The Ride Delegate: Memoir of a Walt Disney World VIP Tour Guide (13 page)

Often I’d find myself strolling, with a stroller, through World Showcase early in the afternoon, after just having finished up a lunch somewhere with my guests, and it was so peaceful and just
nice
. Mom and Dad would usually trail behind me, holding hands and talking to one of their children, while I entertained the one in the stroller, pointing out hidden Disney touches in the countries. I always find people describe EPCOT as the true park in the family of theme parks, because there’s so much space to spread out and just sit and enjoy the weather and maybe some gelato.

But these nice moments never lasted long. By the time we made it to Japan, little Sally would be screaming like she was being skinned alive because she had been denied a patriotic themed Minnie plush, and the peaceful idea of sauntering around World Showcase was nothing more than a passing dream. I constantly had International Cast Members judging me because it was most definitely
my
fault that I brought a shrieking child into their pavilion.

Not all of my tours involved screaming children in faux countries. A majority of my tours were actually awesome tours, and I was always sad to leave a family at the end of the day. I found it hard to bond with families I was only with for six hours, because they were focused on getting in, riding all the rides, and getting out. There was no downtime for chitchat. However, with tours that would span all day, from breakfast to fireworks, or tours that went across multiple days, it was like I had been adopted into a surrogate family. Some families insisted I eat every meal with them, because I was part of
their
family now.

I did, though, have one family who told me I reminded them of their Aspen ski instructor, but the difference between the two of us lay with the fact that I ate lunch with them that afternoon. I guess the ski instructor never did.

It was always sad leaving a family that I really liked at the valet because I never knew if I was going to see them again. Sure, we had exchanged emails and the kids had found me on Facebook, but I wondered if they would take a trip down to hang out with me again. One dad told me they only took Disney vacations every four years, and asked what was the likelihood of me still being a guide four years in the future.

“I’ll probably die here, wandering around the EPCOT parking lot, hopelessly looking for my car in the vast wasteland of pavement,” I told him. And I only lost my car once in the EPCOT parking lot, but I never forgot the traumatizing experience of that summer day.

I never saw that family again. I hope they enjoy their next tour guide just as much.

I had a handful of repeat guests who I’d see maybe twice a year, if not more. One family visited so many times that I met all of their extended relatives including half brothers, half sisters, half aunts, uncles, and one brother from dad’s third marriage who everyone treated like he was 100% blood related anyway. They were my favorite family. They were a family who insisted I eat with them for every meal, and always made sure I was riding rides with them because they hated the idea of me standing idly by waiting for them. I became friends with the teenagers, babysat the little ones while the parents went on thrill rides, and one of the pre-teens asked me how to become a tour guide because she wanted to be just like me when she grew up. She told me this as we were exiting Test Track and I know I welled up in the merchandise shop.

They were my absolute favorite family and they never handed me a wad of stickers. This was the family I loved so much I honestly didn’t want them to thank me because I felt that would have been weird. I would have hung out with this family for free. They reminded me of my own family, and how our vacations functioned as dysfunctional as possible, and I loved them for that.

Once I didn’t host them, and the mom sent me a text, asking why I wasn’t around. I apologized to her again and again, but I had another commitment that I couldn’t get out of. I assured her that another guide, just as good as I was, would step in and host them. I went so far as to ask the Office for a specific guide to host them, and the Office ignored my request and paired them with a big-mouthed, big-haired tour guide. At the conclusion of the tour the new guide complained to me that she hadn’t gotten any stickers for the two days she spent with them.

Like any good fairytale, I guess being a tour guide was all about money.

I never rode Tower of Terror. The word “terror” is right in the name; why would I subject myself to that? I don’t like heights or drops, so I’d load my guests onto the attraction and sneak into the bypass elevator and make my way down to the unload area. I could sit down there.

The bypass elevator is literally just an elevator, and I used to hit the button to go down all by myself, and then one day a rude coordinator told me that I needed a Tower Cast Member to operate the elevator and that I couldn’t wander around the building by myself. So now I waited for a Cast Member to show up to take me down to the ground floor to wait.

Off to the side I could see that there was a bellhop talking to some kids. I assumed he was trying to talk them into the ride and explain that it wasn’t as scary as everyone made it out to be. But the kids did nothing but shake their head at the bellhop. I took a step closer to them, and realized that the kids didn’t understand anything the bellhop was saying. The kids didn’t speak English.

“What’s happening?” I asked the bellhop, inserting myself into the situation.

“I think their dad is on the ride, but they can’t wait for him here.”

“What language do they speak?” The bellhop shrugged.

I looked at the little boys. One was clearly older than the other, and they held hands so they wouldn’t get separated. The older boy told me something in hurried French. I recognized the word for “father”.

“I speak a little French,” I told the bellhop. I turned to the boys. “Je parle un peu le Français.” I told them. They nodded. They had understood that.

The older boy said something hurried in French again. I didn’t understand it. I only spoke a
little
French, and I could not differentiate one word from the other. The boy kept pointing at the elevator doors behind us, and I took that to mean that their father really was on the ride, and he had told them to wait here.

But how do I say, you can’t wait here, your dad’s exiting on the ground floor?

“Um. Ton père. Premier étage!” I have never been prouder of myself in my entire life than when I pulled the word “first floor” in French out of my brain. “Premier étage!”

The boys looked at one another. The bellhop looked at me. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to tell them that their father will be on the first floor. I know like six French words, okay? Give me a sec.” I raced through my brain again. I held my hands out wide, gesturing to the themed basement area around us. “Deuxième étage. Ah! Avec moi, soirée, premier étage!”

“Nooooo.” The boy said with his little French accent.

“Avec moi! Soirée! Premier étage! Soirée!”

“Nooooooo.” The French boy said again.

“Seriously what are you telling them?” The bellhop asked.

“With me.” I pointed to myself. I pointed down to the ground. “First floor. Exit. Ton père est soirée premier étage Avec moi soirée!”

The boys looked more and more confused with every French word I butchered. They said something in French. I understood none of it, like they understood my attempt at French. I tried Googling a longer sentence on my phone, but the reception in Tower of Terror is horrible. I couldn’t get any bars. I went back to telling the boys that they could exit with me, first floor. I pointed to the elevator behind me. They shook their heads quickly.

“Oh, ça, uh…elevator. Elevator est…no…woosh!” I made dramatic hand gestures, conveying to the boys that the elevator behind us was not going to drop thirteen stories down to the ground. “Avec moi, no woosh! Avec moi, soirée, premier étage!”

Maybe the boys understood me; maybe they just wanted me to stop slaughtering their language. Either way they hesitantly took a few steps forward and peeked at the bypass elevator. The older one said something to the younger one, and then they said something to me, and we all got inside. “Bien!” I said to them once we were all inside. They nodded because they understood that word.

The elevator descended one whole flight down to the ground. We exited out the hallway and in-between the two elevator shafts. The boy’s father was waiting around the corner for them.

“Sortie!” the boy yelled to me as soon as we got down to the exit. The father came over to me and shook my hand, said something to me in French just assuming I understood fluently, and the three of them went off. “Au revoir!” they yelled.

I managed to get a bar of reception in the basement of Tower, and googled the French words I had been saying to the boys. I kept on telling them
soirée
, but soirée is not the word for exit. Sortie is. I wasn’t telling the boys to exit with me on the first floor. I was telling them to come party with me on the first floor. Soiree. A party.

Avec moi. Soirée! Premier étage. I probably scarred those poor French boys for life.

Sometimes I accidentally signed up to work overtime. It was one of those instances when the Office had sent out an email saying that they had tours to fill, and if we weren’t already scheduled to work we should pick one up for easy overtime. Okay, easy overtime. That’s something I can get on board with. I emailed the Office, and I was immediately put on a tour for the following week. Two days before the tour I was sent an email regarding the tour from one of the coordinators at the Office. The tour seemed easy enough. Nine guests, six hours in Magic Kingdom.

The day before the tour I was at the gym when I got an email. I read it quickly on a treadmill, skimming the words for tour details. One detail stuck out. “Wheelchair.” The dad was in a wheelchair. Honestly, the information didn’t faze me. I had done plenty of tours before where one of the guests had been in either a wheelchair or an ECV due to mobility issues. It wouldn’t be the first time I had handled it, and it wouldn’t be the last.

I showed up at the Office the morning of the tour right around 8am, with my iced coffee in hand and my sunglasses on my head. I breezed in and began my morning pre-tour rituals of getting my car, getting my keys, getting more coffee, when from somewhere in a cubicle I heard someone call, “IS THAT ANNIE?”

I moved towards the sound of the voice. It was the coordinator who had assigned me the tour. She pulled me into her cubicle space.

“So your tour today,” she starts. “It might be challenging.”

“You emailed me yesterday about the wheelchair, it’s perfectly fine. I’ve had plenty of guests in wheelchairs before.”

“Dad is a non-transferable.”

“What?” The word was one I recognized, but her phrasing didn’t make sense.

“Dad. Non-transferable.”

“He’s in a wheelchair.”

“Yeah, and he can’t transfer out of it.”

I started at this coordinator. Slowly I was putting the pieces together, but this coordinator took me for stupid and explained it to me anyway. “He can’t get out of his wheelchair, Annie. You’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that.”

“You couldn’t have told me this yesterday? Or two days ago?”

“I thought you would have called in.”

“I wouldn’t have called in. I’m not a guide like
that
.” Sometimes if guides heard that their tour was going to be difficult, or wouldn’t tip, they’d call in. It was kind of a low blow.

The coordinator didn’t seem to hear anything I was saying. She went about deleting emails from her inbox. “I think he was active military or something? I only talked to the mom and she didn’t say. He doesn’t have any legs.”

This wasn’t a big issue, honestly. It was just a super rude move on the coordinator’s part to drop it on me at 8:17am when I have to meet the guests at 9am. I would have liked to actually prepare for a tour like this. Yes, I know the attractions at Magic Kingdom are wheelchair accessible, but it would have been nice to refresh my memory so I knew quickly off the top of my head which ones we could or couldn’t do today. But something like that would have been too much trouble for that coordinator.

I drove to Magic Kingdom and chugged a diet coke as I went.

The family was supposed to meet me at 9am on the steps of City Hall and I saw them coming from a mile away. They were dressed in bright blue t-shirts and I asked why they hadn’t brought me one.

“We’ve got some back at the room!” Mom excitedly told me as she introduced the family. She had me meet her two children (who told me they designed the t-shirts themselves), then her parents, then her husband’s parents, and then her husband’s brother. Lastly, I met her husband, Dad, who was confined to a wheelchair. He didn’t have legs, and he also didn’t have a right arm. Instead, he had a prosthetic hand that he used to maneuver his motorized wheelchair around. He wore a backwards baseball hat and shook my hand with his able hand.

“Today’s going to be a great day!” He smiled.

I realized it was at this point I had one of two options to carry out the tour. I could either drastically tiptoe around the fact that Dad was in a wheelchair and needed to be assisted onto every ride (and then assisted off, of course), or I could ask him, straight up, what he could and couldn’t do so we could work together to make it the best day ever. I went with the second option.

“What do you and do you not feel comfortable riding?” I asked him as we made our way down Main Street. It really wasn’t my decision what he could and couldn’t ride; it was completely up to him. No, I couldn’t physically assist him in or out of any ride vehicles, but I could help him with every other aspect of the day.

“Nothing that goes upside down,” Dad laughed. “I want to ride everything else.”

Challenge: accepted.

We went to Fantasyland first; the boys were young and I knew the quicker we could get in and out of that land the better. The wheelchair was bulky, and as the day grew more and more crowded I knew it might pose a problem navigating through crowds with such a large group. We headed for “small world” first. As we turned the corner down the wheelchair entrance, I could see the wheelchair boat three away from the dock. It was like a sign from the heavens.