The great 2016 road trip, part 4

Staying off-site turned out not to be the best decision. It was cheaper, we were right next to Disney World, and within a block of bus service into it, with multiple restaurants and a grocery store within a couple blocks, and we decided to drive in on a couple days. But. Orlando in mid-September is the sort of hot that saps all your energy, and the extra hop of the bus plus internal Disney transportation added noticeable time when we just wanted to get back to the hotel and rest. Next time, we definitely need to go when it's cooler, and stay on-site, and just pay the extra fee if we happen to have a vehicle with us (although cooler times of year in Orlando mean probably too wintry to be driving on parts of our cross-country route, so we probably won't).

But we did get to all four parks, and ride lots of rides and all the monorails, and try interesting snacks, and so there was a lot of fun. Some highlights I can recall:

• Favorite ride that Disneyland doesn't have: Mickey's PhilharMagic, where Donald Duck gets magically transported into various big Disney movie musical numbers. Extra props to whichever Imagineer looked at the scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel sings wistfully about joining the human world and said, "What this really needs is Donald Duck getting electrocuted."
• Animal Kingdom has at times tried to play down its zoo aspects, at one point running a promotion called Nahtazu (say it out loud). Look, it's a zoo. It's the most amazing zoo I've ever visited, and it should be proud of that fact.
• Epcot is too freaking huge. I mean, you could easily spend two or three days just working your way around World Showcase. This is why I want to spend a week at WDW if I get the chance to go back.
• Sign that I have become an old person: The part of Expedition Everest where you get yanked backwards into the darkness failed to move me, so to speak. Take away enough visual and vestibular cues and I don't have enough information to be scared. I was amused by the sight at the point where the train stops as the track switches behind it, though. Apparently the backwards acceleration is sharp enough to dislodge loose hair scrunchies, which can be seen dotting the walls there. I dubbed it the Valley of Lost Ponytails.
• Best queue entertainment: Seven Dwarves Mine Train, which has multiple games on great big touch screens to keep you and, more importantly, all the small children around you from getting bored. The actual ride is kind of a letdown after that.
• We mostly stayed away from rides that are also at Disneyland, but we did check out the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean. The Mansion in WDW has an extra room and its own queue games, but Pirates is barely half the ride you get in Anaheim. OTOH, it does have a much better-themed exterior, where you wind in and out of something resembling an old Spanish fort, as opposed to the nieghborhood-pool feeling of the Disneyland queue.
• Rides which no longer exist at Disneyland were fair game. WDW still has a PeopleMover and I still hate whoever had it removed from Disneyland.
• Best appeal to my inner geek: The Land, which is half cheesy out-of-date paean to farmers, but half real live research facility.
• Favorite oddity: Ellen's Energy Adventure, a ride which took a whopping 45 minutes. First there's a pre-show film, then suddenly the screen is moving out of the way and the auditorium splits up and you realize it's actually three huge ride vehicles. You travel through some animatronic entertainment, then everything forms back up and you see a second film, then you get animatronic dinosaurs, which I'm guessing were the original selling point of this ride. Then one more short film. A strange but entertaining experience. I'm sorry to hear it was closed soon after we visited, and I'm glad I got the chance to experience it.
• The Swan and Dolphin, WDW's conference hotel, would be a great place for a Smofcon. I have now visited the miniature golf course which a short walk from it, and I believe the substantial number of mini-golf fans in SMOFdom would find it worthwhile.

Some aspects of our timing worked out well. Hitting the lull between Labor Day and the Epcot Food & Wine Festival, crowds were fairly light for most of the visit. I took a nervous look at the National Hurricane Center's forecast page every evening and morning as we were heading toward Orlando, but we lucked out with a few dry days.

The SO got a Haunted Mansion top hat to remember the experience by, and I got a T-shirt with Donald Duck on it. We made our last night in Orlando an early one so as to be rested to get back on the road the next day, although we would have had to anyway because that was the evening that a storm with a serious amount of rain hit Florida.

Next time: Cars and geology again