I had this wee adventure on the way back home to Baltimore from Disney World last Sunday. About ten miles into my trip the car’s message system beeped at me and the center console told me I only had 10 starts left. Above that number was a small icon indicating that the complaint was I had run out, or was about to run out of DEF.

I understand why they’re doing that countdown thing when it comes to the emissions control system, it’s because lots of drivers will simply ignore it otherwise, but I absolutely hate it and I think it’s a potential life threatening thing to just shut down the car when the count runs down to zero. When it started happening to me a couple years ago on my way to California, because my catalytic converter failed, I was in Grand Junction which did not have a Mercedes dealership and the nearest one was in St. George Utah, which meant driving several hundred miles through empty roastingly hot desert.

My car is a 2012 E350 Bluetec that I took delivery of December 2011. I am its first and only owner, not counting the factory and the dealer. It has that OEM 642 engine everyone seems to hate but I’ve had no trouble with it (ironically not counting the emissions control system which I’ve had to have worked on Lots, like the DEF tank heater replaced which cost nearly two grand, and both NOx detectors replaced). This is probably because I give the car every service the factory indicates except the oil changes. Those I did twice as often (every 5k) until the car reached 170k and now I do them every 3k. I do them myself except at the 10k service intervals where I let my mechanics do the oil change too.

And also top off the DEF tank. So that nominally gets done every 10k, but if I need to visit the mechanics in between those service intervals, like I’m taking a cross country road trip and I want the car checked over first, I’ll ask them to top off the DEF tank then too.

My car currently has 209k on it, most of that road trip driving. I am able to walk to my office, and to most day to day things I might need right here in my city neighborhood. So the car does not get commuter miles. I do a lot of pleasure road tripping in my cars and this Mercedes makes a wonderful road trip car..

Only once before have I had a problem with the DEF tank running low and that was because a shady dealer didn’t do it, or change the fuel filters like they were supposed to either, and I had to find out, that time also on the way up I-95 from Disney World. Good thing you can get that stuff at any any truck stop.

So this time I thought it was another case of the mechanics not topping off the DEF tank. But the guys I use now are really good and very trustworthy. So I gave it some thought.

I did the emissions recall two Julys ago, got a check for 2k from MBUSA…and lost 4 mpg (why??). I wondered if the car was sipping DEF more since then and maybe that 10k interval just wasn’t cutting it now. I had the car looked over several times before taking a road trip to visit family in California and asked them to top off the DEF tank then. So I might not have noticed the DEF tank was draining out faster than before since the emissions work.

I stopped for some road food and checked to see if I still had a countdown. I did. Now I only had 9 starts left. I had a reservation for the night a South of the Border, which yes is barely a two star motel but every room has its own private covered car port which makes it worth it to me. I figured I would buy some DEF at a truck stop along the way, get myself to South of the Border and my room. Nine more starts would be more than enough. Once I was there it would be easy to empty the trunk and add some DEF to the tank.

I stopped at a Flying J and bought a cubetainer of two and a half Gallons of DEF. When I started the car again it said I had 16 starts left.

Wait…what…???

I didn’t think that was in anticipation of my putting DEF in the tank and now I’m wondering if it wasn’t some glitch in the system and the tank had plenty of DEF in it. So I kept on driving hoping the next time I stopped I’d still have some starts left. Periodically I checked the messages. I had one message, I had 16 starts left. I checked again. Same story. I stopped to take a bladder break. When I started the car again there were no messages, no indication of a countdown happening. I double checked the message list. Nothing.

?????

Now I’m thinking maybe the sensor that tells the car the DEF tank is nearly empty was glitching and now it wasn’t. Or now it was telling the car the DEF tank was okay when it wasn’t. I had no idea, but I promised my car I’d add DEF to the tank when I got to South of the Border and I was going to do that.

So I get to South of the Border, check in, drive to my room (those private carports are Really Nice, you drive right up to your room door and even if it’s pouring rain you can unload the car for the night no trouble) unloaded the trunk, took out the trunk liner (the car has to be a working member of the household so I bought one of those when I took delivery) and uncovered the DEF tank.

The cubetainer of DEF came with an extendable pouring spout that fit snugly into the DEF tank filler. I started pouring. The tank took nearly all two and a half gallons. I think maybe there’s a pint or less still in the cubetainer.

The next morning I drove the rest of the way back to Baltimore without any trouble or new messages. As I read it, the DEF tank in my car has about a six and a half gallon capacity. So there was probably still four gallons of DEF in it. I don’t think that should have caused any problems.

Anyway…new rule: when I do my own oil changes from now on, I will also top off the DEF tank. And it would be nice to have a feature that lets me see how full the DEF tank is. But the sensor that’s in there might not be capable of that.

The chatter I’m getting on the Mercedes forums is the sensor in the DEF tank that tells you when you’re about to run out is getting flakey. Oh well. I’ll ask my mechanics about it when I do the next 10k service in a few weeks. I love my car, but that countdown thing sometimes makes me wish I had a 1973 240D. With a four speed stick.

My initial impressions about returning to DVC have not been wonderful. In my previous incarnation I would spend February/March in Saratoga Springs because it gave me walking access to Disney Springs, and my birthday week at Boardwalk because that gave me walking access to my two favorite parks, Epcot and Hollywood Studios. I have fewer points this incarnation, but more than enough for a week in Saratoga Springs, which is now my “home” resort. This trip I shelled out extra points to get into a room I thought would be right next to Disney Springs. But no…the extra points put me right next to the main building, which I guess was a premium spot but not what I wanted. And the view off my balcony might as well be a brick wall.

So maybe extra steps to Disney Springs benefits my overall health. Fine. Whatever. It’s not crippling, just annoying. But I came back into this expecting better than I was getting now.

This morning I attempted for the first time to use one of the laundry rooms here, only to discover they don’t put nearly enough washers and dryers in them here. At Port Orleans Riverside they have lots at every pool. I reckon the thinking here is there are enough rooms that have their own washers and dryers in them they don’t need a lot of those in the common laundries. This was an unpleasant surprise. 

Previously I either wasn’t staying long enough to need a laundry or, if I was staying on hotel row for a few nights and then going to my DVC room, I would use the excessively long time between DVC check-in and check-out to go to a local laundromat and get my things clean. I would pack lots of clothes for my birthday week at Boardwalk because Septembers in Florida can be sweltering. This was so as not to need to do the laundry until I got back home. My birthday falls on peak hurricane season…hahahahaha…but the points and hotel stays are cheaper then so…okay.

When I discovered how easily I could get into the laundry at Port Orleans I decided to pack fewer clothes and use the resort laundries instead. I’ve been trying for years now to limit the amount of luggage I take with me on my road trips, all to no avail. But fewer clothes in the main luggage helped a bit.

I began checking out the laundry rooms after I got here, and discovered they were tiny by comparison. But also mostly empty. So this morning I tried getting into the laundry across from my room, which was somewhat larger because it’s in the main building and pool complex. It was fully occupied. But there was a web app I could use to tell me when the machines became available. I figured that app was also how you paid, similar to payment to use the machines in Port Orleans, and other hotels nowadays. (which is Very Nice because you don’t need a lot of quarters…)

Oh great…now I can do my laundry!

So I kept checking the app to see when the machines in that laundry room were available. But it kept reading zero machines available. So I checked the other Saratoga Springs laundry rooms and the only one showing any availability was way on the other side of the resort. I began to think I’d need to go to that Laundromat in Kissimmee again, and what the hell am I spending all this money to be back in DVC again??

Get me started on the pathetic welcome package they gave me when I rejoined…

So I decided to walk over and check. Sure enough the web app was broken and all the washers were available. There was a couple using the dryers (there were Lots more of those) and I asked if they’d tried the app and is that how you pay. Oh no, says they, the app isn’t necessary and the machines are free.

Well okay…that’s a perk. I guess it makes sense given that some rooms have washing machines in them, so maybe it isn’t fair to those of us staying in the studios to charge us for using the ones in the common laundry rooms.

So maybe now I’m not so unhappy being back in this thing again…

I had a surprisingly nice dinner at Biergarten yesterday. I say it was surprising, because I’d just assumed that all the servers I used to know there (excuse me…Cast Members) had either retired or left Disney by now. But no…several who remembered me and a certain someone were still there and I got to talk to a couple of them about what was going on with me, and what was not going on with me and a certain someone. One of the servers came over to chat with me for a bit and congratulated me on my return to work at Space Telescope.

I’ve had the theme song for the first series of The Littlest Hobo (the one I grew up with, not the second series music) going through my head all night for some reason…

Looking forward to my next Walt Disney World DVC vacation first week in March. I’ll be dining at the Brown Derby in Hollywood on the sixth, to reminisce about the angrygram I got while eating a Kobe steak dinner. If the Kobe steak is on the menu I’ll definitely be having it. 

Mostly just trying to forget that my country is circling the drain, because half the country is one half easily manipulated half-wits and one half stone cold bigots that would rather burn it all down than let the rest of us have a share of the American Dream, and the other half can’t decide whether to fight for the Dream, or make peace in our time.

When Walt Disney was alive nobody would have ever thought it would come to this. Conservative man though he was, he’d be spitting nails that a man like pussy grabber Donald Trump was in his Hall Of The Presidents. When I was a young boy and Walt Disney was alive I believed in that great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day. It seemed obvious. We were looking at the stars, and not paying attention to what was in the human gutter.

It seems I am always buying one of these Oaxacan wood carvings every time I go visit Epcot Mexico. But this one was a Must Buy the moment I saw it…

I’d never seen the artists do a crab before, and here in Baltimore and along the Chesapeake Bay Maryland Blue Crab is serious business, so of course I took it home with me.

I went out for breakfast this morning, and saw this on the way back to my hotel…

Seen on the way back to the hotel this morning. The sticker on the rear window says they’re firefighters and sure enough the car turned into the firehouse a block ahead.

I’m guessing it makes for some interesting conversation in the firehouse as, so I hear, the firefighters all pretty much supported DeSantis. But maybe that changed when he took away their park perks along with all the other Reedy Creek employees.

(Disney paid for and operated its own emergency services through the mechanism of the Reedy Creek Improvement District. DeSantis was going to take it away from Disney until someone finally explained to him that would mean Florida would end up paying for everything that Disney was, plus also taking on all its debt. So he settled for stacking its board of directors with his cronys and changing its name.)

I go out for my morning coffee walk and I see one of the maintenance crew trying to clean up some white chalky footprints off one of the walkways. I can’t figure who was wearing white paint on their bare feet.

So just now I’m spraying sunscreen on my bare feet before I go out again because just a few minutes out in this sun and my feet are already starting to show a tan. Then I realize that’s probably what happened this morning. Someone dumped a bunch of sunscreen on their feet and tracked it all over that walkway before it dried.

I put a bunch of paper towels on the floor of my room before I started spraying my feet. Should be dry by the time I’m ready to go to Hollywood Studios.

I’m doing dinner tonight at the 50s Prime Time Cafe, and hoping they’ve put the chairs back in the Tune-In Lounge.

Definitely T-shirt and cutoffs weather here. I really need to be careful wearing sandals out in the sunlight here with these pale white feet of mine. Also the rest of me.

I’m at Port Orleans Riverside for a couple weeks. I’d extend my stay but I told the guy I worked under at Space Telescope before I retired that I’d be back home June 2 and he wants to discuss my coming back to work there part time.

So…making the most of this one while I’m here…

Still stunned that Facebook recommended “Tico Assmann” to me (see previous post). My head is still spinning, but that might be vertigo from the train ride.

Disney Vacation Club welcome tote bag…then…

…and now.

The tote bags are the welcome package you get whenever you buy points in the Disney Vacation Club. There are goodies inside, but mostly it was that first tote bag that really told me I’d bought into something special when I bought my first set of points a decade ago.

This time around…not so much.

When I retired I sold my DVC points because I thought the entire Disney World experience was going downhill and I probably wouldn’t go back. Bob Chapek, the previous CEO of Disney seemed to just want to trash everything people loved about the parks. The Disney message boards were full of heartbroken complaints about his disrespect for park theming and guest experience. All the little perks of staying in a park hotel were going away and the annual pass system was being changed out from under us. I never got a notice to renew my old annual pass and assumed they just didn’t want us having them because it was costing them money. For a while nobody could buy a new one.

And then there was the new park reservation system. They’d implemented that during COVID, but then it became a permanent fixture. So even if you had an annual pass, you still had to make park reservations and if you might not be able to if they’d all been taken for the days you wanted. So to my mind that made the annual pass worthless, and staying at Boardwalk pointless.

Then it began to look like single diners could not make dining reservations at the nicer sit down restaurants.

So I sold my DVC points and let the annual pass lapse. But then they fired Chapek and brought back Iger and it seemed things were turning around. Some of the perks came back (I’m still waiting for the bar stools and food menus to come back to the Tune-In Lounge…). I went back a few times and renewed my love of the parks, especially after the Florida republicans went on a warpath against Disney for treating its LGBT guests and employees decently. I bought tickets for the first time in over a decade (because no annual pass) and navigated the park reservation system. I still hate it, but with the new “go-to” days looks like Disney World is trying to move away from it.

With some difficulty I got the Disney World annual pass back. Then I visited Disneyland for the first time and lucked out on getting a Disneyland annual pass before my second visit. While at Disneyland I was approached by a DVC saleslady.

What happened was I was checking out the guest laundry at one of the hotel towers, which as it turned out was their DVC tower. My next trip to Disneyland I’m going to try to arrange a ride on the California Zephyr…a trip I’ve fantasied about since childhood. The plan would be to take the Zephyr to California, and pick up the Coast Starlight from Emeryville to San Luis Obispo where my brother could pick me up. I’d stay with him for a few weeks, then take the train to Anaheim again and Disneyland, spend five or six days there at the Disneyland Hotel, then take the train back to LA Union Station and pick up the Southwest Chief, which I’d taken before, back to Chicago and a train from there to Baltimore.

If I do it that way I will need to be able to do a laundry before the train ride back home because I won’t be able to carry a lot of luggage with me. Just enough stuff for the train. I’ll need to do a laundry before heading back. So I asked a security guard where the guest laundry was. He offered to lead me to it because it was down an odd hallway. Afterward we talked about our mutual love of the Disney Parks (I told him about the classmate, that Certain Someone who coaxed me into coming to Disney in the first place, showed him a picture of the guy, and he said he actually remembered him(!)) 

When we parted ways, a DVC sales lady came over to talk to me. She said she’d heard me talking about selling my DVC points and she asked me why. I told here basically what I wrote at the beginning of this post and she suggested (of course) that I might want to look into becoming a DVC member again. There were specials going on and she could get me back in for not so much money.

I thought it over, and later via email asked her about Saratoga Springs, which I used to use my Grand Floridian points for to have a nice warm weather vacation in February, at a DVC hotel that gives me walking access to Disney Springs. Saratoga Springs was the original DVC hotel, and it’s the least expensive one point wise. Walking access is super important to me. The reason I had points at Boardwalk, besides liking the theming of it, was it gave me walking access to my two favorite parks, Epcot and Hollywood Studios. But with the park reservation system that isn’t nearly as convenient as before. You don’t need reservations to walk over to Disney Springs.

Over the next couple days we talked it over…I had budgetary considerations…and I eventually agreed to buy in again. I got 100 points in Saratoga Springs.

What you see at the top up there is one of the two tote bags I got when I first joined DVC, first for 75 points at Grand Floridian, and then for 100 at Boardwalk. The tote bag below that is what I got after rejoining.

This came inside the new tote…

That’s one of the little goodies in the tote you get joining now. I’m sure the saleslady saw the look on my face when she handed that new tote bag to me. All I can think is Disney is still sweating blood over all the money they lost during the COVID lock downs and now they’re cutting corners everywhere they can that doesn’t piss off the guests.

But I’m fine being back in. Not as many points as before, but for now anyway I’m splitting my time between Disney World and Disneyland, so I don’t need as many points. There is a DVC section of the Disneyland Hotel, but even if I got points in that one it is so high in demand that I’d still have trouble getting in, so I’ll just pay the money for a stay there. My annual pass gets me a discount on a room there anyway.

Week before last I was feeling extremely bad. So fatigued I barely got out of bed. No energy at all. It began to scare me enough that I went to the emergency room here (after checking that it was in my network). But they couldn’t find anything wrong…at least in the tests they gave me. So I was discharged with advise to get with my GP back home, drink more water, eat healthier food (good luck with that) and take a multivitamin. 

That afternoon, as I tried to give my car an oil change, I felt so badly out of balance that I fell over twice, and felt like I was about to fall over every time I leaned over the engine compartment of my Mercedes. I was tempted to go right back to the ER and tell them something was still wrong, you need to give me some better tests. But as usual with me, I decided to wait it out and see if it got any worse.

I’d bought some Boost Oxygen cans for a possible trip back home via I-70, to get me though that 11k plus altitude at the Eisenhower Tunnel. The next morning I tried huffing one to see if it helped any. Probably, in retrospect, it was just coincidence, but I began immediately to feel better. I think now that I might have had some food poisoning from that popcorn shrimp I had at the Dairy Queen in Santa Rosa NM. But I don’t know.

I am feeling much Much better now, but I still have this disturbing feeling that I’m about to lose my balance every time I have to suddenly change direction…like when I’m trying to avoid stepping on Henry, my brother’s Maine Coon cat, while he’s darting in front of me to get my attention. I really need to talk with my GP and see if someone can figure out why I’m still having balance trouble.

Last week I took my second ever trip to Disneyland. In a previous post I wrote about my good luck in getting a Disneyland annual pass. I got a chance to use it then. As before, I took the train down to Anaheim, which is a snap since the train station here is just a couple miles from my brother’s house. But I made a mistake I’ll never make again with the hotel reservations.

Because I saw myself spending so much money with the new Annual Pass and the road trip to California, I decided to see if staying at a nearby hotel instead of at the Disneyland Hotel would work. There was a Holiday Inn close enough I could walk to the park, and I am a Holiday Inn One member so staying there would get me membership points I could use later. And I favor the Holiday Inn Express hotels while on the road. So I made a reservation for that one close to Disneyland. It was about one-third the cost of staying at the Disneyland Hotel. But you get what you pay for.

It was a bad choice. The room was the worst I ever had at any Holiday Inn. Way too tiny for the two single beds in it, next to the elevator machine room, and the doors to get in and out of the pool so there was a Lot of noise from the other guests and the elevator. I couldn’t open the window without everyone at the pool being able to look in as the room was slightly below ground level. The bathroom was barely larger than a closet. I’d rate it as no better than a two star hotel. So I decided to see if I could get a room at the Disneyland Hotel and just accept the cost. I had an unexpectedly good tax refund this year, so the money was there. And I really needed this trip to Disneyland to get me out of the depressed funk I was in since February.

But there was a problem. The Disneyland Hotel website would not let me make a reservation before the Friday I was set to go back to Oceano. I tried the hotel apps and it looked like they were sold out for the week. So the morning of my second day in Anaheim, I walked to the hotel and went to the front desk and asked if they had any rooms I could reserve. The clerk said they didn’t make future reservations for walk-ins, only same day. That was fine I told her, I want to check in today and check out Friday.

They had a room! No annual pass discounts for same day, but I was desperate to get out of that Holiday Inn room. I went back, repacked my things, and rolled my luggage a quarter mile to the better hotel.

There were other complications…I could not link my hotel reservation to my Disneyland app for some reason because it was a walk-in, so they made a new reservation that would link to the app, but then the key cards I had wouldn’t let me in the room so they had to fix that, and then I got billed twice for the reservation because they hadn’t cancelled the walk-in one. But it all got fixed.

The Holiday Inn refunded me the money for the days I didn’t stay. Then billed me for them again, so I had to go back and find out why. Turned out the clerk that checked me out early and gave me the refund, didn’t actually note that was wasn’t using the room anymore. So I got that fixed.

And I was able, finally, to have a nice Disney vacation. Mostly at California Adventure because that’s my favorite theme park now, even over Epcot. First thing I did after getting into the Disneyland Hotel room was walk over to California Adventure and use my new annual pass to get in. I had to use the Disneyland app to show the cast member at the gate my pass, because I hadn’t just then linked it to my Disneyland Magic Band+. Things are different there versus Disney World, where the Magic Band does it all. More about that later. 

So I’m back in Oceano now, and my mindset is much, Much better. Apart from the occasional feeling of losing my balance. Which happened to me lots while trying to navigate the crowds in the Disney parks, and Downtown Disney.

Oh…and I’m back in the Disney Vacation Club. More on all that later…

Yes…yes I did…

This is for Disneyland in Anaheim California…the original park, which I went to for the first time last year (and I still haven’t posted about that here…sorry…). At that time California Adventure became my new favorite theme park and I knew I was going back every time I visited family in California. So I began thinking about getting one of their annual passes too, or maybe even forgoing the Disney World pass for one at Disneyland, because both might be a bit too much to maintain on retirement income.

I’m still amazed I got it…Disney annual passes are Hard to get these days because park attendance just keeps going up and up and they’re trying harder now since COVID to keep a lid on it to keep it enjoyable…and yes, keep their costs down. I’d already decided to take a road trip to Oceano after I got some maintenance done on the Mercedes, and I was pretty sure that while I was there I’d do another Disneyland visit. I was about to go to bed last night when I randomly decided to check to see if the passes were on sale again. They only open up a short window of opportunity for just one day and for just a few hours until they hit their limit on sales. I’ve logged in before only to discover I missed the date by a few, but they seem to only whisper when the passes will go on sale and if you aren’t tuned in at just that moment you miss it. I logged in late last night and lo and behold they were selling them, and I picked one, got dropped right into a waiting queue, and then almost immediately was presented with a form to complete my purchase. I’ve no idea how I lucked out that much, but it happened.

So now I have a Disneyland annual pass too. I will probably renew the Disney World one at least once this year when it comes up: I already have a reservation for Port Orleans Riverside, my favorite, when that time comes around. Whether or not I renew it after that depends on what the renewal price is. But I am keeping my Disneyland annual pass. The political climate for folks like me is much better in California, and that is the land of my birth anyway. I’d wanted to retire back to there but it’s too expensive now, and I have a cute little house with an easy mortgage in a very nicely walkable neighborhood here in Baltimore.

I’ll do another road trip to California sometime around end of July or August.

My high tech thermostat was telling me that it’s 13 degrees outside when I got up this morning (it’s taking readings from the AC unit outside where it’s mostly in the shade this time of year). I was hoping for something a bit warmer so I could do my morning walk. But I reckon that’s going to have to wait.

I sure can’t wait for the temperatures to rise into the 50s, like the forecast is saying, later this week. It’ll come with a lot of rain but that’ll help get rid of the snow that’s keeping the car put for now. Of course that’ll mean more flooding.

I’m taking the train to Walt Disney World at the end of the month, as a winter mental health break. Initially I’d wanted to do it right after New Year but there were no roomettes available and this would have to be a train ride because this is the snow time of year and I didn’t want to drive down only to find my streets a foot or more deep in snow and nowhere to park. I’d given some thought to taking a week during Valentine’s day to perk me up, but on reflection that would only have depressed me more. A round trip on the Silver Meteor was available within my budget for the end of January and I took that.

But there were no Disney rooms available in the park other than the top level thousand dollar plus rooms which I can’t afford, and as I write this even those rooms are unavailable. It was frustrating, but on the other hand good to see that DeSantis and Rufo are having zero effect on Walt Disney World’s popularity. I made sure to get my room in Port Orleans Riverside for the May/June two week vacation (can I call them vacations if I’m retired??) now instead of waiting until the annual pass renewal.

I can only wring five nights in a hotel row hotel this trip, but that gives me walking access to Disney Springs which is a must have if I can’t get into any of the park hotels (resorts…whatever…), and the train ride is itself a relaxing part of the vacation. I haven’t done the Silver Meteor in a long time. This time I’m getting off in Kissimmee instead of Orlando. It’s just the next stop down but that gets me a drive into the parks without having to navigate I-5 traffic. I’m renting a car for the stay so I can get around the parks on my own schedule, not the bus schedule, and Florida weather allowing it should be a moment of fun and relaxation. 

Then I get to go back home and trudge through the rest of the winter in Maryland. And spend money on the car. It needs new engine and transmission mounts. So it goes…

The workers here (Cast Members, as they’re called) really get into it…

This happened in Orlando the other day.

It’s just a couple weeks to Gay Days in WDW and this is one reason why I’m going there with my cameras. Mostly I just want to enjoy the parks, and being able, finally, to go whenever I want now that I’m retired. I think I want a Disney weekend…okay, let’s just go…no need anymore to request vacation time… It’s been something I was looking forward to. The park reservation system and the fact that it’s difficult for single diners to make dining reservations at my favorite places made me question if I was ever going back again. But I think I’ve worked through all that now. I have my annual pass again and selling my DVC points gets me back to making stays in the basic and mid tier park resorts where I can make reservations on the fly whenever I want, which is nearly impossible at a DVC resort. So I’m back in my comfort zone there.

But Gay Days this year is a special case given all the hate mongering going on down in Florida. So to have some Mouseketeer fun with all the other red shirts in the parks isn’t just a good time this year, it’s an act of defiance. Yes, we are Disney people too. And I want to show my support for Disney since they’re taken a lot of static for supporting us. But also, I want to document what is happening down there, in my own way, with my own eyes.

(As a side note, I’m working on getting another photo gallery up here of the stuff I took during the Love In Action and the Love Won Out protests.)

Security is something you almost never even see at WDW, except at the park entrances where screenings and bag checks take place. Once inside the park you might think it isn’t even there at all. But I’ve seen it appear…suddenly out of nowhere…once.

It was in front of La Cava del Tequila inside the Mexico pavilion at EPCOT World Showcase. Someone, probably having had a little too much to drink, got upset at the wait to get in (it’s a pretty small bar with only a few tables), and started causing a loud angry scene, and so I was told later got physical with another guest. He was instantly surrounded and spirited offsite.

And it’s easy for their security to come out of nowhere because there are usually dozens of hidden entrance/exits for the cast members to come and go so they can go about their work. Walt Disney wanted all the mechanics of making the parks work kept out of sight so as not to spoil the illusions he was creating. Magic Kingdom is built on top of a network of tunnels, they call them utilidors. And everywhere in the parks are scattered little out of the way doors and passages marked “Cast Members Only”. And the really interesting part of it is nearly none of them are hidden in a way you might expect. Instead, the scenery is such that your eyes are always directed away from where they are.

And according to a certain someone I used to know who worked there, cameras are everywhere.

So I’m hoping that first weekend in June their security is on their top game. I want everyone to have a good time. I will be very satisfied if the only photos I get are of happy Gay Days Mouseketeers. Because that is a message people still need to see as a counterpoint to all the lies that are surely coming before, during and after the event.

As you can see there, outside the parks it’s probably going to be brutal. I may try to get a few shots of it, but I will have to be very Very careful.