3/29There's No Crying at the Guest Relations Counter..TheyTook Me Into the Back Room!

[appleorchard]

Ohhhh... I gotta sub this..
If you got a trip to the "room" the crying MUST have been bad.

Yeah-- it was!

 

[pellegirl]

Oh I am hooked - I can't wait to read more. Also interested to read about traveling at this time of the year since we only can go during Easter week, for now at least.

 

[crathy21]

I'm in, love your writing style and looking forward to following you on this TR!

Cathy

 

[appleorchard]

I'm here! We were there from the 4th -12th at All Star Movies.

Wasn't the weather great? Unless you wanted to swim, of course--then it was not so great.

 

[tammilynne]

Hi from Texas .. looking forward to reading more!

 

[appleorchard]

I have to apologize for the lack of apostrophes in these posts. For whatever reason, they don't survive the trip from Word to the DIS, so I'm having to go back through and put them all back in. I seem to use a lot of apostrophes, too. Just wanted to let people know I do know how to use them!

 

[appleorchard]

We thought getting the YES tickets would be easy. Go to Guest Relations, pick them up and cue the magic. We had all our paperwork. But everywhere we went to try and get our YES tickets, all we heard was NO.

Because we wanted to hit the MK on our first day, we naturally started there. We love the walk from BLT to the MK. You can hear the train whistle as it comes around the corner. Space Mountain is practically in your face. And looking at all the poor people getting on and off the buses gives me a wonderfully smug feeling about not having to ride the bus.

The bag line was nice and short, but it still took us forever to get through, because Queen M packs an unbelievable stuff under the stroller. And then she never remembers that she has to take it all out so they can sort through it, piece by piece, as if they were looking for a lost diamond in a pile of trash, until she’s standing in front of the security guy. If I were a person behind her in line, I’d be highly annoyed with us. J will probably be in a stroller until she’s 21, because M needs the basket space underneath for all her stuff.

[/IMG]

The always-overpacked stroller

We finally made it, though. I handed the person behind the counter, explained what we were there for and confidently held out my hand for the tickets.

Deep down in my heart, I think I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. And guess what? It wasn’t. My guest relations person looked at the paper, then looked at the computer screen. Again. And again. Then she went and got someone else and they both looked at everything. Queen M dragged out her confirmation papers so that they could scrutinize everything in duplicate. After about 10 minutes – and Disney is the only place I ever have this kind of patience for this kind of nonsense – I finally asked if there was a problem.

Of course there was.

“Our computer says you bought two adult tickets, not one adult and one child.”

Me: “That’s not even possible. It’s the YES program, you need to take a kid with you.”

Her: “Well, that’s what the computer says. But the paper says you bought one adult and one child ticket.”

Me: “So what’s the difference? Just give me two 6-day tickets of any kind and I’ll go away and leave you alone.”


Her: “We can’t do that.”

So she looked for a while some more in the computer and then she had a brilliant idea to get rid of us.

“We don’t have those tickets here.”

After 15 minutes of flipping through computer screens, this was her final decision: they don’t have the YES tickets at the Magic Kingdom. She even highlighted, in yellow, a section on our confirmation that said we had to get the tickets at any park except the MK. In case I started to argue with her. Can’t argue with yellow highlighter.

It did say that. So I couldn’t be too upset, except that she had wasted 20 minutes of our time to tell us that.

So we trudged out through the convoluted route you have to follow to get to the monorail and up the ramp to get on the monorail and go to the TTC. I think it would be wonderful if they made it a little easier to get to the monorail. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just walk straight there?

Now, at this point, we were still happy. J might even have fallen asleep and it wasn’t quite 5 pm yet, so we had plenty of time to enjoy the park. And the whole thing was probably my fault for not reading the papers more closely.

It was with only slightly less confidence than we’d started out with an hour before that we handed our pages of paperwork to the person manning the TTC counter. And it didn’t go well from the start.

He looked in the computer, he looked at our papers, while our sense of déjà vu and doom grew with each passing moment. Then he sighed. Always a bad sign.

“I can’t find this in the computer,” he finally said.

Now we were going backwards. We went from having the wrong thing in the computer to having nothing at all.

So we explained. And he got more helpers. And we gave him even more confirmation papers. And I showed him the confirmation on my phone. And then he disappeared for 10 minutes.

“Nobody’s here who can do this right now,” he said when he finally reappeared.
“There’s only three people who know how to do this here and they’re all gone,” the other guy helpfully added.

I finally lost my mind. J was swinging on the chains, threatening to strangle herself, fall smack on her head or break the chains and throwing popcorn all over the ground at the same time. Queen M went off to indulge in her unspeakable habit at the nearest DSA.

I went into a little tirade about how we weren’t leaving without these tickets and we were wasting one of our 6 park days doing this instead of doing magical things at the magical kingdom.

“The park’s open until 9,” he said, completely unmoved. Plenty of time for magic, he seemed to think.

So I told him again about our wild goose chase that began at the MK, and he and his friend just rolled their eyes when I said they couldn’t give us the tickets at the MK. I don’t know what made them feel so superior, THEY couldn’t give us our tickets either.


But if you stand in front of someone’s window long enough, eventually they have to do something to get rid of you. He went somewhere, was gone again for a very long time and came back with two 6-day tickets.

One was a child’s YES ticket, one was an adult hopper with water parks and more added onto it. I suppose that was the only adult ticket they could find lying around. We didn’t care. We took it and ran. It was 6 o’clock and we had to get our money’s worth out of our ticket day.

Next chapter

 

[Millie12591]

Your trip report rocks!

I love your writing style and sense of humor. The title alone is worth stopping in to find out what happened.

Fun, fun!! Can't wait to read more.

 

[Mjtsmami]

Can't wait to read more!

 

[appleorchard]

Thanks all! This was not the crying trip to Guest Relations, BTW. The person who really wanted to cry was the poor guy behind the counter. He was being completely obnoxious, but I could tell he was also incredibly frustrated. I'm not sure why Disney offers this program and then makes it so hard to get the tickets!

 

[SusieBea]

You are a mess (in a good way), and I'm in! More please...

 

[appleorchard]

You are a mess (in a good way), and I'm in! More please...

That's the truth LOL!

 

[jecskc]

Loving your TR so far !! Looking forward to reading more !!

 

[appleorchard]

Why does this program keep taking out all my apostrophes?? I don't have all day to keep putting them back in lol.


Well, at least we were getting somewhere now. We had three hours of magic left and there was nothing but a monorail ride to keep us from getting to it. J loves the monorail, maybe not quite as much as she loves the princesses or Mickey's Philharmagic, for reasons I'll explain shortly, but she does really enjoy it.

But she won't sit down on it.

It doesn't matter that we have the stroller right there or that there's no one else in the car. J wants to stand. More specifically, she wants to shimmy around the pole; this drove her father nuts when he was with us on our first trip. No doubt he was worried about her future career choices. Queen M and I are more relaxed than he is, so it doesn't bother us as long as she doesn't fall on other people or get too out of control with her dancing techniques.

Since our car was empty --sensible people were eating dinner -- we let her have some fun. It's a short ride on the Express anyway.

By the time we finally got to the MK for the second time, with actual tickets in hand, we were ready to join the sensible people for dinner. We didnt make many ADRs for this trip, so we headed to Caseys. Which was also where most of the sensible people were also having dinner.

Casey's is always, in my experience, a madhouse. The first time I went with J and her parents, it was so nuts in there that I took J outside and over to watch the castle show, Celebrate a Dream. Queen M was buying the hot dogs and her DH was milling around somewhere out of my range of vision, so I just told M where I was going and not him. You can imagine what a mistake that was. You'd have thought I had a jet plane hidden somewhere and was planning to skip the country with her. You would never know I watch this kid two days a week and have never once disappeared with her in the last five years.

Casey's was just as bad tonight, but we waited it out, got a little table inside where no one ever seems to look for a seat and enjoyed eating in relative peace and quiet. We were actually getting our money's worth just out of being there.

We saw a little bit of the last Celebrate show; we never seem to see the whole thing from the start. But that was just a stop on the way to our real destination, new Fantasyland. Because it was Super Bowl Sunday, we expected the place to be deserted. That's also what Josh at Easy WDW seemed to expect.

We were all rather surprised.

It wasn't crazy mobbed, but it wasn't empty, either. We checked out Belle's little country place, but the line was 60 minutes long, and we really planned on doing it first thing on a MK day anyway. So we bagged new Fantasyland without even checking out Ariel's new digs and went to one of J's favorites, Mickey's Philharmagic.

J Rocks the Opera Glasses!

She loves the show, but what really pulls her in over and over again is the loot she gets during each show. In the form of jewels. If you sit in the front row, J has found, Ariel will toss out fake plastic jewels during her big scene that land all over your head, your seat and the floor.

It's easiest to do this in the front row because there aren't as many people sitting around you who might not appreciate fake plastic jewels raining down on their head during the show. If anyone sits around us with little kids old enough not to pick up said jewels and choke on them, we usually quietly let them in on the secret beforehand, so they know where the jewels came from. But this time, we didnt have time to let the dad next to me in on the secret before the show, because they slid in next to us at the last minute.

At the right moment in the show, Queen M let loose with the loot. J enjoyed the jewels as always, but the dad next to me is what really cracked me up. His daughter was just dumbfounded by this largess from Ariel. She kept crawling around on the floor, looking for more jewels and holding them up right in front of her dads face so he could admire them. We don't want to spell it out after the show, because we don't want J to hear us, so we were trying to tell him, in code, where they came from.

"This doesn't happen every time," I cautioned him. "Ariel only throws out jewels every once in a while. It's very special magic."

I could see this guy trying to take this in while J danced around contradicting me.

"Ariel always gives me jewels, it's always magic in the front row," she told the other little girl while they admired each others haul.

"No, not really, J, you've just been lucky," I said, trying to get the message across that this just wasn't happening without a little parental input.

He just nodded and picked up his daughter, still chattering away and trying to twist around to see if she'd missed any jewels on the floor. No chance. J never misses a jewel.

So if you're out there, sir, I can tell you plainly now; we throw the jewels when Ariel does her 3D throwing thing. It's easy to do when the kids are raptly focusing on the screen. And if you were sitting anywhere else around us and also wondered why jewels were raining on your head and admiring Disney's special effects, I'm sorry to disillusion you.

Try it sometime; there's nothing quite as magical as making magic for someone else.

Next chapter

Photobucket has decided it's too tired to resize photos right now, so i'll try and put them in later.

 

[sommergirl25]

Wasn't the weather great? Unless you wanted to swim, of course--then it was not so great.

Loved the weather! We got out and swam twice while there. I would have rather the pools been warmer but my kiddos insisted!

 

[dragonflydoll2]

Great trip so far, your J sounds so much like my DD on her first trips to Disney, hillarious!

 

[appleorchard]

Loved the weather! We got out and swam twice while there. I would have rather the pools been warmer but my kiddos insisted!

J and her mom went swimming twice, too. I put a suit on, went about two feet into the pool and came right back out. It was ridiculously cold! Of course, the sun always goes in whenever I go down to the pool, so I didn't expect much. Our next trip's in October, so should be plenty of swimming. Our last one was in August--that was TOO much swimming because it was so darn hot.

 

[appleorchard]

Great trip so far, your J sounds so much like my DD on her first trips to Disney, hillarious!

She's a very funny kid, but also very sweet-- usually. I see SoG in your signature-next year we'll stay there at least once. We don't own enough DVC points to finance all these trips! And Shades is so convenient to the Polynesian and the monorail.

 

[Enchantress01]

OMG! You rock! I love, love, love your TR; your writing style is hilarious.

You are an amazing Grandma. I wish my grandcuties lived closer to me and I can't wait to watch them discover Disney for the first time. So, I'm living vicariously through you for now.

So sorry about your first Guest Relations fiasco, but I'm so glad it worked out and you could get out of there and have some fun.

Can't wait to hear more!

 

[appleorchard]

We love our adult trips, but there's nothing like going with grandkids. They're just so darn amusing! glad you're enjoying it and hope you learn a lesson from our disaster down the road and do better than we did!