Disney 2005: Prologue

Walt Disney Whirled
OR
Frights of Fancy

Bear Necessities:

Our first family trip to Disney World was back for our daughters second birthday. We stayed nine days and took far too many pictures to annotate individually. Overall it was a great, if exhausting time. Things went much better when we realized that our daughter was completely terrified of theaters/auditoriums, and audio-animatronics. We also found that even though she has many videos of characters in costume showing how big they are…they look much bigger in person. If we had known this going in, things would have went much smoother. As it was, once we stopped trying to drag Anabelle into attractions that scared the living beejeebers out of her, we all had a much better time.

The baby was so tired she went back on a two nap schedule, which was when Rosa and I would take turns going on attractions that she didn’t want to see (which was most of them). There were also several attractions that only one of us saw, when the other had reached "too tired to move". Anabelle loved “it’s a small world” and went on it about a dozen times total (apparently, those are “dancing dollies” and not scary like the other robotic stuff). The carousel was a close second. Her absolute favorite attraction was the laminar flow fountains that shoot out of the ground near the Goofy statue at the Pop Century hotel. She’d spend a lot of time every night running through them, hysterically laughing. Most kids two to four years older than her, if they got any water on their face while running through, would dash to their parents to dry it off. Anabelle would stand, staring into the fountain, until it shot her square in the eyes, then she’d laugh and say, “again!” (That’s my girl.) She made a few friends there, as they teamed up to beat down a single fountain. Mostly she ran around on her own, running back to tell us of important developments such as, "I splash my face," or, "I sat on Goofy's foot!"

She also really liked the parades. I used to think Disney parades were really short…that is until I watched them with nearly thirty pounds dancing on my shoulders. Those are some long parades. The first couple she’d just sit dumbfounded in happy silence. Once she got used to them, from over my head a I’d hear, “WHO’S THAAAAAAAAAAT” as each character approached, and then, “HI *character name* Hi HI HI HI HI”. Fun.

Since we took an obscene amount of pictures…far too many to annotate individually, I started the tradition of writing a travelogue so my daughter would have something to commemorate the trip.

Links to the other days will be here after they are posted.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9

Other Disney Trip indexes (below the index of the 2013 trip)