Happy Saturday friends, and hooray, it’s finally the weekend! Here’s a recap of what’s gone on at YMMV this week. From what we’ve written to what others wrote that we really liked and wanted to share, it’s all here, in one convenient place!
Category: Theme Parks
Trip Report: 2019 Disney Vacation Club Exclusive Moonlight Magic Event at Epcot
Walt Disney World began their “Moonlight Magic” events in 2016 to celebrate Disney Vacation Club’s (DVC) 25th anniversary. DVC, as Disney’s version of a timeshare, can cost significantly less when you purchase points on the secondary market (as opposed to buying them directly from Disney). To make buying from Disney more valuable, they have continued the Moonlight Magic events from 2017 onward as a perk that’s reserved for those who’ve purchased points directly from them and not from the secondary market.
Joe and I have been attending Moonlight Magic events, on and off, ever since they began in 2016. As DVC members since 1991, and as Central FL locals, being able to go to a select park after hours, with minimal crowds, has been a nice perk that we look forward to here and there. As the events became more popular, it had become a little more difficult to sign up in 2018 if you weren’t staying at a WDW DVC property for the event (they get first dibs), but Disney has tweaked the system and we’ve found it easier to get in in 2019 than 2018.
We’d been to the Epcot event in 2017, and in 2019 had been to the event at Magic Kingdom, so we were interested to see how the event had changed, not only from park to park, but from year to year.
Continue reading “Trip Report: 2019 Disney Vacation Club Exclusive Moonlight Magic Event at Epcot”
The Daredevil Superfans Who Snuck Inside An EPCOT Attraction To Explore & Document It Before It Was Destroyed
With time comes change, and there’s no greater example of this than at Disney parks. In fact, Walt Disney himself was said to say, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
Growth can sometimes be a whole new park, or a new land within a park. But sometimes that change is in the form of tearing one attraction down to make room for another. At Walt Disney World, attractions such as The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh replaced Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Journey Into Your Imagination With Figment replaced Journey Into Your Imagination (which replaced the original Journey Into Imagination – we wrote about that whole hot mess in this post), and an entire nightclub complex, Pleasure Island, was “reimagined” into the current Disney Springs shopping district (granted, work on Disney Springs didn’t even start in earnest until about half a decade after they closed Pleasure Island but let’s save that for another blog post).
Horizons was a dark ride attraction at Epcot that opened in 1983, closed in 1994, reopened in 1995 while Test Track was being built and Universe of Energy was under renovation, and closed again, this time for good, in 1999. It was demolished in mid-2000 to make way for the current Mission: SPACE attraction. Horizons had something of a cult following and to this day, there’s lament of the loss of what some think is the best attraction ever seen in the history of Epcot.
When Disney attractions close, there’s historically no official documentation, at least not that fans ever get to see. Two young adults in Florida who loved Horizons decided to change that…
Carnival & Midway Games: The Science Of The Scam, And How To Win
‘Tis the season for local carnivals, fairs, festivals and lots of other events that, at least in the U.S., usually includes soft ice cream, corn dogs, kettle corn, funnel cake, fried stuff on a stick, and “spin and puke” rides. Probably in that order. 😉
When I was a kid, the things I loved the most at the carnival were the games of chance. Whether it was squirting water into a clown’s mouth, aiming a whiffle ball to land in a red cup or trying to break balloons with darts, I was positive that I could beat the odds and win that 3’ plush Snoopy I had my eye on. Unfortunately, although I spent a whole lot of money trying, I never did win that Snoopy. But I did win a working kid-sized blender on a carnival roulette wheel once when I was about six or seven.
Continue reading “Carnival & Midway Games: The Science Of The Scam, And How To Win”
All Incl. Resort in FL Keys Burns Down, New Cheap Way To Travel In NYC, % Of Americans Who Don’t Travel, & More!
Happy Saturday friends, and hooray, it’s finally the weekend! Here’s a recap of what’s gone on at YMMV this week. From what we’ve written to what others wrote that we really liked and wanted to share, it’s all here, in one convenient place!
