Disney World – Some Thoughts
Having traveled to Walt Disney World (WDW) over 30 times (all since 1987 and no, I never went as a kid…), I have come to enjoy “getting away from it all” in the parks. Most often with my family for vacation or on several business trips to the Orlando area, I have been able to truly relax and forget about the rest of the world. When it comes down to it, nobody does it better than Disney.
Just for reference, our trip history looks like this:
Month/Year | Resort | Type of Trip |
| September 1987 | Off-Site Condo | Family Vacation |
| October 1988 | Off-Site Condo | Family Vacation |
| May 1990 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation |
| December 1991 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation |
| January 1992 | Off-Site Hotel | Business Meetings |
| August 1992 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation (We left <12 hours before Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida!) |
| December 1992 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation |
| April 1993 | Grand Floridian | 12th Wedding Anniversary Trip |
| December 1993 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation |
| December 1994 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation |
| August 1995 | Wilderness Lodge | Family Vacation |
| January 1996 | Dolphin | Business Meetings |
| March 1996 | Off-Site Hotel | Business Meetings |
| August 1996 | Wilderness Lodge | Family Vacation |
| November 1996 | Wilderness Lodge | Family Vacation/Reunion w/11 of us |
| August 1997 | Wilderness Lodge | Family Vacation |
| October 1998 | Contemporary Resort | Business Meetings (My wife joined me) |
| November 1998 | Wilderness Lodge | Family Vacation |
| August 1999 | Boardwalk Villas | Family Vacation |
| April 2001 | Polynesian Resort | Family Vacation |
| December 2002 | Grand Floridian | Family Vacation |
| September 2003 | Swan | Extended weekend getaway with my wife |
| September 2004 | Contemporary Resort | Long weekend trip with my wife |
| February 2005 | Dolphin | Vacation with my wife (Noticing a pattern here? Hint: The kids are in college....) |
| September 2005 | Dolphin | Long weekend trip with my wife |
| January 2006 | Dolphin | Long weekend trip with my wife and daughter (son was back to college already.) We met up with friends running in the Disney Marathons. Did we run? Not a chance...maybe we'll walk them someday. ;-) |
| April 2008 | Dolphin | 27th Anniversary trip with my wife |
| April 2009 | Saratoga Springs | 28th Anniversary trip with my wife. No theme parks, just R&R. Our first stay as DVC members. |
| August 2009 | Bay Lake Tower | Vacation with my wife. First stay at the new “BLT”, followed by a 3 night cruise on the Disney Wonder |
| May 2010 | Bay Lake Tower | Family vacation. All four of us were together for the first time since 2002. |
| December 2010 | Bay Lake Tower | Vacation with my wife. Our first time back for the holidays since 2002. |
| October 2011 | Bay Lake Tower and the Disney Dream | Vacation with my wife. 2 nights at BLT, 4 nights on the Dream, then 3 nights back at BLT. |
If you think that we have been there often, you are right and we love it. However, we have friends who do not live in the immediate Orlando area who are there many times per year, often just for long weekends, rather than a weeklong vacation stay. Some, who are hosts of podcasts and/or manage Disney related web sites, are frequently there for press events for new attraction openings and other announcements. Of course, we know folks who live in the Orlando area who, as Florida residents, get all sorts of discounts and are there several times per month for day trips. At some time in the future, we hope to be Orlando area residents and then be able to take advantage of the proximity to visit more frequently and more cost effectively.
Now that we are Disney Vacation Club members, we’ll almost certainly not stay off-site again for personal visits. Even if we were not, given the wide variety of price ranges now available (from the All Star Resorts to the Grand Floridian), there is almost no economic reason to stay outside WDW and after considering the variety of benefits on-site guests have, any modest economic difference is easily offset. Also, being able to easily go from the theme or water parks back to the hotel during the day, without worrying about going to/finding your car, driving to the hotel, driving back and re-parking eliminates a major hassle.
As you can see above, we have been to WDW at various times of the year, including several Christmas vacations. The parks and resorts are dressed to the hilt for the holidays. There are many exciting special events during that time, including tree lightings, holiday parades and processionals. On one of our early Christmas trips, we got to see James Earl Jones read the Christmas Story from the train station in the Magic Kingdom during the Processional. I still get shivers remembering his booming voice reading the script. Since then it has been moved to the theater in front of the American Adventure pavilion in Epcot and a variety of stars read the story over multiple nights. WDW is a great place to spend time with the family during that special time of the year. As you can probably tell from above, going to WDW has become our family’s favorite way to re-energize.
We have made many friends via the internet who share a common “Disney bond”. The Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.disney.parks (RADP) has become a forum for sharing this common interest and sharing the experiences and base of knowledge with others, who are perhaps visiting for their first time or are keeping up with the constant change. Of course, if you are looking for a Usenet golf resource, rec.sport.golf is the place to go. Note that I am linking to Google Groups here, as more and more ISPs are terminating their provision of Usenet groups for a variety of reasons. If you still have “NNTP” access through your ISP or purchased access, use your favorite Usenet application.
Also, via internet relay chat (IRC) we continue to stay in touch with friends, literally all over the U.S. and the world. For information on joining #radp-friends on IRC go to Laura Gilbreath’s Disney Chat IRC page. Wednesday and Sunday nights are the usual “get together” nights for the group.
During some of our trips to WDW, we have participated in “RADP meets”, where a group of “radp’ers” get together and share the experience while engaged in visiting the parks, resort hotels, the clubs at Pleasure Island or just sharing a meal. We even traveled to Winnipeg, Canada in August 1998 for a wedding for two folks who met through RADP! We have made many new friends in this way, some of whom we only knew by name through RADP or IRC prior to the meets. It is always interesting putting faces with the names and personalities you interact with over the net. Frequently, when traveling for business and I am in a city where fellow radp’ers reside, if our respective schedules permit, we’ll try to catch up for dinner.
Since the 2008-2009 time frame, we have also begun to more aggressively use social media vehicles such as Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and Gowalla to increase the frequency of contacts and connections with both existing and new friends and family, to take advantage of the more real time sharing of activities, stories, images and related content. Through these communication venues, we now stay in touch with literally hundreds of people and continue to make new contacts on an almost daily basis. I also subscribe to a myriad of Walt Disney World related podcasts to stay in touch and to keep up to date on happenings at the World. Many of the podcast hosts now also host meets at Disney World, some planned well in advance, while others may be more spontaneous and we hope to be able to participate in more of these during future trips.
As a result of my love for Walt Disney World, when it came time to develop a personal web site, there was only one choice for subject matter. As most web sites go, this one being a labor of love, it will continue to grow and I hope provide, in some form, a resource for others seeking information on WDW and my other passion: GOLF. In some way, I hope this returns some of the joy that I have experienced and received from others whom I have met via the internet.
Golf – A Late Start
Though being a relative newcomer to the game of golf, I have come to both appreciate the obsessive/compulsive disorder that is the game and the incredible patience and camaraderie of fellow golfers. In February of 1995, I had finally succumbed to peer pressure from co-workers, some of whom are single digit handicappers and played competitively in college. Some of whom, now in retrospect, probably also wish I had never taken up the game… 
We had just come back from a January 1995 business trip to Palm Springs, California where several co-workers had taken the time to play some of the finer local courses before attending meetings while I worked. (okay, so maybe it was a little envy too…).
Upon returning home to Minneapolis, Minnesota and spending much time reading and speaking with quite a few folks about the game, I convinced my wife to spend the better part of a Saturday afternoon looking at equipment. After about three hours at a local pro shop, I walked out fully outfitted and ready to play, of course, totally ignoring the snow on the ground and the sub-zero temperatures. In case you are wondering, King Cobras. O.K., so now what do I do?
Well, my first lessons were shortly after that in late February of 1995 in a golf dome here in a suburb of Minneapolis. The dome is a pressurized bubble, enclosing an indoor driving range, which is typically 70-90 yards deep, to facilitate hitting during the colder months up here. You can’t tell if your shots take a 90 degree turn to the right at about 95 yards, but it is good enough to at least maintain some flexibility and mechanics over the winter. Of course, you have to be sure you are not grooving a slice or hook while you are there. There are several of these in the Twin Cities area, most with two levels of hitting areas.
By the way, prior to this I was an avid tennis player (U.S.T.A. 4.0). I have not played tennis since!
For most of that first spring, when the weather finally warmed up, I hit at local ranges and played on some 9 hole par 3 courses just to get some more experience and work on swing mechanics. Incredibly, my first “real” round of 18 holes was at the TPC Course in Los Colinas (near Dallas, Texas) with a colleague during a business trip in June of 1995. We had meetings at the Four Seasons Resort there and had enough time for one round. This was just after the Byron Nelson PGA event, so the rough was thick and the greens were fast. I hit a 118 and still have the scorecard from that first round. Since then, I have had the opportunity to play a wide variety of courses, both here in Minneapolis and “on the road” during business trips with colleagues and clients. I even played two of the Disney courses (Magnolia and Osprey Ridge) with colleagues during a business trip in January of 1996.
Minnesotans are avid golfers, despite the woefully short season up here, which is typically April to October. There are more golfers per capita here than any other state in the country and Minnesota is also the only state in the U.S. to have hosted all of the U.S.G.A. Championships!
To give you a brief insight into the Minnesota golf mentality and how creative folks can get when faced with golf deprivation over the long winters up here, let me tell you about a year round, open-air driving range that is near where I live. The facility is set up in a building that contains hitting areas in a line on a single level. The hitting areas face the outdoor driving range area that is 200 yards long, with high netting along the outsides and far end to keep balls from going astray. The hitting areas are configured like garage stalls with pull down doors that are closed at night and have radiant heaters to keep things warm during the colder weather. On cold mornings they turn on the heaters a couple of hours before the facility opens to warm things up. Now you have a warm and comfortable location to go hit your balls, not just 70 or 90 yards, but out to 200 yards so you can actually watch the ball in flight and know how you are hitting. Most importantly, you can do this when it is 0 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
OK, so now your next question is, “How do they retrieve the balls that have been hit, when the ground is covered with several feet of snow?” Ah, here is where the genius of man in his desperation to play golf comes in….they have placed vertical poles out on the landing area arranged in a repeating square pattern. The poles are up to 10 feet high, depending upon the underlying terrain, to keep the tops of the poles at a consistent height. Attached to the tops of the poles are square nets, that are arranged to droop down toward the middle of the square, like an inverted pyramid. In the middle of each square netting section are vertical large bore tubes leading down to a ball collection system. When you hit your balls out on the range, they fall into the nets, run down into the tubes and get collected in a main catch area for return to the hitting facility! Ingenious! Even better, it really works! “Necessity is the mother of invention!” This place may be the first of its kind up here, but I dare say, it won’t be the last! For more information see GolfZone.
I had made some progress since that first round back in 1995. I have been as low as a U.S.G.A. 17.3 handicap index, with my personal best round of an 89 at my former home course which has a 72.2/137 rating/slope from the black set of tees I play, which are at 6,610 yards. There are a total of five sets of tees, with the “tips” at 7030 yards (74.2/140). I have since replaced my original set of steel shafted Cobras with a graphite set due to periodic flare ups of tendonitis in my wrist. The graphite helps to reduce the vibration in the shaft, which has managed to keep the tendonitis at bay. I picked up a new Cobra 7.5 degree Gravity Back driver, which I can hit around 270+ pretty consistently and that has helped take some strokes off the game.
I have had many opportunities to play “on the road” during business trips, which have afforded me the chance to play some great courses like The Boyne Resort in northern Michigan, Steele Canyon east of San Diego, The TPC and Tonto Verde near Scottsdale, Blackwolf Run (River Course) in Kohler, Wisconsin, Desert Springs Resort in Palm Springs, Ruby Hill in Pleasonton, California and La Cantera in San Antonio. It is always interesting to play new courses and face new challenges, especially the mental ones, as I travel. One can get too comfortable playing the same course each time. To face differing course layouts and design philosophy is one of the great aspects of the game.
Over the past few years unfortunately, due to neck and shoulder issues, I have not been able to play. My last round of golf was back in August of 2006 as was unable to finish due to weakness in my arms and hands. In September of 2009, after trying various non-surgical options, I finally had my right shoulder operated upon and the left side was done in March of 2010. To date, these have provided much improvement in range of motion and my strength is returning. On July 27, 2011 my son and I went to GolfZone and I hit balls for the first time in five years. It went well enough, that the following weekend, I went to a local sporting good store and spent a couple of hours looking at new clubs, since my Cobras are going on 15 years old. The Cobras have stiff graphite shafts and I want to switch back to regular flex steel shafts on the irons and wedges and regular flex graphite on the others. After trying new models of Cobras, Taylor Mades and Callaways, I locked in on Callaway Razr X irons, hybrids and Razr Hawk 3 and driver, along with Cleveland CG15 wedges. However, given the expense, I made the decision to wait on purchasing new clubs till later in the year. In the mean time, I had my Cobras re-gripped and will spend time at the range working on swing mechanics. strength and flexibility. I won’t play a round until next year (2012) to give myself time to get comfortable swinging again with new clubs once I purchase them. The bottom line is that I am now optimistic about getting back to this game and no longer just be a spectator.
Finally, as I have grown in my skills and appreciation for the game and its history, I have come to both understand and identify with a quote from the great Arnold Palmer:
“Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated. It satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time, rewarding and maddening. It is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.”