Bitten again......sigh.

I am doing some research for a story I am writing. Yeah...just another fan fiction thing that I do when there is nothing else 'cooking.' I have fans that have been clamoring for another 'road' piece for a while now. This time I am sending my families from a previous fic - 'The Duplex' - to Walt Disney World for Thanksgiving. Something about 'seeing' the esteemed Goran Visnjic (aka Luka Kovac) in a Goofy hat is appealing. And someone has emailed and asked that I interject 'Abby Lockhart' (aka Maura Tierney) grumbling around in a Minnie Mouse get up. Haven't figured out how to get that in but it sounds like a hilarious possibility. Hee. At any rate, I am having some mindless fun. I always do when writing fan fictions. But that's for another post. This one is all about WDW.

I thought I had outgrown the place. Seriously. I went to Disneyland twice and WDW once (the year it opened!) with my parents when I was growing up. My sister and I went to WDW together - alone - the year she graduated from high school and I graduated from college. Road trip extraordinaire! What memories the two of us have of that trip. I went once again with my husband - who was then my fiancee - for a long weekend. We took his daughters for a week several years later and stayed in a camper. We joined my sister's family there when my son was a toddler. My parents moved to Florida and WDW became an easy day trip....or a jumpstart for an extended stay. We took my youngest step, a niece and our three year old son for a week once. My son and I went back for a day six months later when we were visiting my parents. Pathetically, my son had been there six times before the age of seven. Then along came the Princess from her Russian orphanage. Our family was now four strong and I was working part time. Which meant a partial pay check. The trip became rather pricey for us. But, we had saved a day of our tickets from the year before (Disney tickets are good forever) in order to take her at some point. And we did two years after her arrival...for her 7th birthday.

It was...interesting...to experience the Magic Kingdom with a child who has not grown up with the Mouse. She had seen a number of the movies via our dvd collection at that point - Snow White, Bambi, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and The Little Mermaid (which scared the bejeezes out of her). She even had several sing along dvds committed to memory. (Listening to 'The Tiki Room' with a Russian lilty lisp was hilarious!) This was to be HER trip. She was to pick and choose where we were to go. I anticipated having her overwhelmed with it all. Instead, all she cared about was getting pictures taken with all of the characters so she could have a photo memory book like the one I had made her brother years before. That's all. Oh...and swimming in the pool with the dragon slide at our for one night only New Orleans Resort pool. Sooo....that trip ended up being placed in the hands of the master - her 9 year old brother - who managed to get us to all of his favorite places in three different WDW parks in ONE day....and back to the pool for a late night swim. My feet had blisters on top of blisters! That was six years ago. The last time we were actually inside the parks.

So now I am researching what things are like at Walt Disney World for the holidays. What the new attractions are. Where the new restaurants are. For my story. And I have been bitten again. Sigh. My children are 13 and almost 15 now. They are more interested in their friends, their sports, their school activities. The 'master' has been to another kind of park and is now a roller coaster fiend. He wants to ride them over and over all day long. I thought the Peter Pan ride would be a hard sell. He wouldn't be interested in another trip to WDW. She wasn't much intrigued the first time around. Surely she wouldn't be interested this time. Or so I thought. I am just mulling a trip over. Trying to figure it all out. Financially. But their eyes have begun sparkling at the thought of the possibility. Heh. Walt Disney was a genius. That WDW 'bug' is freaking contagious.