Disney Revealed - Walt Disney World Tips and Tricks

I will be reviewing RideMax.com in detail during our holiday trip to Walt Disney World this year. We will be at WDW from Dec 27th-Jan 3rd. I have used TourGuide Mike in the past for my trip planning and he has some wonderful ideas. It’s time to try something new and see how accurate the RideMax software is.

We are going to be at WDW during one of the busiest weeks of the year, so I’m very curious to see how the software handles our trip. Stay tuned. I will post my review in January.  Have a very Merry Christmas!!

I would like to point out that RideMax already is off on the right foot.  I ordered the software this morning and accidentally chose the Disneyland software rather than the Disney World software.  I wrote the support an email and received a response within the hour letting me know that they were crediting back my account.  Now THAT is great service.

EDIT:  We just returned from our trip and I had the stomach flu for almost the entire trip.  We didn’t make most of the parks and I will not be able to review RideMax the way that I had wanted to.  HUGE bummer to say the least.

Have you ever wanted to be celebrated as the “Person of the Year” at Walt Disney World?  SunNews7 has put up a new video that allows you to type in your name (or anyone’s name) and watch a news video that highlights that person as Disney World’s person of the year.  This would be a great treat to show your kids if you are planning a Walt Disney World vaction.

They allow you to customize the occasion as well.  You can choose from the following celebrations.

• Vacation
• Holidays
• Birthdays
• Graduation
• Wedding
• Anniversary
• and Many Others

For the example below I used the name “George Clooney”.  Notice that Goofy even says that name George at the end of the video.  You can email the video to whoever you want or save it for your blog or website.

You will almost certainly ride the Monorail if you visit Walt Disney World. The Walt Disney World Monorail operates over a span of 14.7 miles, with around 50 million Disney guests traveling on the monorail each year.

The three routes on the Walt Disney World Monorail are:

Express: Express service between the Magic Kingdom and the Transportation and Ticket Center (TTC).

Resort: Round-trip local service making stops at the Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Contemporary Resort, the Transportation and Ticket Center, Disney’s Polynesian Resort, and Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa, in that order.

Epcot: Service between the Transportation and Ticket Center and Epcot.

A spur track connects the Express and Resort lines to the maintenance shop. Another spur connects the Epcot and Express lines and is located northeast of the Transportation and Ticket Center.

Fun Facts about the Walt Disney World Monorail

Backstage at the MK (on the far northeast side of the park), there is a monorail barn. Ten of the twelve monorails spend the night in there. Why only ten? Because when the barn was built, WDW was only supposed to have a total of ten monorail trains, but two more were added out of necessity for more guest capacity. Each night, two monorail trains have a sleepover in one of the other stations, and if the temps get below freezing, they go deluxe and stay in the Contemporary’s station. Because of regularly scheduled maintenance, no two trains ever spend more than one night in a schedule rotation outside of the barn. Someday, when you’re at the MK and you have a few spare minutes, go outside the gates and turn left. Walk down the pathway under the beams toward the Contemporary, and just before you come to the intersection where North World Drive goes backstage, stop and look up. Above your head is a switch beam, which can move a train between the outer (Express or Exterior line) and inner (Resort or Lagoon line) beams. If you’re really lucky, you might witness an actual switch. While looking up, you’ll also note a spur track that goes north into the backstage area, which then continues into the barn. If you happen to have a recent property map, the Magic Kingdom area spur track and the barn are actually shown on the map, although neither is identified as such. On the Epcot line, there is another spur track to the northeast of the Ticket and Transportation Center (TTC), which connects it to the Express beam. What happens in the event that one monorail breaks down along the beam and can’t get back to barn under its own power? There are three diesel powered tractors that can pull a fully-loaded monorail into the nearest station. The passengers are dropped off there, and the tractor then moves the empty train backstage to the barn for maintenance. By the way, the monorail trains also share the barn with the WDW Railroad steam trains. The monorails occupy the upper area of the building and the steam trains have the lower area. TRIVIA: The two “extra” trains added to the fleet are Monorail Lime and Monorail Coral. The way to tell the difference between Monorails Green and Lime and Monorails Pink and Coral is by the white delta shape painted on Lime and Coral’s color identifier stripe on the side of the train.

Since 1971, total miles logged by WDW monorail trains would be equal to more than 30 round trips to the moon. One dozen new cars were put into service along the 14-mile beamway in 1990 as the original fleet received a well-deserved retirement.

Disney World Monorail Map

This list comprises of fun facts for Walt Disney World.  These facts are always fun to tell other people you’re standing in line with or impress (scare) your family with how much knowledge you have of Walt Disney World.

These facts are all compiled by Debbie H. from the Dis Boards.  She maintains a Word document that is over 150 pages long with all kinds of fun facts.  I will be posting the bulk of that information on the blog over the coming weeks.

Walt Disney World Fun Facts - General Information

(1) Go into any Park store–the CMs have stickers behind the desk. Ask them for the “I Made Magic Today” sticker. They will give you 10 Mickey stickers and 1 “I Made Magic Today” sticker. Your job is to pass out the 10 Mickey heads to people that aren’t looking so happy and make them smile w/the sticker or people that are having a great time and telling them it’s because they are so HAPPY. At the end of the 10 stickers, you end up w/your sticker, and you know that every time you look at that sticker YOU MADE MAGIC!!!

(2) Ask the bus drivers if they have any of the tradable bus cards!

(3)  WDW has over 2,000 acres of grass to mow! That’s 18 miles around the Earth’s equator! (…and Disney mows THREE times a week!)

(4) In some attractions, there are VIP lounges. If there are celebrities visiting WDW (or politicians, etc.), they can be taken into the VIP lounges. There are drinks and snacks available in the lounge, photo albums of different celebrities and people who have been in the lounge, and they get taken on to the front of the line when they are ready to ride. (If you look at Spaceship Earth from the back, there is a building attached to it with some window looking things. That’s the lounge in SE!)

(5) IF YOU ASK FOR A LARGE CUP OF ICE WATER THEY WILL GIVE IT TO YOU AT NO COST, AND YOU CAN GET AS MANY AS YOU WANT AT A TIME. (Get two when you get food or when you need something wet and cold. Drink one right way and use one to carry around so you can stay hydrated longer.) Disney won’t tell you this, but they won’t turn down your request.

(6) When leaving MK at closing time, hop on the Resort monorail and skip the massive lines heading to the TTC via the direct Monorail. The resort monorail stops at TTC but is not express. It is more relaxing as you can usually get a car to yourself and can sit. Also, no standing in line on tired feet waiting and waiting, and once you get to the TTC, it is usually between arrivals of the express monorail and there is a lull in the crowds trying to get to the trams. (Additional note: Have one person in your party drive to the Park you are going to [if you are a Resort Guest] and park for free. The rest of your party can ride the bus, boat, etc. [for the fun part of it]. Then, at the end of the night, no waiting in long lines on tired feet. Just hop in your car and go back to your resort!)

(7)  If you have a special needs child with a disorder that falls under the autistic spectrum or is hypersensitive, you can get a note from their doctor and take it to guest services. They will give you a special assistance card. When you get to an attraction, show it to the CM working there. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to wait in line, but they will try to take you into a quieter area for your wait. You can get a sample note from www.allearsnet.com.

(8) A bottle strap that you buy at the parks for cokes/water bottles works great for carrying around Pal Mickey. (Put it around his neck.)

(9) Disney World bought about 150,000 gallons of paint — enough to cover nearly 7,500 average sized homes in 2004.

(10) If you were to stack all of the buttons used by the Costuming Plant Seam Team in one year, you would have a stack 96 times taller than the height of Cinderella’s Castle.

(11) Number of trees, shrubs and flowers: more than 7 million!

(12) Daily water usage: 15 million gallons!

(13) Largest working wardrobe in the world with more than 1.5 million operational garments in use and over 7,000 different garment types. In addition, there are over 2 million pieces of entertainment costumes. Each day, the costuming plant processes between 27,000 and 31,000 garments.

(14) More than 50 million soft drinks sold annually.

(15) 10 million hamburgers, 7 million hot dogs, 9 million pounds of french fries, and 300,000 pounds of popcorn sold annually.

(16) Uses 194,871 miles of toilet tissue, 24,409 miles of paper towels, uses 319,353 lbs. of chocolate, 1.2 million pounds of watermelon, 741,150 pounds of sugar, 1.8 million pounds of flour, 245,000 pounds of fruit filling, 38,000 pounds of white icing glaze, 2.9 million pounds of eggs, 606,000 pounds of bananas, and 510,000 of grapes.

(17) Serves more than 1.5 million soft pretzels, more than 639,000 pounds of macaroni and cheese, and more than 3.8 million ballpoint pens annually.

(18) Uses more than 337,000 pencils annually, nearly 148 million sheets of recycled copier paper annually, and 730,102 gallons of bleach annually.

(19)  214,000 bandages were provided to guests during the year 2004.

(20) In 2004, Walt Disney World recycled 18,322,000 pounds of paper products.

(21) WDW uses human waste as fertilizer! They treat the waste on-property and put it to good use.

(22) In the morning (usually from around 8am-12pm) when the lines are really long to get on the monorail from TTC to MK, take the boat! The TTC boat offers wonderful views and a great breeze in about the same amount of time that the monorail would have taken to get you to MK. A great added bonus: If you get on the TTC boat at those times, Chip, Dale, and Pluto love to hang out on it! Perfect opportunity for your kids to see their first characters at DW-before they even enter the park! Not too many people on the boat either, so there are great opportunities for pictures with the characters.

(23) If you are the first family of the day to request the photo that they take of you on the ride, they will give it to you free!!

(24)  Disney merchandise that is exclusive to Disney World has a gold castle logo on the package somewhere.

(25) Ever notice there isn’t a lot of gum stuck on rides, trees, waiting areas in WDW? That’s because they don’t sell it, just for this reason.

(26) There are more than 20,000 different colors of paint used in Walt Disney World