THE GATES OF LIFE
When we are young, we crave boundaries, even though we pretend not to. We kick Dad in the shins, sobbing and arching out of our strollers, not understanding why he won’t let us run amuck all over Main Street USA. Eventually, unable to budge Dad’s firm stance, we fall back in exhausted relief, snoring. Someone who cares for us has set up a “gate” of sorts, a gentle obstruction to our self-damaging behavior. This “gate” saves us from ourselves.
Growing up, I was a rule-follower. Okay…maybe it’s more accurate to say that I was anxious about being caught and criticized. As a responsible adult, though, I have grown weary of certain boundaries, especially when I feel as though I am mature enough to self-regulate. For example, by contract, I am supposed to be at my high school teaching job at 7:30 a.m. But if an accident on the highway adds twenty minutes to my commute, or my husband’s work schedule deems it my turn to put our kids on the bus, I am not late to work because of my disregard for the contract. I’m late because life events do not always fit into the borders of an itemized document. In that case, I long for a little flexibility, considering that later that evening, I will be operating outside of the boundaries of the contract yet again. This time, however, I will be doing so by grading essays, designing lesson plans, and writing e-mails to parents on my own personal time.
We are constantly encountering and constructing gates in life. Now, some boundaries are non-negotiable. We can’t drive on the sidewalks, or bring weapons to concerts. We can’t allow our teenager to punch the high school principal for confiscating her phone. But let’s be honest: too many gates can wear down our spirits. Some boundaries should be negotiable. I think that Walt Disney World agrees.
THE MOST MAGICAL GATES ON EARTH
Naturally, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom are packed with gates. Rows of walk-through metal detectors and tapstiles at the entrances, manned by security guards. Roped-off queues. Cast Members holding signs at the threshold of Pandora that say, “END OF THE LINE,” so nobody can race ahead unfairly. With millions of Guests visiting the Parks every year, orderliness is non-negotiable. Wait your turn; enter one at a time; take a breath between touching your Magic Band to the light-up Mickey head and placing your finger on the glass. (And, if I may, please maintain at least two feet between the front wheels of your double stroller and my ankles. Thanks.)
If you are a serious Walt Disney World family trip planner like I am, you have also been spending months waiting for a series of My Disney Experience “gates” to open before even arriving in Orlando: 180-day ADR and 60-day Fast Pass windows, Extra Magic Hours and After Hours schedules, and holiday party dates. Getting through these virtual gates is a competitive process. But you and I understand that playing by these WDW family-trip-planning rules will gain us access to the magic that the Parks and Resorts promise. You and I have already chosen WDW as a vacation destination because there, our families can believe in Tinkerbells and Fairy Godmothers, walk around in Star Wars film scenes, and fly, both in pirate ships over London and on banshees through mountains of an exoplanetary moon. Once we’ve nailed down our Fast Pass for Test Track or arrived at Hollywood Studios for rope drop to claim a Rise of the Resistance boarding group, we will be rewarded with mind-blowing, rule-defying experiences. We have faith in this system.
Until my recent moms trip with two of my closest girlfriends, however, I was convinced that if I handled the trip-planning process in any manner other than the rigid one I knew, my vacation would be a disaster. Little did I know that this trip with my friends, Chrissy and Julie, would make me appreciate the multiple ways that Walt Disney World “opens gates” to its Guests, relaxing its small rules to make us feel as trustworthy as grown-ups and yet as free as children.
“HERE YOU LEAVE TODAY AND ENTER THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY, TOMORROW, AND FANTASY.”―WALT DISNEY, ENTRANCE TO MAGIC KINGDOM
No matter the magnitude of the obstacles we are fighting at home, when Cast Members at Walt Disney World remove even minor boundaries for us, life seems more miraculous. IMHO, here are some of the benefits of Walt Disney World’s “open gate” attitude.
You can be your high-maintenance self without fear of judgment. If you are like me, the prospect of preparing for a 12-hour day at Epcot, let alone a 10-day trip to Florida, ramps up your anxiety: what if you forget to bring the very thing that will make or break your entire vacation? Good news. As long as you don’t mind a bag search at the Park’s entrance (or sore shoulders), you can tote around a backpack stuffed with your hairbrush and dry tee shirt for a post-Splash-Mountain touch-up; a second pair of shoes and moleskin for blister care; a mini fan and sunscreen for noon-sun brutality; and a winter coat to weather the chill at the Villains After Hours event. On our moms trip, I even brought a stabilizer for my phone so that I could go Facebook Live without making viewers (at least five at one point! Yeah!) motion-sick. And no one will confiscate any of these things or give you a second glance for needing them. You do you, says Disney.
You can save time and reduce worry by being the bag-lady you know you are. Time is precious on Walt Disney World trips. No matter how well you plan, you will underestimate how long you will spend taking bathroom breaks and crossing from one side of a Park to the other. If you want to spend $200 in the Emporium before you even reach the hub of Magic Kingdom, you don’t need to find and pay for a locker to secure your jumbo shopping bag before riding an attraction. You can shove that bag right between your feet while you ride Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. Nothing disastrous will happen. Your new Mickey Mouse iron trivet will not fly out and give you, or anyone else, a concussion. If there were a true fear of this possibility, Cast Members would not let you bring your merch on the rollercoasters (understandably, light sabers assembled in Galaxy’s Edge are an exception). You can also rest easy knowing that your property is always with you. At another popular Orlando theme park, about a 20-minute drive from Walt Disney World, you must rent lockers to store your personal items before riding certain attractions. A team member could stop you at an attraction’s gate and direct you back to the extra-large lockers ($2) to store your backpack, inflatable alien souvenir, or popcorn bucket. After you ride an attraction, you might be too hasty in gathering your belongings from your locker, as the next person to rent it is standing really close to you and breathing heavy with impatience. You might be in such a rush that you do not register that your $259 Maui Jim sunglasses must have tumbled out of your backpack and slid to a back corner. By the time you do register that you have left your sunglasses behind, you are too late: the heavy breather has stolen them. Damn you, lockers.
You can question the crowd and follow your own path. The first morning of our trip, Chrissy, Julie, and I headed to Animal Kingdom for rope drop, determined to ride Flight of Passage without a Fast Pass. After we finished our business at the Guest Services window (see next anecdote), Chrissy reminded us of a tip that we had heard from our favorite Disney vlogger, Adam Hattan. If we walked through the Rainforest Café restaurant and gift shop, situated to the left of the entrance plaza, we would find a single tapstile station at the exit of the café’s back patio. From this station, we could potentially cut off hundreds of Guests who were following the traditional rules by waiting at the main gates. Casually, we strolled into the Rainforest Café and wound through the displays of leopard-print clothing and plush snakes in the empty gift shop. We felt that haunted, guilty feeling, as though we were somewhere we shouldn’t be.
“Yes, yes, of course! Come on in!” said one of the store associates. “Walk right through! There’s usually a Cast Member at that gate. He should be there any minute.”
And he was. Chrissy, Julie, and I were the only ones at this secret tapstile, chatting with our own personal Cast Member. At last, he received the official go-ahead to open his station, and heralded our first steps into the moms trip we had been anticipating for months with a battle cry—“Let’s do this, ladies!”
We were amongst the first Animal Kingdom Guests that morning to leap from a cliff and soar through a Pandoran sky, the wind in our hair, mist on our eyelashes, earthy scent in our noses. Uninhibited. Free. And all because Uncle Walt (and Adam Hattan) had led us through a course of open gates.
You can rely on Walt Disney World to relax (what you think are) the rules for the sake of keeping your family together. Part of the reason why my friends and I decided on a moms trip to Orlando was that Chrissy had 5-day Worldpassport tickets from her family’s WDW vacation in 1987—gorgeous retro treasures—that she was so gracious to share. One of the tickets had two days of Park-visiting left, and the other had one. We needed to add a day to the second ticket, and also purchase a third ticket, a two-day Park Hopper, to cover all of our admissions to the Parks. Because Chrissy’s tickets were in paper form, we had no way of redeeming them until we had set foot in the Parks and shown them to Guest Relations. I bought the third ticket, the two-day Park Hopper, ahead of our trip through My Disney Experience, which meant that only I could schedule Fast Passes. The three of us nervously watched our group’s Fast Pass window come and then tick away, knowing that only one of us officially had access to attractions via our Magic Band. Our inability to have every detail in place before we arrived pressed down on us threateningly. But we had no choice.
Or so we thought.
Chrissy had practiced her speech to the lucky Guest Relations associate who would need to untangle our ticket fiasco. Julie and I stepped aside and let her explain the situation to Robert, a native of Orlando and seasoned Cast Member. We were prepared to beg for the integrity of our moms trip—Please, sir, please will you work your Disney magic and give us all of the same Fast Passes for the day so that we can celebrate our time together?—and could barely breathe, expecting Robert to slam down a gate in our faces.
“No problem,” he said. “Let me see your Magic Bands.”
Chrissy, Julie, and I looked at each other in disbelief. Was it really that easy? Had we just bypassed all of the conventional measures to planning a Walt Disney World vacation?
Our fortune continued like this. A Cast Member at Epcot waved us through the gate at Test Track. Another Cast Member at Hollywood Studios granted us the same wish, matching us for Slinky Dog Dash. When we obtained Boarding Group 47 for Rise of the Resistance, and worried that our reporting time would interfere with our Oga’s Cantina reservation, a Cast Member reassured us that we could go to Oga’s and show up late to Rise. “Everyone here knows that conflicts happen. You can’t help that,” Maggie said. “We want you to be able to do everything you want to do.”
We felt invincible. All we had to do was demonstrate our solidarity as a family, and our enthusiasm for being together here, in a place we loved, with people we loved. And what did it take for Walt Disney World to give us permission, to swing the gates wide open? Not much at all.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Sometimes, it’s nice for adults—so accustomed to the drudgery of peeling away red tape—to enjoy a little liberty. We happen upon countless daily barriers that slow us down, from spending an hour trying to get through to a real person at Verizon, to begging the pediatrician to illegally sign a camp form before the yearly wellness visit. When I’m in Walt Disney World, all of the vibes I’m feeling tell me that this domain is mine. My playground, my story. No one here is going to throw petty obstacles before me just for the sake of asserting authority. Any gates that Walt Disney World erects in my path are for my own good. Otherwise, when they say Be my Guest, they mean it.
Photo: The Force. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
