Mickey Mouse Banking & Trust: Part 1

This is the story of how three people went to Disney World in an effort to keep one four year-old happy.  This was done by employing the services of made-up children’s book characters, a group of big-horned fancy cows, 2 giraffes, rides ripped off from movies, and the mystical $8.00 hot dog. These are the sights as I saw them, and the calls I made after calling them.

First off, if you’re turning yourself in for a full week of mouse-related activities, you apparently don’t have to go down with the poor folk and claim any baggage that is yours after arriving – or take any paternity tests to unclaim them.  Your sacks of vacation wares (or wears) are automatically thrown onto a Mickey-related relay, which sends them directly your hotel.  Watching the bags being thrown from the airport thing onto Mickey’s specialized gear is like watching Cano and Jeter turn a luggage double play.  We hired a dude who rolled in Lincoln Town Cares to affiliate us with our Mouseville destination, because it was cheaper and less time consuming than lettin’ Mickey’s handle roll dirty.  Plus, you get to make a 30 minute stop off at Publix - which is a beautiful, yet tragically named grocery store chain in Florida and the South.  You can get actual food there, but more importantly, wine, liquor and swill.  If you’re ever in Florida and going to be marooned on any theme park-like property, I suggest you head to Publix.  To remember the name, just think of what you have to pull out of your teefes every time you return from South of the border.

As for our accommodations, we chose to pimp ourselves out at the Animal Kingdom for the week.  When we arrived, this dude who was all Africaned out rolled one of those baggage carrier things up to car, and started loadin’ up.  Unbeknownst to me, that cat didn’t end up following me into the reception area.  Instead, he just took our bags to Luggage Gitmo.  When you’re doing anything mouse related, they always deal with getting your luggage to you.  So, I just assumed they would show up at our door like usual.  Nope, not this time.  Since I didn’t give the overly helpful gent with the cart anything, he didn’t bother to put any name on the luggage.  When I called the front desk to request the release of our bags, they had none for Smith (what are the chances of that?).  I about blew an African horn, and started thinking that maybe we were on some hotel reality game show called “Idiots and What They Will Do With Their Luggage”.  When I arrived at Luggage Gitmo, I could see that our bags were clearly being held without probable cause.  They had never caused any problems, and should’ve been released from custody for the betterment of US-African relations if nothing else.  These bags were not lodged under the names Nelson Mandela or Smith either.  It turns out the guy who drove us from the airport told them to use his company’s name, which was Quicksilver.  So either a terrible Kevin Bacon movie, or a goddamn Marvel hero had been keeping our necessities out of reach. 

The un-pissed off 4th time back down, we got the luggage, and I actually got a full flavor scenic view of some big-assed horse looking thing with zebra stripes.  Then we all headed off to the luxurious African-themed suite, equipped with a warning to close our shades – due to all the photography being in use.  So, it was kind of like being stalked by rhinos and giraffes.  It was a very nice accomodation though; and to set the record straight, no Coke bottles ever came flyin out of the sky, and we never prayed to any Coke-like receptacle (?).  My wife did seem like she was imbibing quite a bit of Royal Crown’s answer to low calorie holy water - Diet Sundrop – but nothing else cult-related went down, for the most part.

As we settled into our room, Dr. Griswold stopped by to give us our Mouse World itinerary.  Each of was given yellow legal paper with some sort of Sanskrit written on it; this note told us what park we were going to each day, what rides we wanted to ride, the rides we could take our son on if he wore his boots, and when we could have some free time.  Look kids, Splash Mountain…EPCOT!