Me and The Mouse.
by Dave
Thanks for stopping by The Mouse Blog and welcome! If you are reading this, you likely have a similar Disney addiction to the one I have been enjoying for most of my life. What we plan on doing here is writing down our thoughts about The Mouse whenever the addiction gets the best of us…so check back often.
I can not say for sure what this site may evolve into, but the vast majority of my interest in the Disney Company revolves around Walt Disney World. I can only assume the focus in the future will be there, but I certainly have no intentions of sticking to any formula. My goal here is to feed the addiction, and to hopefully offer the reader some insight and information to make the Disney Addiction even more fun, and maybe even make a trip to The Mouse more enjoyable as well.
It seems appropriate to begin this website with a brief history of me and The Mouse. I’ve been going to Walt Disney World since the mid-70’s when I was very small. I can remember the days when all there was outside the Magic Kingdom was the Disney Village, now known as the Downtown Disney Marketplace. My father would rent boats with my brother and me while the rest of the family would go shopping. Most of the time spent in Orlando was spent outside of The Mouse. The Magic Kingdom was limiting, and since we were usually there for a week, we often go to Sea World, Busch Gardens in Tampa, and spend plenty of time at the off-site hotel’s pool. Fun, but not yet an addiction.
There were essentially two major milestones that changed a love for the Magic Kingdom into a full fledged Mouse-addiction. The first was in 1982, with the opening of EPCOT Center. That gave my parents something to really enjoy, which I think was the point. Instead of rides and characters, there now was wine, food, and shopping of the highest caliber. To me as a teenager, this was entertaining once a trip, but after that I often hopped the monorail to the Magic Kingdom to hit Space Mountain and Pirates a few dozen times, usually solo. I wonder how many kids used to do that.
The next milestone was in 1988, with the opening of the Caribbean Beach Resort, the first on-site moderate resort. Those were the days before the word “moderate” was used, because there were no “value” resorts. All that existed was the monorail resorts and off-site hotels. With the Caribbean Beach, we had a terrifically themed, affordable hotel that offered all the Disney bells and whistle. Little things like the special television shows and the bus system made you feel your were “in the bubble”. In the following years, WDW did all it could to amplify this strategy, building more theme parks, more hotels, and more restaurants and bars then anyone who was there in the 1970’s could have ever dreamed possible.
Now Disney World is a total immersive experience and I can’t wait to be immersed. I’ve stayed at nearly every resort on property, or will stay there in the next 12 months, and have been on more than one Disney Cruise. Now to make matters even better, I am a DVC member. So needless to say, I’ll have plenty of photos, reviews, and opinions of this magnificent place. (Notice I didn’t use the word “magical”. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a complete shill.)