When Walt Disney World opened in Orlando, Fla., in 1971, my parents wasted no time in taking my sister Nancy and me, and our best friend, Carolyn. We stayed in the Contemporary Resort, took the monorail to the Magic Kingdom, and could not imagine anything better.
Universal Studios Florida debuted in 1990 and I showed up soon after to check it out - this time pushing my own little boys in a stroller, and meeting Carolyn and her son at the gate. We spent a lot of time in Fievel's Playland.
Today, the original versions of the two destinations seem like relics of a distant era. Disney World now has five parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM, Animal Kingdom and Downtown Disney) and 22 resort hotels with a total of 25,000 rooms. Universal has three amusement areas (Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure and Citywalk) and can house 2,400 guests in its three hotels. Carolyn and I have boys in college and my younger son, 16, is past the playground stage, but fortunately I have a 6-year-old daughter - a late addition to the clan - who gave us the perfect excuse to plan a trip and see what's new at the Orlando theme parks.
Here's what we found on our recent visit:
Walt Disney World
From my boring, adult point of view, one of the best updates to Disney World is the 8,500 value-priced rooms, mostly in four resorts: All-Star Music, All-Star Movies, All-Star Sports and Pop Century. With the Magic Your Way program, you can build a week of lodging and park admission for a family of four for less than $1,600.
Though our four-person room in the Pop Century was fine, especially for $79 a night, if I went back I'd spring for one of the new poolside Family Suites at the All-Star Sports Resort (from $169). These sleep six and have microwaves, fridges and flat-screen televisions. Another option is the Disney Vacation Club, time-share condominiums you can take by the night when available. My mother-in-law recently bunked at DVC's Old Key West and raved about it.
Take the money saved on lodging and get ready to blow it.
In addition to all the usual ways to spend a fortune at Disney, there's now a Princess Tea Party where your little sweetheart gets to dine one-on-one with a princess at the elegant Grand Floridian Resort. The not-so-sweet price is $225, but it does include a doll, wand and tiara.
Visitors can't leave without seeing a performance of Cirque du Soleil in the Downtown Disney shopping, dining and nightlife complex. Cirque is the most beautiful and amazing spectacle I've ever witnessed and is definitely worth the $95 ticket. (That's the most expensive price level, but a great view means a lot here.) Next door is DisneyQuest, a vast playground of high-tech amusements that young gamers can disappear into for hours for $36. Parents can park themselves at the House of Blues across the way with an order of Voodoo Shrimp and a cold beer.
In addition to the tea party, my daughter, Jane, loved the Lion King, Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast musical shows. "It's a Small World" won her heart as it did mine in 1971.
Although she thought the new Finding Nemo attractions were pretty cool, she was much more impressed with Soarin' - a simulated aerial ride over California, including vistas of Yosemite National Park and Napa Valley, encounters with hang-gliders and hot-air balloons, and sudden fragrances of pine forest, orange grove and the sea. This attraction, like the other big-kid rides, including Expedition Everest, Tower of Terror and the Aerosmith Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, can have very long lines, so we took advantage of the FastPass option, which gives riders tickets to return at a specific time. FastPass is free and available on most rides. Whew.
Visitors to Disney this year have a chance to participate in the Year of a Million Dreams. The park is selecting 1 million visitors to win a variety of prizes ranging from Mickey Mouse ears to a ride in one of the parades to a night in the fancy new room at Cinderella's Castle. Other "dream" rewards include admission to a special event, such as Epcot's Party for the Senses, a $125-a-ticket wine and food sampling.
Winners are selected at random by their time and location in the park. For example, on Oct. 28 at 11:30 a.m., the winner was whoever sat in a certain seat on the Star Wars ride at MGM. It happened to be Angie Berdar, 26, of Gaithersburg. She was given two tickets for Party for the Senses.
"It was absolutely wonderful," she says. "There were chefs from all over the world, a performance by Cirque du Soleil and great wines." While she and her uncle enjoyed the spread, the others in her group were given FastPasses for the evening.
However, the glass slipper doesn't always fit so nicely. That same day, Tom Beall of Ellicott City was tapped on his way out of the Dumbo ride with his granddaughter. Three Disney employees tried to tell him he was a prize winner, but Beall was sure they were selling him a timeshare.
Finally convinced, he was taken off to fill out a pile of tax forms and claim his tickets to the party. Describing himself as "a retired Department of Defense, screw-top wine kind of guy," Beall was not as delighted by the event as Berdar. "They dropped the wife and I off with these heavy totebags full of gifts and we couldn't find a place to sit for a long time."
Visitors may or may not get tapped for a dream, but one thing they can count on at Disney is great fireworks. The evening sparks at Magic Kingdom and Epcot are better than ever. The Epcot show - featuring the song "Let There Be Peace On Earth" and witnessed by vacationers from all over the world with upturned faces reflecting the lights in the sky - actually brought tears to my eyes.
Universal Orlando
Universal has no lodging to compete with Disney's value resorts in price, but that's intentional: their goal is to be the super-plush theme park alternative. The most luxurious of their three Loews hotels is the Portofino Bay (from $299). Modeled after an Italian seaside village, it has made the Top 100 Hotels in the United States in Conde Nast Traveller and Travel+Leisure ratings. Portofino Bay's charms include Italian food so delicious that the Mama Della's restaurant serves a clientele that's 40 percent Orlando residents. There's also a pool surrounded by sugar sand and sporting a waterslide modeled on a Roman aqueduct, with lifeguards who run children's activities every half hour.
As much as we enjoyed the Portofino, I'm sure we would have been just as happy at the Hard Rock Hotel (from $254) or the Royal Pacific Resort (from $239), the latter is a mini South Seas island designed for total kid-friendliness. If I had a few more days, I would have loved to exercise our pool-hopping privileges - the Hard Rock's pool has music piped in underwater and the Royal Pacific's is practically a water park. Also very alluring at the Royal Pacific was Emeril's Tchoup Chop Asian restaurant. The hotel has a lounge outside its main dining room where kids can eat, watch TV and hang out - an idea whose time has come.
The best thing about Universal's hotels from the kids' point of view is the room key. Just by showing their keys, guests at any of the resorts receive no-wait admission on all rides. For my teenage son, Vince, this meant he could go on some of his favorite new attractions - the pitch-black, spine-tingling Revenge of the Mummy ride, the Dueling Dragons and Hulk roller coasters, and the state-of-the-art Spiderman 3D experience - over and over. I think he rode the Dragons six times. Though many of the rides in Islands of Adventure build Universal's reputation as the edgy, older-kids theme park, one of the most enchanting parts of my daughter's Orlando experience was Seuss Landing, where guests can take a trolley through the setting of If I Ran the Zoo, ride a Lorax on the carousel, or pose for pictures with the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat.
She also loved seeing her favorite Nickelodeon characters in the Jimmy Neutron ride, and all of us gave thumbs-up to the adorable Shrek 4D. Though Jane has yet to see the film E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, that ride won her heart completely (though the veterans in the group were sad to see that the bicycle-type conveyances have been replaced with standard, multi-bench cars). She also dragged us onto the water rides in Toon Lagoon, where we got soaked. Definitely bring a bathing suit and a towel.
Universal's parallel to Downtown Disney is CityWalk - a dining, nightlife and shopping area. In June, Blue Man Group will open a permanent show here. In the meantime, I spent about an hour at the Quiet Flight store watching helpful salesgirls assist Vince as he tried on snowboarding beanies.
See, the future is arriving everywhere you look. Not so many years from now, Carolyn and I will probably be visiting these beloved parks with our grandchildren. By then, Disney will probably take up most of Central Florida and Universal's rides will be in 6D.