More than 50 million people stop at Disney theme parks in Florida each year. They come for a photo shoot with an anthropomorphic rodent fairy tale princess, to marvel at the glorious pneumatic garbage system and enjoy the technicolor retreat from reality, the void. – Sealed fantasy of a marketing genius once dubbed the most magical position in the world.
But there is a specific subset of Disney park enthusiasts for whom Disney World is more of a testing ground than a refuge, a place that is more masochistic than magical.
Their goal is to ride each and every Walt Disney World ride: roller coaster, carousel, log channel, slot, centrifugal motion simulator, and revolving educational theater exhibit attraction, in all four parks, in a single day. exploitation. They are shaken, spun and soaked. They take a jungle cruise and a tough descent into a tower of terror, stop at a haunted mansion and come face-to-face with Pirates of the Caribbean, cross Space Mountain and listen to a serenade through dozens of multi-ethnic dolls making a song.
The intrepid pioneers of this challenge (your Marco Polos, your Shackletons) are a pair of middle-aged guys: an Orlando-based software engineer named Shane Lindsay and a Chicago-based photographer named Ted Tamburo.
Every year as a child, Shane Lindsay would hop into his family’s truck, with his three siblings, to drive the 17 hours from the farmlands of Indiana to Walt Disney World in Florida.
“It touched my soul,” Shane told me. The position a dream. He felt like Pinocchio on Pleasure Island or Alice in Wonderland. Returning to Indiana, he spent what seemed like the rest of the year waiting for the annual pilgrimage.
But his circle of relatives only planned to schedule one day there. So, in the days and weeks leading up to a trip, Shane would spend hours reading the multicolored data guide, as if he were preparing for an exam, absorbing each and every detail, even memorizing the menus of places to eat, systematically making plans about how to travel. could sneak in as much as imaginable. as much as is humanly imaginable on a single’s day.
“I have become obsessed with seeing each and every charm possible,” he says. “It drove my family crazy. ”
The task became trickier in the years to come. Though more Disney theme parks opened in Florida, Shane’s family would still only visit for one epic day, at the end of which, Shane would be exhilarated and exhausted, but haunted by the lingering feeling of having missed out on this or that.
Shane grew up, but never outgrew his overwhelming love for Disney World. He moved to Orlando to be closer, took his wife there on their honeymoon and read about it online in his free time. In 2009, he created a blog, Parkeology. com, dedicated to dissecting the main points of Disney theme parks, like a lepidopterist dissects butterflies.
And, nostalgia and Disney going inextricably hand in hand, he often found himself thinking back to those frenzied family trips of old.
He got to thinking: well, just how much of the parks could one experience in one day? Would it even be possible, in any meaningful sense, to do it all?
In 2013, Shane made an announcement on his blog. “We are at the beginning of another wonderful step in civilization,” he wrote. “Like the first moon landing, Parkeology will send a man into the box to make history or die in exploration. “
You may think that riding each and every attraction at Disney World turns out to be a perfectly fun way to spend the day. However, if you consider the reality, you’ll see that it’s starting to look like hell, even if it’s sprinkled with fairy dust.
Walt Disney World includes four theme parks: Magic Kingdom, Epcot World’s Science Fair, Animal Kingdom Zoological Show, the combination of all the other Hollywood studios, spread over 43 square miles, about the length of San Francisco. or two Manhattans, or 25,000 World of Disney stores. (Disneyland, California, is made up of just two theme parks side by side. ) The parks attract about 159,000 visitors, depending on the day.
At the time of writing, there are 52 rides in Disney World. Riding all of them in a single operating day requires spending up to 20 hours on one’s feet, covering a distance of up to 20 miles, much of it at a jog or run or sprint. Not in a sensible linear fashion, either, but zigging and zagging on crowded, stroller-strewn pathways from one end of a park to the other. There’s not really any time for meals, or bio breaks for that matter. And, oh yeah, it’s Central Florida, swampy and scorching and prone to sudden flooding rains, climatic conditions that’ll make anyone wish that Walt’s madcap idea for a weather-controlled future-city had come to fruition.
This is the physical component, the component that tends to attract runners and fitness junkies. One challenger I spoke to, speaking from joy and identifying as an “adventurer,” candidly compared to the challenge of hiking the Appalachian Trail and the Camino de Santiago.
It’s also a huge logistical and mathematical puzzle. Jimmy Larson, who designs missiles as part of his day job, spent 18 months compiling knowledge in a 37-page spreadsheet full of VBA scripts before his attempt. “I approached it like any other engineering problem,” he told me. “There are many imaginable solutions, but only some were viable and one of them was an optimal solution that minimized the threat of failure. “
Gaining knowledge of Google Maps, Larson wrote a program to calculate the walking distance, adding obstacles, between walks in a park. He wrote another program to get graphs of wait times for a trip during the day from a Disney vacation planning website. , as well as an application that recorded the actual time it took to complete a trip, adding entry/exit queues, compared to the displayed wait time. Created a histogram of walking or running distance between vacations.
This allowed Larson and his teammate, his brother, to simulate their day until the second. “For example, estimating that it would take two minutes to walk from the main front to the Astro Orbiter,” he explained, “we would know that it’s 0. 33 miles and that it would take 4 minutes even with a smart jogging pace.
(After all that, Larson had trouble even getting into the park because the Gogo Squeeze applesauce packets in his pockets kept on setting off the metal detector. Once through, he realized he’d left his camera and car keys at security.)
There’s even a science to opting for the day. The low season means fewer crowds, shorter wait times but also fewer opening hours. Between constant maintenance and renovation, there are only a few days a year when all the attractions are open. And then there are the pop-up crowds to contend with at special events: foodies and oenophiles at the Epcot Food and Wine Festival, horticulture enthusiasts at the Flower and Garden Festival.
The esoteric wisdom of parks, necessarily dead elsewhere, proves incredibly useful. No, not just knowing the prettiest baths in the Magic Kingdom (Rapunzel’s bath, by the way), but knowing exactly how much a popular attraction will increase wait times in the rest of the park, or knowing that a quick walk through the park to get to the souvenir shop on Main Street is less difficult than navigating the raging ocean of humanity on Main Street itself.
Like army tacticians planning an attack, challengers spend days, weeks, and months examining maps, learning the layout, looking for shortcuts, and mapping out their routes. They know about attractions that open late or close early (main street attractions, which end at 10 a. m. m. , have been the downfall of many teams). They make reconnaissance trips and repeat the adventure from one park to another.
They carry spare clothes and shoes, as well as extra layers, rain ponchos (for the relentless soaking of the Kali River rapids ride), phone battery chargers, and non-perishable food. In the case of veterinary technician Stacy Galloway, they pack precisely the replacement to buy a margarita to drink on the Gran Fiesta boat ride in Epcot’s Mexico Pavilion.
This is not to mention the necessity of mastering Disney’s Lightning Lane system, requiring competitors to be checking and rechecking their phones constantly.
Does it sound less fun now?
One challenger I spoke with compared the whole affair to “a video game come true,” another to “running a marathon looking to solve a Rubik’s cube. “Many of them described it as the hardest thing they had ever done in their career. Lives.
Kent Mullens, who has completed the challenge multiple times, described the experience to me as a kind of extended cortisol-raging anxiety attack.
“Riding the rides isn’t ‘fun’,” he says. “Every little thing is heightened. If a Cast Member doesn’t load a ride properly, that might cost you three minutes. You have anxiety over the three minutes. Or, if a family of four is spread out, blocking your path, that might delay your five seconds. But in your head, it’s, ‘GET OUT OF MY WAY.’”
And after all that, no matter how careful the plan is or how fast it is, it’s a matter of luck. In the end, each challenger is at the mercy of unpredictable attraction stops and closings, as well as the largely unknowable whims of Walt Disney World.
“We have a driving strategy, a feeding strategy, a dress strategy, a park-jumping strategy,” T-Nina Hermann, a grandmother from Indiana, told me. When we spoke, she was preparing to take on the challenge with her daughter. “I make a plan for the day. . . then I see how everything goes down the tube due to the closure of Slinky Dog. “
SHANE LINDSAY ARRIVED at Magic Kingdom shortly after 8 a. m. m. on Sunday, June 16, 2013. He was accompanied by Ted Tamburo, the co-founder of the website Parkeology, who flew in for the occasion. On Main Street in America, Walt Disney’s rosy reminiscence of the little American, the town coming to life, stretched before them: a first component of a career.
Shane and Ted met at an AOL forum in the ’90s and bonded over their shared obsession with Disney theme parks. After 18 years of online friendship, they met in person for the first time Friday night, at Epcot, in the light of the monumental golf ball of spaceship Earth. “When Shane told me what he had proposed, I said, ‘I’ll participate,'” Ted told me.
It was tough going from the outset. They were not, by their own admission, in optimal shape. Shane was recovering from a cold, and Ted was brutally dehydrated, having decided against lugging around a water bottle.
There was no question that the rides were to be endured rather than enjoyed: the wild whiplash of the Barnstormer coaster, the body-battering Primeval Whirl, the brain-blendering Mad Tea Party, the galactic upchuck generator Star Tours.
The educational tedium of Epcot was in a way the most agonizing: the six-minute Journey into Imagination, the fifteen-minute Spaceship Earth, the twenty-minute Living with the Land, and especially Ellen’s Energy Adventure, a forty-five-minute ordeal starring Ellen Degeneres and Bill Nye. (“Special effects include the feel of warm, moist swamp air,” my Walt Disney World guidebook promises. It closed, mercifully, in 2017.)
And, wouldn’t you know it, during the Kilimanjaro Safaris ride through the simulated savannah, the vehicle lingered and lingered at the real-life rhinos, who were feeling perky. Shane and Ted gritted their teeth and checked their watches as the other passengers oohed and ahhed.
At one point, Ted’s toe was horribly bloodied and bruised. It didn’t help that he and Shane had some foot phobia. “Pack this and that,” Shane said.
To all appearances, they looked miserable. And yet, they were running (well, limping hurriedly) from one attraction to another, from Magic Kingdom to Hollywood Studios, to Epcot, to Animal Kingdom, back to Hollywood Studios, back to Epcot, and through it all, back to the Magic Kingdom.
“People were telling us, ‘Hey, slow down, we’re all here to enjoy ourselves,’” Shane says. “No, we’re not here to enjoy ourselves. We’re here to actually accomplish something.”
Ted says he slightly noticed, for example, the ghosts on the Haunted Mansion attraction, or the pirates on the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. “The truth is that when you take on this challenge, you don’t pay attention to those stupid attractions. You’re on those things just urging them to go faster.
Shane’s savant-like knowledge of Disney World proved to be invaluable, and not just for figuring out the fastest exits and routes. At one point, a Cast Member wouldn’t let the pair onto a ride until they viewed the pre-show film. Shane proceeded to recite the entire show verbatim from memory. She let them on.
When Shane and Ted arrived at the joyful robotic exhibit of the 37-ride, 14. 5-hour Carousel of Progress family circle, the animatronic character “Father” in the level looked just as they felt: his head had dislocated and was hanging unnervingly. his neck.
Then it started raining. Audible thunder inside the theater.
Torrential rains caused the closure of maximum attractions. Shane and Ted still had no option to admit failure, just two races from victory. They separated from the Magic Kingdom, defeated and deflated.
“It was so hard, I remember leaving thinking I’d never try it again,” says Shane.
They had failed, but they had failed admirably, while proving it was imaginable and cementing a friendship in the process. It is possible that neither of them, they agreed, would have done what they did that day without the other.
It took them about a week to start again. They returned to the park in 2014 and reaped the benefits of the classes they learned on their first try.
They pulled into the unload station of the forty-sixth and final ride, the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train—and into the history books—at 12.40am on Sunday November 9, 2014, completing the challenge with twenty minutes to spare.
AT FIRST, SHANE and Ted doubted anyone would seriously want to replicate their feat.
“I mean, you’re running around in really hot, muggy, Florida heat,” says Shane. “You’re on your feet all day long, for 17, 18, 19 hours. You’re not eating anything, you barely have time to stop for the bathroom. It was just kind of funny that there would be other people that think that sounds appealing.”
In fact, a madness was born. Thanks to Parkeology. com and other sites, many groups have officially attempted the challenge posed through Shane and Ted: husband and wife groups, father and son groups, mother and daughter groups, brothers, sisters, more productive friends. Twenty groups would tour the parks and several more people would compete multiple times. At times it has become a spectator sport, with other people following and cheering it on via social media, and others raising money for charities.
Above all, the challenge brings together die-hard Disney fans. Many of them are annual passholders and repeat visitors, some of them are Disney bloggers or cast members. Vikki Tupay, who accepted the challenge in her seventh Try, creates and sells her own Disney accessories, such as mouse ear bows and princess hats.
Many competitors I spoke with shared stories of spouses rolling their eyes, friends and family members left perplexed, and colleagues who remain unaware of the true depth of their obsession. Even Ted had hidden his secret Disney-loving identity for much of his adult life. “I’m sort of embarrassed that, for so many years, I wanted to hide it, when in fact I should have been shouting from the rooftops,” he says.
For enthusiasts, the challenge is an opportunity to seize and immerse themselves in their passion. “Very rarely, adults with careers in many other fields, are obsessed with Disney theme parks,” Ducote says. “And even rarer are the adults who need to attempt the impossible. “
“It’s a kind of exclusive club that most ‘foreigners’ don’t understand,” says Jimmy, the missile engineer. “It’s actually great to have this network of other people who don’t wonder why I would spend literally hours on the phone with my “Brother, looking at what deserves to be his third trip of the day when he’s going to Disney World in 3 months. “
In addition to the intellectual and physical demands of the challenge, there is also an emotional element.
“The first time I finished this challenge, I cried,” Kent Mullens told me. “When you take a step back and look around, for most of those people, that’s their first and only visit to Walt Disney World in their entire lives. When you think about that, and the fact it was all started by a mouse, you just… wow.”
After Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt stood at his second-story viewing window on Main Street, bleary-eyed as he looked out at the crowd. I asked Shane if he experienced an edition of that pride as he watched those Disney fans follow in his footsteps.
“I thought I was the only guy who cared about those parks as much as I did,” he told me. “And then the internet comes along and you realize that there are, you know, millions of people who have the same weird individual likes and dislikes. We kind of opened the floodgates to all these other people who were just as crazy as we were.
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