Going to Disney World seems to just be what you have to do. Never mind the money.
Sooner or later, 99.9% of parents seem do this for their kids, regardless of how much your family has bought into the whole princess thing or not. (We have not.) I think my poor First Daughter (FD) is honestly the last kid her age in the UP to get there, and she’s always been very gracious about it. Which made us feel even more like we had to do this—and since she’s 13 now we wondered if the window was closing. Second Daughter (SD) is 5, and she has no idea what it’s all about. It’s just another fun experience.
Anyway, I went into this thing with my skepticism on 11, but shortly after we booked our trip and hit the credit cards, we received our MagicBands™—with each one actually printed with one of our names. Yipes. Does Disney do this for all of the gazillion MagicBands people use? Yes, yes, they do. It was just the first indication that maybe we were going to get our money’s worth.
The second big clue for me was the utterly gonzo, new-style Mickey Mouse cartoons they showed on the shuttle bus. I have never had any patience for lame old MM. No personality, and never amusing in the least. But these new cutting-edge toonz? They. Are. Hilarious and awesome. What’s happened to them over at Disney?
Our second morning we had breakfast with Stitch (SD had been afraid he’d steal her breakfast) and learned about their Mickey Mouse-shaped waffles being available in vegan form, AKA, the non-gluten version. Wow. Okay, this is gonna work out fine.
So anyway, and the reason for this post, we checked out Dole Whip, first in Adventure Land (twice) and then in Epcot. Over the course of 24 hours, we bought the stuff three times, in larger and larger portions. It is amazing. Most sources say it’s vegan, and allegedly it’s just frozen pineapple pureed to perfection, but, boy howdy is it good. It’s only available at theme parks, apparently, so if you want it in the real world, you have to make it. Or try, anyway.
We found a plausible recipe on the internet, and I opened up the frozen bag of Dole pineapple chunks and set to work, trying to coax our standard blender into doing the deed. Adding water in a stream, as per recipe, resulted in nobody-knows-but-me how many little bits of pineapple are now forever stuck to the kitchen ceiling. As everyone else finished dinner, I ran a nerve-wracking race, trying to generate Dole whip before I caught the inevitable bouquet of burning blender motor. It wasn’t bad in the end—a bit stringy—though next time I’d use pineapple juice instead of water to make it sweeter.
We’re just going to have to go back to Disneyworld, dammit.
