Back at the hotel, after getting the bus from the airport, we decided to attempt the river trip again. Everyone on dis had told me how good it was and we weren’t sure when we’d get to do it otherwise, so off to the dock we went.
And this time we actually got on the boat YAY!!!!
And Dis’ers are correct, it’s a very relaxing, peaceful trip. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
It even takes you past these lodges, which we both agreed we’d love to stay in.
Ahhh, the approach to Downtown Disney
We decided first of all to check out Pleasure Island, so we went to the Comedy Club. This was where the night took a dip for the worse. Not saying the show wasn’t good, it was, we just had very bad service.
We only wanted to see the show and we found ourselves on a table near the stage. We were one of the first ‘groups’ to sit down. Our waitress came over and asked what we wanted to drink. Karen wasn’t feeling 100% and I don’t drink alcahol so we ordered water. I know it’s probably annoying for them but at the same time, we are entitled to sit without drinking. Well, from the second we ordered that our waitress was visably ‘off’ with us Btw, she didn’t know I was a cast member, so she was treating me as if I was a guest and her attitude was unacceptable. Anyway, when she eventually brought us the water – after making a point of serving everybody else in the room first – and I do mean everybody, more than once in some cases (and we were closest to the kitchen area), we finally managed to get her attention for two seconds. We’d seen her handing out popcorn so I asked if we could get some. I TRIED to ask if we could get it sweet not salted and she nodded abruptly, never getting closer than a metre to us while I was trying to ask quietly. Nearly ten minutes later she comes past and dumps the popcorn on our table without even looking at us as we pay and she disappears again. Of course the popcorn is salt…which was not what we wanted as we were already hot and thirsty. So we barely touched it. That kinda put a damper on the show so as soon as it was over; we left and wandered to Westside shops instead.
Karen was in the mood for a snack, and as the popcorn had been a failure we figured we’d try the Candy Cauldron.
It’s busy in there but we join the queue and try to pick what we want quickly. However, a number of things don’t have labels and being British I’m sorry but they didn’t look familiar to us. So I get the attention of the cast member behind the counter as we’re going past and ask her what the things without labels are. She fires them off in 2.3 seconds and I’m used to fast talkers but I still didn’t catch half of it. Karen and I glance at each other and she’s looking at us impatiently so we just pick two things. Karen’s one you couldn’t really see…I can’t remember what I had (chocolate something). Anyway, she bags them and hands them to us in the back and we remain in line to pay. Karen opens up the bag and peers in and says ‘I think this might have nuts in’. Now, she’s not touched it or pulled it from the bag at all at this point. We get the cast members attention again and ask her politely if this has nuts in. She shrugs ‘I don’t know’. So Karen looks again and points and says ‘I think that might be a walnut’. Again, she’s not touched it or moved it around in the bag, just peered in. The cast member goes ‘might be’. So Karen says (in her polite English way), ‘I’m sorry to be a pain but could I swap it for something else then, I’ve not touched it at all’. Bear in mind we are still in the long queue so not holding it up at all. The CM replies, in an extremely hostile tone ‘well, everything here might have nuts so if you’re allergic you can’t have anything’. Karen keeping her calm mostly from shock (while the cast member in me starts seeing red
) again apologies and says ‘it’s not that I’m allergic, it’s just that I don’t like them’. So the CM snatches it from her and throws the perfectly untouched, still bagged item in the bin (trash). Another CM sees her do it and shouts loudly ‘was there something wrong with it’, at which point the first CM snottily shouts back, across the entire shop ‘no, *she* just doesn’t want it now’. That’s when I had enough and made a mental note of her name badge. Karen and I pay and exit the shop and I walk straight for the guest services hub.
See, being a CM myself I probably even more acutely aware of how we are supposed to treat guests, especially when they haven’t actually done anything wrong and are being polite – so I was wild. Karen was just embarrassed by it all, bless her.
So I join the short line for guest services and get to the front and the nice CM asks if she can help. I say, “Hi, I’m a visiting cm and I’m sure you could help me but I would really like to talk to the manager on duty tonight directly, would that be possible’. She agrees happily and gets on the radio and calls her manager down. So we wait at the side to let her get on with her job. When the manager arrives I explain who I am, everything that’s happened, give names from both places etc and she’s horrified. She is completely in agreement with me and says that she’ll sort it. Now, as a CM I have a loyalty to other CM and I know how tough there job is and how sometimes the ‘image’ can slip (we are human), so I’m normally forgiving but I was sooooo appalled that I had to report it. I balance it though by making a point of going to GS and saying how wonderful a CM has been if they go above and beyond…so I figure that’s fair. If I’d treated guests the way we’d been treated that night I’d have been severely disciplined, so I won’t sit by and see guests treated badly by other CM either.
Anyway, trying to shake off the bad service (which, to be fair, was one of only two incidents all trip), we went window shopping
Then we headed to Disney Quest. We’d never been there before and I have to say – it is SO much fun. We loved all the retro games and laughed our heads off at the rafting. I’d have liked to do some of the other things but it was getting late and we had an early start. DQ helped save what had started as a bad evening though.
The boats had stopped running by this point so we went to get the bus instead and while we were waiting we saw a group of woman chatting. Apparently one of their party was getting married at EPCOT the next day
so we wished her good luck and headed back to the hotel…very sleepily by now.
In the winter they would ship all the animals to the FL park. Not sure whay it closed, but I was so sad it did. Six Flags bougth it and another amusement park acrss the lake and redid alot of stuff, and turned the sea world half into some wild life thing. I never did get to it, and it closed about 2 years after it opened. Now the seaworld part is completely closed, and the old amusement part was reopened by another owner.
:
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. I never would have known otherwise. We requested it and were placed in the front carriage all on our own. Our driver wasn’t particularly chatty, which was a shame because the driver he swapped with while we waited was. But oh well, we got to do it and we got our licenses. And the views are great.
