Tips and tricks are an easy one to understand, but TUNNELS?

Disney offers a few special experiences besides just tickets to the parks, some of them include:

• Cake Decorating
• Autumn at Walt Disney World
• Behind the Seeds, a talk about the plants in the parks
• Caring for Giants: a special tour with the animals at Animal Kingdom
• DiveQuest: Scuba Diving in the aquarium at Epcot.

A full list of all tours and experiences can be found here. Among all the dozens of offerings, there is one that stands out: the Keys to the Kingdom tour. This is a chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at the park and visit some of the off-limits sections (called “backstage” in Disney lingo).

This includes getting the chance to see a part of the tunnels that run underneath the Magic Kingdom. Because I am a software engineer, nerd, and love to know how things work, where do I sign up? Take my money!

They don’t allow cameras on the tour; we still had a few days left on our trip and I didn’t want to get kicked out of the park, so I obliged.

The tour starts on Main Street near the entrance of the park at 9 a.m. There are about 20 people on the tour, and here are a few of the things they shared:

• Red concrete. Why is the pavement in Magic Kingdom red? Walt Disney wanted to share the movie experience, so the pavement is meant to be like a red carpet that leads you to the main feature, Cinderella’s castle. As you enter the park, there will always be popcorn beside the entrance, and candy straight ahead, because thats what you do when you go to a show.
• Buy the land. How much did Walt buy the land for? He bought the land for about $180/acre. However, a journalist from the Orlando Sentinel got suspicious: Who was buying thousands of acres of Florida Swampland under the name “Real Estate Development Company”? She suspected it was Disney, so she flew out to California and asked Walt Disney: “Are you buying land in Florida?” His response was, “Who would buy land there? It is only swamps, has no interstates, no tourism, and is hot all year.” The journalist thought, “You know a lot for someone who has no interest in the state.” She later published a piece as an opinion stating Disney is buying the land. The price per acre jumped from $180 to about $16,000/acre.
• Moving East. Why was Disney World built after Disney Land? After Disney Land was opened, Walt Disney entered 4 attractions for the World Fair. All of his attractions, including an animatronic feature, won out of a total of 5 awards. This showed him that there was demand for his products on the East coast as well, thus began the idea to open another theme park.
• The design of Magic Kingdom. What is so special about it? There are several “Lands”, and they are laid out with great attention to detail. It is a hub-and-spoke layout, with the garden and Cinderella’s castle at the center. Walt Disney said that when you hold out a treat for a dog (called a “weinie”), the dog will come towards it. So each “land”, has a tall, visual “weinie” to lead people: Cinderella’s castle, the Astro Orbiter in tomorrow land, the treehouse from Swiss Family Robinson, etc.
• The Shrubbery. Plants aren’t cool. Are they? Yes! Walt Disney had a neighbor who had a great yard. So, when Disney Land was opened in California, Walt asked his neighbor if he would do the landscaping. Then, when he added Walt Disney World, he said “Guess what? You get to do landscaping for Disney World Too!”. Also, Walt travelled the world and would bring back plants from exotic places, including smuggling seeds in his socks. Also, as you enter adventure land, there are trees planted specifically to block your view of the castle, to ensure people are experiencing adventure.
• What is NOT there. Why is everything…so perfect? Main Street has a ton of buildings and little store fronts. And not a single building has a defect: no peeled pain, not a single light bulb out of place, no gaps in the woodwork. I own a house. It is hard to keep everything in such shape, so I asked the tour guide. Her response? “A team comes in every night to fix things. If any paint needs to be added, or if any guest makes a complaint, they will often fix it immediately.”
• What else is missing. Why no bugs…or gators…in Florida? Every year, they release 6 billion ladybugs and dragonflies to help eat mosquitos. Another article I read to confirm says that they spray garlic as a natural repellant, release bats, and have chicken coups to help control the mosquito population. This is all to honor Disney’s wishes to not spray the park with chemicals, and leave as much natural as possible. As for gators, they have a gator-catching team that is on call whenever one is spotted. Everything is fenced off, but sometimes baby alligators can get through.
• Backstage passes. What happens backstage? A lot of people work at Disney World. 78,000 among the four parks. At the magic kingdom, they all need normal things: like parking, changing rooms, cafeterias, etc. They need to prepare for the parade, and more for all of the “magic” we experience as guests at the park. On the tour, I saw the Incredibles wearing only half a costume as they got ready for the parade. A golf-cart taking all of the princesses to their parade float. Where they house the floats in the off season. There was a full gym under Cinderella’s castle. And a dance studio for the “cast” to practice. And a gigantic room, like the first floor of our house, where a team does the sewing of all of the costumes people wear all around the park. I’m talking 6-12 princess dresses, every princess, along the walls of this entire room. Any little girl would have died to have played in there.

Tips and Tricks

We did 6 days in the parks. Here are the things that helped us the most:

• A stroller. Mercy doesn’t need a stroller in real life. She is tall for her age, and rarely uses it. Disney isn’t real life. We are walking, and it is hot. This saved us a ton of time to rent a stroller down there (no flying with one) to have her be able to rest when she needed, and to haul our ponchos, water bottles, etc. all day long.
• External Battery for phones. The Disney App does a lot (more on that later). But, since you are using the app a lot for maps and lines, not to mention taking pictures/videos, and more, the battery can drain pretty quickly. I had an external battery I got from Costco which worked great, and plugged it in at our hotel each night. My phone is an iPhone 13 (almost three years old), and though the phone is great, the battery isn’t amazing anymore, so this was a big help.
• Magic bands. I’d file this under a “maybe.” Mine fell off each time I put on my backpack, so I ended up just putting it in my pocket the whole week. Disney also offers the option to use a card instead of a magic band, or the app on your phone itself. They are neat as they light up with different colors on the various rides though.
• Lighting Lanes. The lines at the parks weren’t that bad when we visited, so they say. However, if you don’t want to wait 60 minutes for the fun rides, definitely opt for the lightning lane option to cut that wait time to 10-15 minutes.
• One person in charge. Taylor became an expert on ALL things Disney before our trip, including the rides and food. This helped as we just relied on her to make the decisions. I didn’t do much research (partially because I like being surprised!), so picking the right rides and places to eat was a lot easier for our group.
• Small backpacks. We ordered some small backpacks to haul around all day. The problem with a bigger backpack is, you will fill them if the space is available. These small, light-weight, bags were perfect for sunscreen, the battery charger, extra clothes for the kids, and any knick-knacks we got along the way.
• Dining Plan. We had the “quick service” dining plan, which offers a number of meals and snack each day you are at the park. A meal would be something like a burger, fries, and a drink (often times a beer!), and a snack would be ice cream, a pastry, etc. This helped us not think about costs while in the park; also, they were offered really cheap during the “slow” time of the year when we visited.
• Water bottles. Florida in August, need I say more? But this is my blog, so of course I will say more. We got hot and sweaty. We walked our butts off every day, especially the first two days. However, time is broken up by stores and attractions that are inside. Disney World does not skimp on the Air Conditioning either, so there is a cadence of cooling off throughout the day. However, everyone needs to drink a lot of water to make it through the day.
• Photo passes. This also depends: if you are coming back to the park often, you may not need a photo pass. If this is your one big trip, I recommend it. I realized last week that the pictures I shared were all the pictures I took, and didn’t include any group photos with Taylor parents. That’s because the group pics were all from the photo pass, and on Taylor’s phone. These pics are important, and I am glad we have them. Now, for a brief interruption to share ONLY pictures from our photo passes (also, I made it so you can click and see the full image):

• Tank tops. If you know me, you know tank-tops have become my thing. It started out with just the crazy/silly/funny tank tops at the pool, but my collection has grown to include more “normal” tanks as well. I say this because I started a few days wearing t-shirts but had to change around lunch because tank-tops really do keep me feeling much cooler in the Florida sun.
• Good walking shoes. I took 130,074 steps over a week; that’s an average of 18,582/day; or, 61 miles. Most of them pushing a stroller. Good shoes helped a lot. In fact, bring two pairs in case you run into one of the rainstorms Disney is known for, you won’t have wet shoes the next day.
• Staying on property. The transportation to the parks from the properties are amazing. Depending on where you stay, there are buses, trains, boats, or the skyway that run on a regular basis, so your wait time is pretty short. Also, people staying on property get to reserve their rides 7 days before the start of their trip, as opposed to 3 days before the trip when staying off-property.
• A rest day. For sure. Little kids absolutely can’t keep up. Grown ups also need a break. So if staying more than 3 days, add a rest day in between.

An incredible app.

Disney World has its own app. In order to build an app, it takes a bunch of systems and makes them all work together using the same interface for the user to interact with it. The systems usually involve creating APIs (Application programming interfaces), and it is very, very difficult to do.

The Disney App takes this to another level by integrating:

• Hotel Reservations
• Hotel Keys
• Disney Photo Passes
• Mobile ordering for most restaurants at the parks (Not the fancy restaurants)
• A map which can filter to find the nearest characters, bathrooms, restaurants, stores, help, etc.
• Wait times for rides
• Ride reservations.
• Walking directions/navigation on the map.
• Bus/boat time arrival tracking.

Any where else, building an app that can do ONE of these features would be a complex system in itself: things in the digital world are always breaking and need time to update and maintain. The complexity of making all of the Disney systems work together in an app like this just blows my mind.