YOUR AD HERE »

Mickey Mouse

Su Lum

The night my whole family arrived at our rooms in Disney World, giddy after 12 hours of travel, dinner and drinks, my daughter Hillery read aloud an eight-page letter her friend Mark Allen had dashed off the evening before.Mark is (as you will see) a big Disney fan who is from England and in real life is a detective in Leadville. He wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything, so he dashed off this missive penned in letters of increasing size. Here are some excerpts.”Sometimes you can get free passes to some of the piers around the (Epcot) lake which is incredible because you are almost part of the fireworks themselves. VERY VERY up close SAFE SAFE SAFE and personal?”REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER that if you have dinner in the Boardwalk it is walking distance to get to Epcot?”Please excuse the writing I have drank a bottle of red wine/I’m rushing/it’s 10pm/I have to get up at 04.30/then run 6 miles/then work 12 hours/while you are having a blast in Disney you buggers?”Shoot over to the little Dino Land to the SMALL SMALL SMALL roller coaster that spins, it’s the BEST BEST BEST?”The Birds of Flight you have to do, Bruce will LOVE LOVE LOVE it.From page 7, in letters half an inch high, “The BEST BEST BEST BEST BEST ride on your whole trip will be Mickey’s PhilharMagic 3-D show in the Magic Kingdom.” Of course we were rolling rolling rolling on the floor but had to get to bed bed bed so we’d be able to get up up up in the morning to follow Mark’s advice, which we did for the next five days.We got wet wet wet on the 87-foot waterfall drop on Splash Mountain – Bruce, in the seat ahead of me, ducked and Steve said I looked like a drowned mouse – and Skye and I got drenched drenched drenched on the wild river raft ride at Animal Kingdom.We went fast fast fast on Test Track (65 mph with a lot of hairy curves) and the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster (0-60 in 2.8 seconds, and loud loud loud with Aerosmith blasting in our earphones).Hillery, Skye and Riley scream scream screamed and we all laugh laugh laughed, with only an occasional bad review (the sanitized Snow White ride, for one), “well THAT sucked sucked sucked.” We had no consensus on what was the best best best best best (we rated the PhilharMagic show good good good) in the blur of rides and shows.To me the most memorable was the Tower of Terror, where you go through a ghostly, realistic cobwebby hotel, down into the boiler room and onto a freight elevator, which rises 13 stories and suddenly free-falls, falls again, then swoops up and down again. It was a sensation I’d never felt before, one that gave me a better understanding of bungee jumping, but I was limited to one ride because it almost yanked my bad shoulder out of my rotator cuff cuff cuff.Su Lum is a longtime local whose body is aching but had fun fun fun. This column appears every Wednesday Wednesday Wednesday in The Aspen Times Times Times.