Karli and I both enjoyed and appreciated our Disney experience, but there were times when it was more of an exercise in patience than usual.
Disneyland always requires patience - guests queue up for security, line up to get into the parks, wait in crowds for the ropes to drop, stand in line for refreshments, and wait times for rides can last hours - but that's expected, it's very much the price of doing business when you visit the Magic Kingdom.
However, we were surprised by the number of times we were forced to wait even longer due to breakdowns and delays on rides at every level of sophistication.
Over the course of our three day visit, we completed a total of 29 ride experiences, which may not sound like a lot, but it's actually a pretty good performance, given the number of people vying for seats. Out of that number, we experienced ride problems to a greater or lesser extent ten times - over a third of our total, not a very good average.
We accepted the possibility that the shorter delays might have been caused by pausing the rides in order to accommodate the transfer of mobility challenged riders into their seats or something similar, but in most cases it was obviously hardware failure - or perhaps software, in the case of the more sophisticated experiences.
Toad's Wild Ride broke down literally as we were taking our seats in the ride carriage. During the first of our three visits to Star Tours*, they announced that they were experiencing delays, and on the second, we sat in our StarSpeeder 3000 for close to fifteen minutes, without a word of explanation, until the ride finally began.
The new Web Slingers ride at Avenger's Campus stuttered without stopping, cutting short our time at the first scene, Midway Mania stopped working just as we were in the final leg of the queue, and not only did Indiana Jones have delays, but there seemed to be dead areas on the ride, places where there should have been some kind of effect but where we just bounced around in the dark. For our final trip through the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, the iconic stone globe effect completely failed to work, which rather ruined the climactic conclusion of the ride. The Haunted Mansion both stopped in its tracks and slowed to a crawl, and The Little Mermaid ride left me uncomfortably face to face with a glassy-eyed Ariel animatronic figure for a little too long.
On our last day, Smuggler's Run announced that they were experiencing delays and that they would resume service as soon as possible. Ironically, at that moment Garr, one of Ohnaka Transport's less perceptive employees, decided to publicly inform Hondo over the PA system that there was a maintenance problem with one of his ships, the kind of a problem that results from crashing into buildings - either boldly on brand or an astonishing coincidence.
Sadly, there's a very simple bottom line to all of this, and it's just that, the bottom line. Disneyland is a big machine for making money, and as such the people running the machine are probably unwilling to turn it off for maintenance if they can help it at all.
- Sid
* Star Tours has a mix-and-match system that adds up to 54 versions of the tour, which makes it a popular choice for repeat trips.
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