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3. Jet lag and time changes

This brings us to sunny point number two about travel. Many of the guests at Disney theme parks aren’t from around here. They’re tourists visiting from other parks of the country/world. And what’s the most demoralizing part of a plane flight? Well, that’s debatable, but jet lag is pretty high on the list. The National Sleep Foundation believes that millions of travelers lose sleep due to jet lag each day.  A bad night’s sleep will have ripple effects for several days of your vacation. Nobody’s ever crankier than when they’re exhausted from a lack of quality sleep.

That’s only half the problem for many travelers. Someone heading from a flyover state to California is likely to struggle with time changes. The East Coast is three hours ahead of the West Coast, and you may need a full week to adjust to that. In fact, my wife moved from the Central Time Zone to the Eastern Time Zone in 2001, and she STILL occasionally gets confused about the time. A person’s internal clock sets at a young age. Even a few days in a place where the timing is different is enough to make a person grumpy. When two people are both exhausted, there’s enough friction to power the monorail.

4. It’s the heat AND the humidity

Breaking news: Anaheim, California, is hot most the year. Orlando, Florida, is as well. That’s not by happenstance. Walt Disney considered the weather when he picked the two places where he’d build America’s most famous theme parks. One was an orange grove, and the other was swampland. Both of these places are notoriously warm. The positive is that you rarely need winter clothes when you travel to a Disney theme park. You don’t even need autumnal outfits most of the time.

The negative is that is that oppressive heat does things to the human psyche. I’m speaking from experience here. The last 12 days I’ve spent at Walt Disney World, the heat index reached 100 degrees. Not coincidentally, I got cranky a lot. While park planners show tremendous forethought with their attempts to add shade whenever possible, oppressive heat is always a potential problem at Disney. And it’s the one that turns my switch from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

5. One if by land, two if by sea

The genesis of this article was an incident involving Disney transportation or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Our first two days of our most recent visit involved a comical series of misadventures involving Disney buses and boats. They were so absent during our attempted uses that they might as well have been posted on milk cartons. After one particularly heinous incident wherein a bus driver refused to transport us on what was an otherwise empty bus, I stewed for a few minutes and angrily stated, “That’s it! We’re using Uber from now on!” Almost as if they heard the threat, Disney transportation picked up from that point forward on the trip, but the larger point stands.

The opportunity cost of a Disney vacation is outrageous. Every single you spend sitting at a bus stop or boat dock is time you aren’t availing yourself of everything the parks and resorts have to offer. Waiting for transportation causes a feeling of impotency where nothing is under the control of the guest. Each passing minute where your bus fails to arrive adds to the tension. And that’s when tempers flare.

The most frustrated I’ve ever felt at a Disney theme park was at Hollywood Studios. As we waited for a bus to return us to the Contemporary, 11 different Caribbean Beach buses came and went. Seriously. Yes, we counted. I have no idea how the logistics of that work, but it was maddening to watch. The situation was magnified by the fact that we had to get back to the hotel to catch a ride on the Tragical Express, our journey to the Orlando International Airport. It was several of the factors mentioned here arising at once. Suffice to say that I wasn’t pleasant to be around at that moment…and my wife was a saint to put up with me.

The one point I want to stress here is that if you can afford to spend a few dollars per ride, Uber solves this problem completely. Out of the problems on the list that cause couples to fight, transportation is the one that’s closest to being solved.

 
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