One of the things that irks me somewhat about coming to the parks in Florida is the price of the parking, in fact that they should charge for parking at all. That’s right parking isn’t included in the price! When we first came it was $5 a day and you got a really nice souvenir card to keep. Now the price has leapt up to $22 and all you get is a shitty paper receipt. Still we dutifully paid it like everyone else as we entered Magic Kingdom this morning.
With all other parks your journey to the gate is fairly straightforward. The car parking lot transport dumps you right there and just just need to walk right on in. Not at Magic Kingdom where you get dropped at the transportation centre where you have a choice of either getting the monorail or boat across the lagoon. We elected to take the boat as it is nice to see the park appear before you. Just before we were due to depart I noticed some people chucking money over the edge of the boat. Leaning over I could see that the pontoon was covered in coins that boat goers had thrown over. It seems that even when Disney aren’t asking for payment people still find a way to give more to the corporation!
Given that we have been coming to Disney since the boys were quite young we have a number of pictures of them in various places over the years. This year we thought that it would be nice to try and reproduce some of them and today was our first opportunity at the sword in the stone. Our initial problem was actually finding where it was. There was no guarantee of course that it would even still be there. However, we found a helpful guide who pointed us in the right direction and while the surroundings had changed a little it was basically exactly the same as when the first photo was taken 16 years ago.
I did wonder if the boys might be resistant to reproducing these pictures but to their credit they were both pretty amenable and the resulting shot is great.
We returned home early afternoon still suffering the effects of jet lag but having enjoyed our day in Magic Kingdom.
After a rest we went out in the evening to the family favourite Cracker Barrel which serves simple fare at cheap prices. I had, however, forgotten about how much choice there can be in a simple menu option. Helen had chosen something that allegedly came with scrambled eggs. In the UK if it says scrambled eggs you get scrambled eggs, no questions asked. Here it is like some complicated quiz to find out just how you want your eggs – who knew that there could be some many different options for the humble egg?
We went back home stuffed and jaded.