The Ride Delegate: Memoir of a Walt Disney World VIP Tour Guide (18 page)

A coordinator stuck his head around the corner and called me forward. “You ready?” he asked. I moved forward, and my guests followed, all nineteen of them. Someone must have opted to sit this ride out, but I didn’t know who. I barely even knew who my guests were.

I grabbed the door and motioned for them to follow the coordinator inside. I counted, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, they all disappeared down the hallway. One of the last through turned to look at me. “Are you riding?” she asked.

“No, you girls enjoy!” They disappeared. I let the door close behind them and I leaned against the fake brick wall. Defeated. Exhausted. Demoralized.

The coordinator returned to the exit. I recognized him, but I knew him only from the name on his nametag. KYLE. “Are they, um, going to want to ride again?”

“I have no idea. I will pay you a hundred dollars to get me out of here.” I said to him.

Kyle laughed nervously. “That bad?”

“I’m serious. I will pay you a hundred dollars if you pretend you didn’t see me sneak out of here. Tell them I got sick and passed out or I was abducted by aliens, whatever. Hundred bucks.”

Kyle thought I was joking. He laughed again. “Don’t think I can do that.”

I reached into my bag and pulled out my wallet. I had the cash on me. I had more than enough cash to pay Kyle off with. I pulled out two hundred dollar bills and waved them in front of him. “Two hundred dollars to finish this tour for me. I’m serious.”

Kyle looked at the money in my hand. Guests had started exiting out of one of the Tower shafts. He swatted my hand down, to hide the money.

“I don’t think you can sell me your tour,” he whispered.

“I was never told that I couldn’t. Please.” I begged. I had never been more serious about anything in my entire life.

But wait. How did I get here? How did I end up at the exit of Tower trying to bribe the coordinator on duty into finishing my thirty-seven-person tour?

There were certain tours that carried a known connotation. As a guide I knew what I was getting into when I was assigned a three-person tour, or a tour that had every single meal planned out for them, or a tour that started late in the afternoon so they could watch the Electrical Parade from the bridge. Then there were the Middle Eastern tours. I had never done one before, but I heard the stories from other guides about tours who came to Disney World with backpacks full of cash and tried to literally buy their way onto re-rides again and again. They came with detailed security brigades and spent an abundant time shopping. I had a clear preference not to do them at one point in time, but there was nothing to save me from this tour.

Once again, I was the last tour guide available when the call came in. The tour was going to need four guides for thirty-seven guests. But, they wanted at least two female guides. So even though I was completely unneeded by the tour, I became the bonus female guide.

There were three boy guides, too. One of them was Andrew, a guide in his mid-30s who was a dad with two kids. Andrew was pretty cool. I liked Andrew. I had never done a tour with him before, but I had seen him enough in the Office and around the parks so I considered him a friend. The other two I did not consider friends. One was a boy named Thomas, who was a French international tour guide who loved the ladies and the ladies loved him. I found him to be bossy and arrogant and we never got along. The other boy was also an international, from Mexico, and his name was Carl and I could only understand him half the time. He spoke in soft, broken English mumbles and came a little too close into my personal space. This wasn’t exactly the crew I wanted to spend an entire day with.

The last thing this crew needed was a little Jewish girl from Boston.

We weren’t really given instructions for the tour. The coordinator who set it up told us that the guests were foreign dignitaries and one of them “may or may not be a princess”. We never actually figured that out. Due to Middle Eastern cultures, we also weren’t allowed to ask if any of them were a princess, or actually talk to them. They came with a security detail, and that’s who we had to relay communication through.

“Oh, also, please remind
their
security that
our
security will meet them at the entrance to the parks, to check for firearms,” the coordinator told us before we headed out. Awesome.

The five of us met at the Office at 9am. We had to pick up the guests at 10:30am, but they were staying far off property so we needed a good amount of time to get there. We all drove away in matching white 15-passenger vans, a small caravan of tired tour guides.

I was the last one out of the parking lot, and the last one to drive down I-4. I watched the white vans drive in front of me, and I tried my hardest to keep up with their speed, but driving those vans above 50mph was like driving a Dinosaur car off-road.

As I drove along a small blue bird slammed against my windshield and I screamed as it bounced off and rolled away. I have no idea if it died, but it left a small circle dust mark that I couldn’t get off with windshield fluid no matter how hard I tried. When I met the other guides at the hotel and told them about this, Thomas politely told me, “I think that’s considered a bad omen in their culture.”

The guest’s head of security met us. There were three different security members, two men and one woman. They took us into a side reception room where two things happened: 1. I was frisked by security; and 2. I was asked if I had any firearms on me. I didn’t have any firearms, but I did have at least two half-eaten granola bars in my purse.

The Woman explained to us how the day was going to go. Just like the tour coordinator had told us, we were not allowed to talk directly to the guests, and everything had to be relayed through security. The guests wanted to go to Magic Kingdom.

It wasn’t really clear how they separated the group, but some got into Hanna’s van, and some got into my van, and a few got into Thomas’ van, but no one really got into Andrew or Carl’s van. I drove to Magic Kingdom in complete silence. I pulled up into Park One and the guests started piling out, heading into the park before I had time to stop them. Hanna went running in to catch them as The Woman grabbed my arm.

“Can we get them water?” she asked.

“Yeah, of course, there’s a stand as soon as we enter.”

“Is it room-temperature?”

“Uh, the water?”

“They would like room-temperature water.”

By this point the boys had showed up with their empty vans. I turned to Andrew, who in my mind, since he was the oldest, was in charge of the tour. He was the designated dad. “Room temperature water?”

Andrew laughed. “It’s ninety degrees out. No one is stocking room temperature water.

The Woman was not pleased. “You need to find room temperature water.”

Andrew gave me a look. He glanced back at Thomas and Carl collecting their things out of the vans. “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not making any guarantees.” He waited for a second, and held out his hand, the universal tour guide sign for, “Please give me a credit card so I can purchase this ludicrous thing for you.”

I ran in behind the guests as they moved through Tomorrowland. Hanna sent me a message on my Blackberry.

Space.

I moved through the crowd, half my guests, half other guests in the park, and caught up to Hanna. “So we’re just going to put all thirty seven of them on Space?”

“I guess,” Hanna said back to me, looking over her shoulder at the parade behind us. “They’re not all riding. Did they talk to you in the car?”

“No one said anything,” I told her.

“They sort of talked to me. It’s one of their birthdays or something, so this is like the birthday present. And the men?” Hanna looked towards the half-dozen men in the group, not counting the security members and the two little boys trailing along. “They’re not allowed to ride with the women. Some cultural thing. So, if the men are riding, they have to ride separately.”

We made it to the entrance of Space. The Space greeter looked at us with wide eyes. “Uh, how many?” He asked Hanna. Hanna shrugged.

“It’ll be a surprise for all of us!” I yelled at him. Hanna went through the queue line and half of the guests followed her. The other half stayed behind and found a place to sit in the shade. I could have stayed out with them, but instead I made the choice to follow Hanna and the guests inside the building. I managed to count heads and discovered that there were twenty-seven people riding, and divide that by six, we were going to need four-and-a-half cars to get all the guests through. Hanna stood at the load area for Space, and I stood down by the exit making sure that everyone getting off knew how to get out.

Somehow Andrew made his way inside the building, and he greeted me at the exit holding a blue merchandise bag. “Water,” he said, holding it up to show me its weight. “I begged some Outdoor Foods manager to let me buy two cases of it before it went into the freezer.”

He tossed me one and I chugged half of it before the guests got off of Space. Hanna came down once the last guest had been loaded on.

“They want to have lunch somewhere,” she said to me, as I handed her room temperature water. She chugged it, too. “One of them mentioned it to me. Where the hell are we going to put thirty-seven of them?” I pulled out my phone and sent a Blackberry message to the other Cast Members in our group. It seemed to be the easiest way to communicate, since we weren’t all in the same location.

They want lunch. Where. Open to ideas.

Cosmic Rays.

Not enough money in the world for that. We’d need half the room.

Everywhere is probably booked. It’s almost lunch.

Someone call the Office. Thomas, call the Office.

We’re heading to Barnstormer.

WHY.

They want “thrill ridz”. Barnstormer. Then Thunder?

What about lunch.

Thomas, call the Office.

We’re passing Speedway. Meet us at Barnstormer.

I honestly had no idea where the other guides were. Hanna was supposedly with the majority of the group, headed to Barnstormer. Andrew was somewhere with forty-eight bottles of room temperature water. Thomas was maybe calling the Office. Carl was…somewhere.

I raced out of the Tomorrowland Arcade, which doubled as the Space merchandise shop, and ran along the pathway that led from Tomorrowland all the way to Fantasyland. Everyone riding the Speedway saw a little tour guide run, holding her black purse in one hand, half a bottle of water in the other. I wonder what they thought of me.

I managed to intercept Hanna and the guests before they made it to the Barnstormer queue. The Barnstormer area is pretty open, with both queues completely exposed to weather elements and each other. Hanna began herding them into line when I felt a tug on my vest, and I turned to see The Woman standing behind me.

“Can you clear out the line for us?” she said.

“They’re going to walk right to the front,” I said, pointing at the completely empty FastPass return line.

“The other line. Can you clear it out for us so they don’t have to walk alongside other males?”

“The…the standby line?” I stammered. I looked at Hanna standing at the FastPass entrance. She looked at me, confused.

“I don’t want them walking through that line so exposed,” The Woman said to me. “Could you clear the other line for us?”

“No,” I said, without hesitation. I motioned Hanna forward with my hand, and she entered in, the horde of guests following behind her.

“I don’t want them walking through that line!” The Woman barked at me.

There are times when I was more than willing to go above and beyond for a tour I really liked. There were certainly tours where I pushed strollers through the rain without an umbrella, or sacrificed my dinnertime to run an errand across property to replace a lost plush toy, or rode Primeval Whirl against my will. If I really liked a family I was totally willing to ride Primeval Whirl if it made the kids happy, even though I got onto that attraction every single time thinking that it might end my life.

I don’t want to say that I was culturally unaware of what was going on, but I was. No, I will admit that I didn’t have a wealth of information about Middle Eastern cultures and practices, but I knew enough to not be disrespectful. However, here I was, standing outside of Barnstormer, and the head security liaison on the tour had just asked me to clear out an entire queue line so the guests could be comfortable. That seemed disrespectful. No, that downright
was
disrespectful. I wasn’t about to go to their home and demand things to be done a certain way; they couldn’t come into my World and do the same.

“Unfortunately, there is no chance that is happening,” I told her, sternly. “There are guests in that line waiting to ride and I’m not forcing them out.”

The Woman was still not happy. She turned sharply away from me and hurried after the guests moving through the line.

Security woman wanted me to basically evac Barnstormer so the princesses could ride.

Not cool.

They still want lunch.

ugggggggghhhhh.

Called the Office. They can do The Wave. It’ll be easy. We’ll get them out after Barnstormer.

They want to ride Thunder!

I looked up at Hanna, standing at the load area of Barnstormer. She looked down at me. It was barely noon and we were already defeated.

After an unsuccessful trek from Barnstormer to Thunder, in which the guests opted to ride Splash instead, they all came back to the vans in Park One. Hanna and Andrew took the group of them across the park and back, while Thomas got the vans ready to go, and cooled down to room temperature, and Carl stood around and did nothing. I called the Contemporary and made sure they knew we were showing up in fifteen minutes with almost forty guests for lunch at The Wave. The general manager of the hotel assured me again and again that they would be ready for us.

The drive from Magic Kingdom to the Contemporary took about two minutes, and our vans pulled up at the valet and everyone filed out. One of the boys there recognized me, and came running towards my van.

“We’re eating lunch,” I called to him through the window. “Do whatever you want with the vans.”