Disneyworld!

We took Friday off to spend a long weekend in Orlando, Florida - only a 2.5 hour flight south.  The plan was to visit Disneyworld, the Harry Potter part of Universal Studios, and the Kennedy Space Center while we were there.  Here's part 1 of the trip - Disneyworld.

Disneyworld at Orlando has four theme parks plus two water parks - we didn't have enough time for all of them, so we decided to go to the "Magic Kingdom" (what you'd imagine when you say "Disneyworld").

This is the third Magic Kingdom that I've been to after Paris and California.  (Yes Mum and Dad, I know I've been to the Florida one before, but I don't really remember it from when I was 6!)  I was actually a little disappointed - your ticket locks you into visiting one park, but it seemed pretty small, and some of the attractions that would have been in that park in Paris or California (such as Star Wars) were in other parks and thus not accessible.  We went on most things 2 or 3 times and even went on most of the little kids' rides and we still left fairly early.

There were some cool birds and animals around though (real ones) - this is an egret.

Part of what I really like about theme parks is the immersive nature of them when they're done right.

Tomorrowland - because the future is silver and contains many circles.

Frontierland - yee haw!

Stephen waiting in a queue for his favourite ride - Splash Mountain. 

Splash Mountain - no, that's not us.  The Disney rides were fairly tame and you hardly even got splashed on them - we could have done with some splashing considering that it was 30 degrees and blindingly sunny.

It must be really annoying visiting theme parks with me, because I spend half of the time discussing the user experience of the systems and the business ramifications.  

Disney does have one really cool thing - the FastPass system.  (No, that's not my photo - my photo didn't turn out).  Basically you rock up to a ride that you want to go on, and it has a "FastPass return time" on it, sometime in the future (usually an hour or two away).  If you decide that you want to, you can put your park entry ticket into the machine  and get one of these tickets, and then come back to the ride and essentially skip the queue at the time listed on the ticket.  Whoever came up with this idea is a genius - if you think about it, you are likely to queue for a similar amount of time over the day (because you have longer queues when you don't have a FastPass), but this system taps into the guilty pleasure of jumping the queue and makes people feel like they're getting something for nothing.  A really good example of how irrational people are and how you can use that to design something that makes people happier. 

It turns out that I didn't take many picture at Disneyworld - I guess on your third Disney visit, there isn't much left to photograph.  Don't worry - I have too many pictures of Universal Studios and Harry Potter's Wizarding World for one blog post, so I'll start posting those tomorrow!