31 Blogs of Christmas
Day 29

I love Disneyland, but I hate a lot of the people who come to visit Disneyland. People just act like the rules don’t apply to them. “I don’t care that there are a ton of people waiting to walk by, I’m in a hurry so I need to push past the people politely waiting. I’m a self-important tool bag.” I hate that.

Sadly, at 3:15 on December 28th, I became the thing I hate.

I was pushing the stroller with my son in it though the uber-crowded park with my mom following behind. We are headed to the Tiki room, but the entrance to Adventureland is blocked off. No problem, we’ll go through Frontierland and cut across. We start to do that and a cast member tells me we can’t. He says we have to walk all the way around Frontierland, through New Orleans Square, past the Indiana Jones constricted corridor of death and back to the Tiki Room…which is 20 feet from where I’m standing.

At this point, I am not proud of myself…I just kept walking.

“Sir, you need to go this way. Sir…you’re going the wrong way.”

I tossed a reply over my shoulder, “Sorry.” Yet I carried on.

While I’m sure it rang hollow to that poor cast member at the time, I was and am indeed sorry. I know he’s got a job to do and jerks who do what I did make it worse. So I’m very sorry to that guy if he ever reads this.

But I’m not sorry to whoever made him have to enforce that dumb instruction on how to get around the park! I get it. The park is crowded, and you’ve got to manage things so that everyone can still have the best time possible. But don’t think for a second that I”m not aware that you use this opportunity to march guests past as many concession and retail opportunities as you can. There is no other reason to ask my family and I to take the route that poor cast member was trying to direct us to.

Observe this map…

The “A” is where I was and the “B” was where I wanted to go. The blue line is the route I took. The red line is the route they wanted me to take. Not only is the “official” route a ridiculous amount of extra walking, my route didn’t even upset their flow of traffic.

Still, I was in Disney’s park and I should have abided by their rules. Even if they are stupid.

So I’m sorry cast member. If it’s any cancellation, my drive home that should have taken 6 hours took a grueling 10 hours.