to die, and your affairs are not properly in order. Even above the roar of the train on the tracks and my own screams I could hear my daughter yelling in all seriousness: 'I want to get off! I want to get off!'
Going round one bend, pursued by a yeti, I caught her eye and she gave me a look of pure terror. I began to fear my teeth might fall out; then that her teeth might fall out. How could I have brought her on here? Because she was tall enough? What kind of reason was that? When we got off, finally, I wondered, quietly, if she would like to go on it again, perhaps with her mum. But no, she decided, that was the scariest thing that had happened to her ever, ever, and for the rest of the week she was going to refuse even to look at the snow-capped, man-made mountain.
That, of course, was the good part. There were so many other possibilities as yet unexplored. Perhaps, I thought, Eeyore-like, it was the display of choice itself that was getting to me. You want to experience the Cresta Run in your swim suit at 55mph under clear blue Floridian skies? No problem. You want to eat perfectly cooked fish inside an aquarium? Step this way. Over here we have recreated in painstaking detail a mountain village from the foothills of the Himalayas. Just round the corner you will find the authentic ruins of a Buddhist temple, complete with tigers. A choreographed two-week safari crammed on to a single Jeep ride? Just wait here for 10 minutes. The whole place had begun to seem like a temple to attention deficit. No expense had been spared and no ingenuity denied in pursuit of the most indelible American gift to the world: fun. All that conspicuous effort, perhaps, was making me a little tired.
I was still troubled, too, by a note that had been slipped under our door the previous day. For unspecified reasons, movement around the site would, the note said, be limited. The reasons turned out to be the fact that President Bush was visiting for an afternoon. No one would say why. Space Mountain? I asked.
The arrival of the leader of the free world had made for an odd holiday atmosphere. There were helmeted motorbike cops with automatic weapons scanning tour buses on every junction. Security had been stepped up to an even higher level than 'normal'. At the entrances to the park we had spent several fraught minutes trying to get Georgia, who is three, to put her fingers in the right place on a fingerprint machine while a woman with mouse ears grinned impatiently. Georgia was, of course, getting used to these procedures by now. At Orlando airport she had been required to remove her shoes and walk through the metal-detector scanner alone while a fearsome immigration guard yelled at her sister to wait in line.
On the plus side, I supposed that the girls were learning something about the world, and not just America. I brightened a bit, lying there, when I thought about Epcot, the futuristic park. You could see the Leaning Tower of Pisa on one side of its lake, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben on the other. The Moroccan souk was properly bustling, the Mexican market had a great mariachi band. Our two girls had both stood mesmerised in an Imax cinema while a camera panned along the Great Wall of China. They had loved drawing their own kabuki masks and exploring Viking ships and had forgotten about all about the possibilities of sugar for a while. Georgia had fallen asleep on my shoulders while the Beatles played beside a red phone box outside a London pub.
Despite the attractions of the whole world, however, the best fun we'd had so far, I decided, was of the old-fashioned kind: with buckets and spades on the man-made beach near the hotel, and a bike ride on a carefully constructed nature trail. I wondered if I could persuade the girls that the best way of spending the coming days might lie in these more homely pursuits. (Although even on the beach it had been difficult to escape the pursuit of Vacation Perfection: we had been shadowed at a safe distance by a young man on a tractor raking over any footprints we had made or holes we had dug. On the bike trail, when a deer had emerged from the woods or you saw a red-winged blackbird I couldn't help but wonder if they had been coaxed there by tireless Disney operatives in the foliage.)
My daughters were awake now, sitting together on the top bunk, bright-eyed, scanning the park map for places we could go, talking up the possibilities of Thunder Mountain.
'Do you think,' I ventured, 'it might be fun just to spend the day playing in the sand by the water today, quietly, maybe taking a picnic?'
They looked at each other, and, prompted by their mother, shouted the week's most familiar refrain: 'One, two, three!' they yelled. 'CHEER UP DADDY!'
I got up to face the day.
Essentials
Tim Adams travelled to Walt Disney World Resort in Florida with Virgin Holidays (0871 222 1232; virgin.com/holidays). A week costs from £1,169 per adult, from £389 per child, including flights with Virgin Atlantic from Gatwick or Manchester, seven nights room only at Disney's Wilderness Lodge and car hire. A seven-day pre-booked Disney park ticket costs from £149 per adult, £129 per child through Virgin Holidays. You can book VIP guides for $125 an hour from Disney VIP Tour Services (00 1 407 560 4033). For general information on Disney World call 0870 242 4900 or see disneyworld.co.uk.
