Park-Hopping
In which the reader is asked to keep their hands and feet inside the article at all times. This series explores my time in theme parks.
We left the on-ramp and joined the highway. There was traffic. Lots of it. As we drove, I could see massive spires along the road. They were from rides at other theme parks, and they looked like minarets for futuristic houses of worship.
Weekends are the peak time for residents and tourists alike to make their way to the theme parks of central Florida. City planners and park property managers must have done everything they can to make the commute as intuitive as possible for its guests. Traffic still clogs the asphalt arteries leading to our destination: Universal Orlando Resort.
We slid off the highway and inched towards the massive parking complex. From a distance, the 4-story parking lot looked as though it had been abandoned for centuries. Brutalist concrete pillars were decorated with lavish greenery. It gave the whole thing an appearance of overgrown decay, but with well-kept hedges, like a dystopia but where landscapers were the only survivors.
We approached the gate outside the structure. A row of 10 parking attendant booths fortified the entrance. Their occupants checked IDs and tickets like border guards. My girlfriend drove to the booth furthest on the right; there were no cars there. We pulled up to the “guard” and made light of the fact that no other cars had made their way over to this lane.
“I know. I was happy about that”, said the attendant.
We laughed along, then realized what he said, and sat in silence until he gave us back our papers. We pulled ahead as other cars followed behind us; this attendant’s workday had officially begun. We hadn’t even parked, and we’d already felt like we had ruined someone’s morning.
We made our way into the faux-decrepit parking lot. Employees in orange vests shepherded cars to numbered spots like cattle into stables. Having parked in “Cat-In-The-Hat” section, we exited our car and were instantly assaulted by a PA system. Kazoos and slide whistles blasted us with their Seuss-esque cartoonish jingles as we prepared for the day ahead.
The zany music and camouflaged buildings serve as one of the many reminders for guests to holster their day-to-day understandings of reality. As the name implies, theme parks present guests with themes. Specifically, they offer themed environments, which result in themed merchandise and, perhaps most importantly, themed experiences and themed memories. From the moment a guest’s car shifts from D to P, theme parks fire up the entourage of sensations, all of which are committed to the playful illusion within their walls.
What exactly is the illusion? It’s hard to pin down. Intellectualized minds have filled thousands of pages exploring the relationship between guests and the themed environments they explore.
Only, the intellectualized minds rarely find their way inside the parks they create.
There’s an informal term in the travel and tourism industry known as “Vacation Brain”. Because guests are often on vacation while in a theme park, some customer-facing employees argue that a guest’s priorities become skewed, causing their critical-thinking faculties to evaporate. This is what workers claim causes people to show up to a place like Disneyworld and then ask where they can meet Harry Potter.
I can’t say with any certainty whether Vacation Brain is a real thing, but I can say with certainty that kazoos and slide whistles perfectly underscored my surroundings outside the park’s gates. Nothing could have better served as the soundtrack to the chaotic scenes unfolding in front of me. A couple bickered over which souvenir cup to bring inside the park; the cup was chosen after the boyfriend gave each a good sniff to determine which one smelled the best. A mother laid her newborn in an empty parking spot to change their diaper. One of the orange vest shepherds asked guests politely yet firmly to not walk in the lane of oncoming traffic. Is this Vacation Brain, playing out in these travel-sized tourist interactions?
Whether it’s Vacation Brain or old-fashioned sensory overload, priorities definitely become simplified in a theme park. This is why everything has a price, an arrow, or a distance marker. Get to the thing, it’s x miles away. Eat the thing. It costs y dollars. Guests need arrows and beacons - iconographical crumbs that lead them to the meatier chunks of indulgence.
We found our crumbs, which were overhead signs with arrows marked “Attractions”. We joined the masses heading for the gates.
I’m excited that you have decided to explore these pictures and where they were taken with me. If you would like to know more about this project, check out this article. If you would like to share a photo that matters to you, please do so through the link below. The link to join the mailing list is below that.
Cheers,
NS