Several months ago Jess and I went down to Walt Disney World using the passes I bought at the beginning of the year and spent the day at Epcot, the best Disney park EVER. The fireworks, the culture, figment…. it’s just COOL!

Disney runs a hydroponics facility at Epcot (in The Land) that they use to provide food for some of the restaurants in the park. There is a behind the scenes tour you can take where they go a little more in-depth on some of the methods they use to grow the plants, and at the end they’ll give you a little paper that explains how you can set up your own mini-hydroponics at home. Unfortunately when I moved I lost my copy.

After a few months of looking through various boxes and stacks of papers that I still need to deal with in my apartment I gave up on finding it. I guess a bear ate it or something. I figured perhaps Disney might be able to send me another one, so I filled out the little ‘contact us’ form they have on their web page. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t really expecting a reply. However, I saw this in my inbox this morning.

Thank you for your interest in Disney’s Horticulture at the Walt Disney World Resort. We are always pleased when a guest takes special interest in our landscapes. I have enclosed a few pieces of information for your reference. Hydroponics is a really neat system of growing different crops-and The Land at Epcot is a great example of what hydroponics is all about. Basil, beans, broccoli, mint, peppers, strawberries, and tomatoes are all plants commonly grown hydroponically.

In addition to the enclosed information, you may want to check out the websites listed below (these websites are not endorsed by Walt Disney World(r)).
www.howtohydroponics.com
www.growingedge.com

I hope this information is helpful to you. Please feel free to contact me at the phone number or e-mail address listed below if you have any other questions about Disney’s Horticulture.

Happy Gardening!

WDW Disney Gardener
(phone and email snipped)

Attached to the email was a PDF copy of the original paper I had misplaced.

How completely awesome is that?

Thursday Jess and I headed down to Disney to make use of the last day of our four-day passes. Our destination: Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Since the park was open until 8 (and honestly, DAK isn’t that large of a park) we didn’t leave the apartment until 10 or so, arriving at the park right around one.

I made Jess go down the slides in The Boneyard where I used to work. She didn’t seem entirely thrilled about having to do it, but she got me back by getting me soaked on the water ride.

It was a pretty fun day, though! We hit all the major stuff we wanted to, had some pretty yummy food, and made it back home around 11 pm or so.

Friday (Happy explosion day!) we met David, Alice, Brandon, and Jessica – who I will try to consistently refer to here as Jessica so as to avoid confusion with Jess – at the Orange Park Mall. After a yummy lunch in the mall’s food court, we all trekked over to the theater to see Get Smart. The movie was surprisingly good!

Jess and I hung out for a bit that evening, and then I went back to the apartment and listened to things blow up in the area… until 2 AM.

Saturday we hijacked Jess’ mom’s truck and helped move a desk into my parents’ house that my boss happened to be ditching. Also worked on packing up what little bit of stuff I still have left at my parents’ house – now it’s just all in various boxes that are scattered around my apartment.

You’ll probably notice that I did a fair bit of driving throughout the weekend so far – Disney is probably about a 300 mile round trip, and the other two days I drove at least 50 miles. Not so Sunday! I didn’t get up until sometime after 10-11, and I didn’t get out of bed until after 1. It was nice to just lay there half-awake for a while, then pull the laptop over and fuss around with it a bit. Other than some laundry and an interesting attempt at cooking eggs and bacon, it was a fairly lazy day. I almost got away with not having to drive anywhere at all except for a trip to Jess’ house. I definitely love going over there, but ugh – sometimes I just really, really don’t feel like driving. Anywhere.

Now that the weekend is over (I still can’t believe all four days have already come and gone), I have to get busy finishing moving in to the apartment. I’m having people over for dinner Friday!

Our target this time? The Magic Kingdom.

This is probably gonna be a somewhat long post, so click the link below for more!

So! We got up about 8:00 or so and hit the highway to Disney, after a quick breakfast at McDonalds. We wound up getting to the park about noon, so we decided to take care of the important stuff first.

Lunch!

After a fairly yummy panini at Pinocchio’s Village Haus, we decided to head on over to Pirates of the Carribean, since we both wanted to see the changes that had been made in the ride to tie it in with the movie. Honestly, I was both happy and disappointed with it. They added a very cool intro with Davey Jones, and there were some very realistic looking Jack Sparrow animatronic figures added to the ride, but the way they went about it just seemed kinda lackluster to me. All Disney attractions, from Space Mountain to the Haunted Mansion, tell a story. With Pirates the story is about an invasion, pillaging, and burning of a town, and the additions that Disney made just… don’t flow with it. You see the pirates looking for Jack Sparrow, you see all the old animatronics that tell the old story, then at the end you see Jack Sparrow sitting in the treasure room, singing. They could have done a much better job.

Also, the dude who used flash photography through the entire ride was about to get smacked in the back of the head.

One of the other attractions that had been recently reworked that I was looking forward to seeing was the Haunted Mansion. I think that Disney did a far better job with this one, both in the amount of the reworking as well as making it flow with the existing animatronics. They did some neat things like changing the head in the crystal ball to be a head in a floating crystal ball (I seriously need to find out how they did that.), as well as adding an Escher-esque room with footprints tromping up and down glowing staircases. The attic was also completely reworked; there is an entirely new bride animatronic that speaks to the guests, holding a gleaming axe and not at all hiding the fact that she killed her husband. I kinda miss the old bride, but the new one definitely looks far better.

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but the Timekeeper attraction in Tomorrowland was finally removed. Sadness!

But holy crap. The attraction that replaced it is almost worth the loss. It’s called the Monster Laugh Floor, featuring some of the cast from the movie Monsters, Inc., and it’s simply amazing. The audience comes in for a comedy show, with the comedians being animated monsters on a screen on the front – but the voice acting is all done live, so the comedians can interact with (and tease) audience members. It was absolutely amazing.

We finished out the day with a trip to Space Mountain – or rather, a wait in line while we waited for them to fix Space Mountain. Still, it’s an awesome roller coaster, and well worth the wait.

Three parks down, one more to go!

It used to be Disney-MGM studios; I have no clue when they changed the name.

Anyway! The day was a blast. I’d only hit a few major attractions back when I used to work for Disney, and Jess had never been to that park at all, so a good bit of it was fresh and new for us. Jess loved Tower of Terror, and I got to see her geek out over the Star Tours stuff.

Jess also had my camera and went somewhat nuts with it. Pictures soon!

On a more somber note: As we were driving down, we witnessed a car accident. In the close lane on the other side of the freeway ( headed back towards town ) a car just randomly cut a hard left – at freeway speed, mind you – and plunged nosefirst into the guardrail. It hit with enough momentem that it slid off the rail and continued back the way it was originally headed for a short bit.

The timing was such that I drove through the flying debris from the wreck, and if the guardrail hadn’t been there, it would have been us that the car had hit.

I don’t think that’s a memory that will be fading any time soon.