Wednesday morning never had a solid plan made out in advance. There was something scheduled, yes; the rental car would need to be returned to Orlando Airport at 12 noon. Aside from that, we were left to our own devices. What would we do? Where would we go? With limited time and no interest in spending serious money, that is a query that can be difficult to answer on the not so mean streets of Orlando. Prices are high for entertainment round those parts; living proof that competition doesn’t always mean the consumer wins. We settled ultimately on mini-golf, a truly red-blooded American endeavour. Orlando has no shortage of potential outlets to play mini-golf, however we decided that we wanted to go do pay money to play a course that would be kept up and not suck. We also didn’t want to pay for parking. That all pointed us in the direction of Disney World.
Fantasia Gardens Mini Golf is situated right between the Swan and Dolphin resorts on Walt Disney World property. The location is in a somewhat ignored corner of the kingdom set next to some empty picnic pavilions or something. It was Disney’s first course on site – Winter Summerland at Blizzard Beach came 3 years later – and features two distinctly different experiences. We played the Gardens course way back in 2003 together; there’s characters, sounds are made when putts go in, it is colorful and interesting. The Fairways, meanwhile, a radically different approach to mini golf. Holes are long – some in excess of 100 ft, with hole in ones being extremely rare and par 4 and 5 holes being the norm. There are no windmills, drawbridges, loops, or enormous ramps. There’s just rocks and turf.
We played 17 of the 18 holes (we skipped one because of a slow family ahead of us) and hey. its a decent course. One thing we didn’t like was that all of the water hazards on the course had basically been shut off, left dry, or had rocks put up to prevent balls from going in them. There’s “sand traps” but they exist as nothing but differently colored astroturf that isn’t much different than many mini golf attractions in the world have. The hole design of course is quite ingenious, however, Disney’s decision to force “tee times”, while well intended, doesn’t really work in properly spacing groups between adults and slower moving families on a course such as this. Still, I’m happy to have played it at long last, and it may have convinced Meredith enough about her skill level (having beaten me for the god knows how many-th time) where she’d be willing to try a pitch and putt with me. One thing I’d like to see in the future is some better maintenance here, with more attention put on things like water features and theming to ensure it keeps operational.
(We had breakfast that morning before our round at a nearby Perkins, which we miss here in Michigan deeply. This location featured a gentleman making balloon animals. There’s not much more I can say about this, though our food was good and of reasonable value)
Driving back to the airport was a bit of an adventure. Even with an hour or so of time from Walt Disney World, we only arrived 2 minutes before our scheduled return time for the vehicle. Traffic was just crap; at this point people were back to work and…wait, it was 11:30AM on a Wednesday. OK, scratch that. It was tourists. I think. A short distance away once in the terminal was the Magical Express check in desk, and we were whisked away before we could blink to a waiting bus for our journey to Port Canaveral.
Like the other Mears-operated buses used for Walt Disney World’s variant of Mickey’s Magical Express, these buses feature flip down LCD screens and a video that runs for the entirety of the roughly one hour journey. As is the case at Disney World, you are subject to viewing costume characters bound around and doing fun things on the ship, preparing you mentally for what is to come and getting children hyped as fuck to see cartoon characters. But unlike the Magical Express, the ride keeps going once they run out of material. I mean, you are travelling clear to the coast. And that means filler in the form of cartoon shorts and America’s Funniest Home Videos clips. Maybe it was foreshadowing that aboard this well maintained, astonishingly well decorated bus, we were to arrive to our luxurious cruise vessel sync’ed with fat people falling down or getting hit in the genitals with a missile.
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