As you have probably worked out, last night’s entry finally reached your computers this afternoon. I am sorry about that, I simply couldn’t get to the website. It works here, so all is well again.
It seems like ages ago. This is today, and another world completely.
We are in Disneyland.
We have eaten so much that we can barely waddle.
Everything we could eat was included in our complementary booking. I can only imagine that the Disney Corporation had no idea just how much that might be.
Goodness, it was a lot, really a very lot. Three courses and a bottle of wine at lunch, then the same again this evening. We have eaten steak and prawns and pasta and chicken and potatoes and every sort of pudding imaginable, especially tonight, where the puddings were on a buffet. We are all feeling very uncomfortable and after a few minutes careful consideration, decided to go to bed instead of to the fireworks. We are in our bedroom now, groaning occasionally and trying not to make any inessential movements.
It is magnificent and glorious. We love Disneyland with a happy passion. Oliver likes the rides, but none of the rest of us mind very much, we just like wandering about admiring the way things are done and looking at interesting things. The Main Street USA has got the shops on it, and the names of the shopkeepers in the windows are really names of Disney animators.
Of course we did go on rides. We went on the Indiana Jones Ride, which we didn’t realise until the last moment had a loop-the-loop roller coaster on it, so I had to shut my eyes. We went on the Haunted Mansion and the Thunder Mountain and the Small World. A person once tried to sue Disney when it broke down and he was stuck on it for forty minutes, he said the song caused him brain damage. It was thrown out of court but you can see why he thought he might have had a case.
Lucy is sixteen now, so she is not scared of the dragon in the cave under the castle any more. We laughed a lot about her long-ago little girl fears, until she reminded us that they were largely caused by our pretending to throw her over the wall to it because we said she looked delicious.
The queues were not too bad, and in any case our booking had fastpasses with it, but we like the queues just as much as the rides. We have got a variety of tiresome games that we play in queues, most of which are violent, and all of which make us laugh a lot, we are not good people to stand next to. The children next to us were captivated by the slapping game, and would have had a go themselves had it not been for their mother’s pacifist intervention.
Oliver likes the maze best. I like everything. I like our bedroom very much, it has fresh roses in it and somebody kindly left us a chocolate on our pillows, which we ate despite being so full of dinner we had struggled to get through the door.
The hotel is the most beautiful place, we have been here before and love it more than I have got words to tell you. We arrived this morning, singing loud Disney songs along with a CD brought for the purpose, emptied our car on to a luggage trolley, and then abandoned the lot. Somebody parked our car and somebody else brought our luggage to our room. We just buzzed off and went to play in Disneyland.
There is a lot more security than there used to be. We had to walk through a scanner, and so did all of our bags. There are security guards all around the hotel door, it is like trying to catch an aeroplane. It was as friendly and chirpy as Disney always is, but a bit grim and scary anyway, because everybody knows that Disneyland has been named as terrorist target, probably by somebody who has been listening to the Small World song.
There weren’t any terrorists today. There was gorgeous sunshine and hundreds of happily milling about people, especially us. We have become freckled and sunburned as well as stuffed with food and drunk. We are looking forward to being asleep.
We are having the best holiday imaginable.
See you tomorrow.
