Disney Plus or Minus
I don’t know how I would rate the Disney cruise. Stephen King described writing as “refined thinking”, so maybe by the end of this post I’ll have a better idea. Let’s start with a score of 100 and adjust for what comes to mind.
No Internet Booked
I like how internet was not included. You have to buy it, and that added step should trigger a little self-awareness of what you would use it for instead of being present during a trip that already costs quite a bit per minute. If it were included, it would be used. There are too many opportunities to reach for the phone when trapped on a boat designed for children and adults who can’t objectively separate entertainment from nostalgia.
So instead I spent my micro-breaks on King’s book. There was a beautiful anecdote I’ll never forget. I read it to my wife and her eyes welled with tears, which also seemed to happen one out of every five times she saw a Disney character or a picture of her kids with one.
King and his brother were raised by a real MVP single mother. When he was 6, he started copying comics and adding his own descriptions. He showed one to his mom, and she had this amazed look on her face that lit him up. But the feeling drained when she asked him if he made up the story himself. She told him he could do better and to write one of his own.
It was a poor, abandoned mother in the 1950s no less — getting evicted, hopping cities, working jobs like pressing sheets at a laundry where the foreman handed out salt pills so they wouldn’t pass out in 110-degree heat — who got young Stephen King going. He wrote his first story about four magic animals who rode around in an old car helping out little kids.
When I finished, I gave it to my mother, who sat down in the living room, put her pocketbook on the floor beside her, and read it all at once. I could tell she liked it — she laughed in all the right places — but I couldn’t tell if that was because she liked me and wanted me to feel good or because it really was good.
“You didn’t copy this one?” she asked when she had finished. I said no, I hadn’t. She said it was good enough to be in a book. Nothing anyone has said to me since has made me feel any happier.
-Stephen King, “On Writing”
King wrote four more stories about the magic animals. His mom bought them for a quarter each to give to her sisters, and that was the first dollar made by one of the bestselling authors ever. Book defeats internet.
+1 = 101
Disney Premium/Extortion
Walt’s little family business knows how to do intellectual property. Disney likes to grab you by the balls and shove your own credit card up your anus with gusto while reveling in your gasps of exhilaration as if this were the first dip on the Space Mountain ride.
A five-day lap in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the 28-year-old Disney Magic, the oldest ship in the fleet, for two adults and two kids in a Deck 2 cabin cost a little over 7 grand. Tack on automatic and optional gratuities, a hotel night in Houston, parking in Galveston, excursion in Cozumel, on-board purchases — my kids had twice as many matching Disney outfits as days on the boat — and we’re climbing toward the $9K range.
I tend to think of money in terms of opportunity cost rather than absolute value. You could say depositing $9,000 this month in my children’s paltry 529 accounts would have been a better payoff than a boat ride with adults dressed as mice. But that hypothetical would make it tough to justify the price of any vacation, and there is ambiguity around what higher education will look like and cost in 15 years anyway.
Then again, if we had stayed at home and let the kids eat pizza and ice cream every meal and spend $9,000 at Target, they might have filed those core memories in the epic section.
-10 = 91
Daytona Dad
Spring break is too early. MTV misled us back in the day with hot chicks dancing in bikinis. In college I drove through the night with my suitemates to Daytona, Fla., and arrived at a cold, empty beach. Our single fake ID got confiscated, and we must have been the four saddest humans on the coastline that week. All I remember is eating Subway multiple times, two guys per bed, and sneaking into a club for like two minutes and managing to grind with a hot chick indeed despite wearing, coincidentally, a Winnie the Pooh Disney shirt. She might have thought I was special needs.
Here’s that shirt during spring break two years later when I made a better decision to build houses by the Mexican border:
It’s too cold in mid-March. We had to coax the kids to play for short stretches outside. The lifeguards on the cruise wore jackets at times. I had carefully packed a telescope in my carry-on after hyping my boys about seeing the moon and stars at sea. Nighttime was overcast with Chicago-level winds. The best we could do was set up the telescope by our window barely above sea level, with my little one insisting he could see Jupiter even with the cap still on the lens.
-5 = 86
Bodies in Water
The pools were heated, as they had to be. They were terrible though. There was one for small kiddies, one for big kiddies, and one for 18-and-over. All of them were narrow rectangles hosting low-energy diversion. The big kiddie pool was a peculiar sight, a bunch of motionless heads watching the big screen towering over it. My wife made me get in to supervise, and I got caught up in “Beauty and the Beast.”
At one point I realized a ton more kids had entered the pool, and it felt like a scene from a King horror novel. Everywhere I turned for space to avoid hyperventilating, there was another nasty undersized human. I would have felt more comfortable at a morgue.
Then these three freaks with goggles started sneaking along the floor and tickling complete strangers’s feet. I swear those little bony fingers crawling on my skin were more repulsive than that of a corpse. I climbed out furious and thinking I’d rather jump overboard than back in there.
-10 = 76
Pool Addendum
My 4-year-old asked me in the pool if it was OK to pee. Without analysis I pulled him out and my wife hustled him to a bathroom, where he sat with nothing coming out. Afterwards she educated me. When this question is asked, it’s too late.
I would call this retaliation against the gross kids fingering my feet, but we were swimming in it too and likely a blend of urines.
-1 = 75
Kids Detention
The poor weather and pools left a bases-loaded-no-outs jam for the indoor kids club. This was advertised as free childcare, which would dramatically change the cruise’s price-value discussion. Drop them off, party or relax with freedom from a faraway time, pick them up for ice cream, put them to bed early and exhausted.
In practice the club was run great, but it was basically sedentary activity stations and a small “Toy Story” slide. I was envisioning a padded Sky Zone-like area where they would go nuts burning energy. My kids asked to be picked up immediately and dreaded going there more than school. Really the value of kids club ended up being as a threatened punishment if they were misbehaving.
-10 = 65
Food Waste
Life revolving around meals probably applies to most cruises, but especially one where you’re trying to occupy grandparents and children. The food was fantastic. I was wondering how my children’s bodies were disposing of it when they finally announced they needed to poop seconds apart while I was brushing my teeth. I had to rush one of them to my parents’s room and block out their cacophonous Mandarin about when to give gratuities while trying to finish brushing without gagging.
Every parent can relate to those moments of singular focus on making sure your child poops. The toilet flush pressure in the cabins was as strong as the selection of proteins in the buffet line. Thus I looked fairly jacked in our family beach photo, just not summer shredded yet.
+10 = 75
Universal Marvel
There were Disney characters everywhere and accessibility to them you wouldn’t get at a theme park. Black Panther had what sounded like an authentic accent and was so sweet to every kid waiting in the picture line. My little one clammed up, but it seemed like most kids were shy. The endearing thought is some of them are still at least a bit confused about reality and can let their burgeoning imaginations win that fight. Kind of like how I wasn’t sure whether WWF wrestling was real until like age 25.
Hey if I believed Thor was real, I would be nervous meeting him too. I would be nervous meeting Chris Hemsworth.
My wife is in denial about this, but our kids have no interest in the OG Disney characters. They barely know their names and never watch their shows or movies. Otherwise it would have been pretty cool to nearly get clotheslined by Pluto at a dance party.
The best moment was when a small child dressed as Thor walked by our table, and my son casually high-fived him, which he accepted without breaking stride. I didn’t know kids this young operated like that.
+5 = 80
Big Showboat
The burden of parenting is you don’t know which imprints on the growing brain will last forever. Anyone from my generation has a Pavlovian recognition when the opening notes of “Under the Sea” or “A Whole New World” start playing. The final live theater show of the cruise reached through pre-Netflix childhoods and brought back the bangers with stunning costumes and sets.
When the opening cry of “Circle of Life” pierced the air, I’m pretty sure some millennials actually cried. For sure my wife. My kids slept through the entire performance.
In the win column, my 6-year-old made it through the fireworks on Pirate Night with happy smiles. He is super sensitive to loud sounds. After a meltdown during his first Disneyland fireworks show, he had always been quick to usher us home early from any event with pyrotechnics on the schedule, often when it was still daylight.
Disney is the only cruise line that offers fireworks at sea, and it felt like the right scene for a breakthrough.
Also in the win column, I really liked how the magician Zak Mirz set up his final trick. He talked about how it became his favorite because it’s his young daughter’s favorite, how everything changed when he became a parent, how he’s always cleaning floors amid chaos but one day the floors will be clean and the house will quiet.
Everyone knows and forgets to appreciate the fleeting moments, and it helps to hear reminders in different ways.
+10 = 90
We could keep going but this score feels about right, an A-minus that can flex as high as the temperature and interest in Disney characters go.