Grand Floridian

As one of the biggest fans of my blogs I am not shy about peppering myself with things I'd like to see me write about.

"Hey." I write. "Let's hear some stories about your trip to Disney World."

Or

"Do you have any funny Scrabble stories?"

Or

"Write a blog post about me."

Well, as the bible's unauthorized sequel says:

Ask and ye shall receive.

Or, in everyday American English that we can actually understand:

Ask and you could receive if you're one of the first ten callers.

Despite its contemporary nature, the second of these is actually quite a bit closer to the original Koine Greek it was written in, or I don't know my Koine Greek!

Of course, my willingness to respond to my requests does not apply to the one for funny Scrabble stories because I don't have any funny Scrabble stories. So ask all you like but nothing is happening there. Fortunately I do have lots of Disney World stories, so let's go with that, which, conveniently takes care of the third request as well.

It was my wife and I's third day at the Magic Kingdom, and in the mid afternoon our crowd batteries were running low, so we decided to pop out and cruise the monorail in order to investigate some of the super swanky, near Disney resorts and maybe see about lunch somewhere.

We had crossed the beautiful Seven Seas Lagoon on the wonderful ferry boat to Magic Kingdom many times now, and always, off to our left, was the giant resort wonderland of the Grand Floridian, beckoning to me and suggesting that if we were just corporate lawyers, or people with marvelous trust funds, or willing to forgo our next two-week European vacation, we could be staying there, for only 800 dollars a night. What I am saying is that I felt the longings when I looked over at it. I wondered how piercing my longings might be. I wondered if my longings were justified.

So we rode the monorail to The Grand Floridian. It looks just like the Hotel Del Coronado, a grand hotel of its own out on the beach somewhere near San Diego.  I hung out on that hotel's beach once with three very nice people I no longer know. How long ago? Well, one of them told me about how lasers were going to change our lives. They did! So, it was back at the dawn of lasers. I'm just saying my associations were positive, and ancient.

We got off the monorail and wandered around the Grand Floridian. It had a Disney shop that sold mostly the same things in other Disney shops, only with more Princess dresses, very fancy Princess dresses. It had a lot of well reviewed restaurants that were closed. It had a stand trying to sell some Disney vacation program. It was a simulacrum of waspish gentility, but it didn't seem like a very good one. Why? 

Here is the trick with Disney. It's very fun when it does a good enough simulation of something very far away and fantasy like, like Pirate town, or the African Savanna, but it can just seem sort of sad when it's running a simulation of, say, what a nice hotel in Florida might be, in Florida.

So, jilted and judgmental, I hated the Grand Floridian. And, just as I decided to hate The Grand Floridian, while walking into the main, grand atrium, we looked down on the ground and saw one enormous cockroach.

It was great.