kartooner

While vis­it­ing Cal­i­for­nia my wife and I ven­tured with our daugh­ter Zoe to Dis­ney­land. At first I had my reser­va­tions about tak­ing an infant to the park con­sid­er­ing she’s just under 3 months of age, but after much thought we decided to take her and make the best of the expe­ri­ence. After­all, theme parks were orig­i­nally built to feed the imag­i­na­tions of chil­dren around the world.

A great advan­tage of hav­ing a baby at Dis­ney­land are the Switch Passes. These are sim­i­lar to Fast Passes, the only dif­fer­ence being that they assume pri­or­ity over Fast Passes and allow up to 2 peo­ple to enjoy the ride with­out the cum­ber­some lines. The the­ory is that your spouse or sig­nif­i­cant other will have to wait with the rest of the Dis­ney pop­u­la­tion and upon return­ing from the ride they can ask for a Switch Pass to allow you to beat the long lines and scurry past the rest of the crowd.

My daugh­ter enjoyed both Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Man­sion. It seemed like she found the Singing Statue heads to be the most fas­ci­nat­ing aspect of the ride as her eyes were fix­i­ated on this effect as the doom buggy con­tin­ued on it’s trek in the man­sion. When we reached the part where the buggy tilts back­wards she smiled at the cawwing raven which only tells me that she will prob­a­bly grow up enjoy­ing Haunted Man­sions and hayrides dur­ing Halloween.

After­wards we jour­neyed to the Inno­va­tions build­ing, which used to be Carousel of Progress back in the 1960’s. We were greeted by the ani­ma­tronic robot Tom Mor­row (voiced by the bril­liant Nathan Lane) and found our way into the rotat­ing building.

Inside the build­ing there are a vari­ety of hands-on tech­nol­ogy includ­ing a mod­i­fied Google engine which pre­vents access to any sites that aren’t linked to Dis­ney (odd, huh?) and a Seg­way exhibit. The Seg­way exhibit show­cased the ‘IT’ machine that appeared in 2002 as the “next big thing”. It allowed any­one after fill­ing out Seg­way release forms to ride the machine with assis­tance from a park rep­re­sen­ta­tive. I would have tried it out, how­ever Dis­ney­land only had two machines in use and the wait would have extended past 2 hours at least.

I’ll just wait until Ama­zon starts hand­ing out Seg­ways or the day when they depre­ci­ate to a more afford­able price. Sim­i­lar to those tiny scoot­ers that were released a few years back at around $200 a pop and which now sell for $20.00 or less.