The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [45]
I promise, they have been walking in your food
Orlando roaches are huge, most clocking in a 2” long or more, they fly, they make weird noises, and they are literally everywhere that food can be found. Yes, you will see them scurry across the floor at Disney restaurants, and yes, you might find them in your resort room. The worst thing is that if you see one, there are probably dozens more hidden away, just waiting for the lights to go down so they can swarm. In the worst infestations, you can go into a kitchen, turn on the light, and the countertop will be pure black, completely covered with roaches, who will then scatter into the walls in a matter of seconds. They carry diseases, they’re hard to kill, and when you step on them green goo spills out. There is not much to love about cockroaches, as opposed to….
Love Bugs. These black and orange flying bugs are literally a bunch of little fuckers. Twice a year for about a month they swarm over Florida, covering every brightly colored surface, getting clogged in radiators and smashed on windshields, and landing on your hair, in your eyes, in your mouth, etc. Which would be gross enough except that what first appears to be one long bug is actually two bugs joined together at the crotch, fucking until death! Have fun explaining that one to your kids!
Good luck explaining this to your kids!
Brain Eating Amoebas. Yes, it sounds like something out of a bad horror movie, that doesn’t make it any less real. Naegleria fowleri is an amoeba that lives in the bottom of lakes and enters your body through the nose, where it hauls ass into the brain and proceeds to feast on your gray matter. Warmer temperatures allow it to replicate more, and it thrives in stagnant, shallow areas of a lake. Which is one of the main reasons why Disney no longer lets you swim in the beaches along Bay Lake, and is also why some think River Country was shut down. In 2007 six people died from the bacteria, and three of those deaths were in Orlando! If a single amoeba is inhaled into the nasal passages it can first cause flu-like symptoms, followed by hallucinations, and finally coma and death in as little as one day. So when the signs on the beach at The Polynesian tell you “No Swimming”, they’re not kidding around!
Naegleria fowleri look pretty, until they’re eating your brain
Chapter 4
Off-Limits Exploration
SNEAKING INTO THE UTILIDORS
It’s your fourth or fifteenth trip to Walt Disney World. You love the place dearly, but by now you’ve gone on all of the rides many times over, explored all of the resorts, and eaten at all of the best restaurants. You’ve even traveled off-site to Universal and Sea World, and maybe even to The Orlando Love Loft. You’ve done it all, and the thought of going back and doing it all again seems a bit boring for an adventurous spirit such as yourself. But yet you’re still drawn to Walt Disney World…. What to do?
This is the spot my friends and I found ourselves in back in the summer of 1995. Three guys who were born and raised in Clearwater, and who had all been to Walt Disney World more times than we could count. Hell, we used to go there on school field trips! Being total geeks, EPCOT was our favorite park, but we loved them all, and combined we’d probably made over 100 trips to each park in our lifetimes. It was a second home, and Walt Disney was our cool Uncle. But we were becoming adults, and wanted to rebel against the boredom of safety and false security Uncle Walt had provided us. We were too old to think that “It’s a Small World” was fun, but not yet old enough to enjoy it on a nostalgic level. In short, if we were to keep going back to WDW, something had to give.
And it finally did give, for the better, the summer after our freshman year at college. I’d enrolled at a prestigious private university, purposefully getting out of driving distance from my family in Florida. Newmeyer, a pudgy nerd who’d never touched a girl (much