Travel Tips Nobody Asked For.

If you love It’s a Small World like I love It’s a Small World (which is a lot), then you will want to try this little travel hack you won’t read about on any of the deep, deep Disney forums that tell you how to optimize every moment of your visit.  Thanks, AJ, for your thirty minute YouTube rundown of the best cupcakes all Disney World has to offer, but what I need is a strategy for repeatedly enjoying the best ride ever made, a craft project come to life and the closest five-year-old me was getting to international travel, and I’d like to revel in it away from the huffy judgment of my legendary amusement park cowardice, dished out by my family members.   

Lucky for you, I have that strategy and I’m here to pass it on.

First, plan to be in the Magic Kingdom in the evening, around fireworks time.

When everyone else is scoping out their spots for the fireworks, go to It’s a Small World.

There will be little to no line.

There will be just a few families squeezing in one last ride before finding Grandma by her spot near the trash cans at Space Mountain.

The attendants will look at you curiously and ask if you know it’s almost fireworks time.  

Meet their gaze.  Level a husky, single-word reply of “yes” as you sink luxuriantly into your almost-surely-empty boat, cool and aloof as a murderous heiress escaping to Venice.

Enjoy the ride.

When you circle back out the other side, you will find there is absolutely nobody left riding, just a flotilla of empty gondolas bobbing in the two-inch waves and the teenage attendent you left standing dazed and dubious on the dock moments before.  Just beyond the tick-tock jumble of numbers and clock faces at the entrance, you will hear the blare of the fireworks soundtrack, and the Oohs and Aahs of the poor suckers who don’t know that anything Mary Blair drew is always going to be better than fire explosions in the sky.  

Now’s when you go in for the kill.  Now’s when the simple beauty of this plan tumbles into your la, like diamonds from the trench coat pockets of a murderous heiress escaping to Venice but also pulling off a diamond heist on her way.  Now’s when you astonish that young man in the sherbet vest, whose back is to you as he extends an automatic hand to open the exit gate, because if he doesn’t move his neck he can almost see the fireworks. 

Now’s when you say, “Can I stay on the boat and ride again?”

He won’t want to betray his awe at such an unprecedented power move, so he’ll simply shrug and say sure as he lets the gate clang shut and signals to the kid down the way that they’ve got a live one on board.

Now is when it really happens.

Now is when you are the absolute only person riding It’s a Small World.  

You won, Charlie.

You can take pictures and no strangers’ shadowy butts or pointing fingers will besmirch them.

You can trail your hand in the water and ripple all the lucky pennies, except you won’t, because you’re not entirely sure you wouldn’t be electrocuted.  

You can completely relax into the only ride at Disney World that never stoked the banked embers of your constant childhood anxiety into flames of abject panic. Flames! Like the fake flames in the Pirates of the Caribbean; how would we possibly know if there was a real fire?  Not to mention all the fake gunfire, and how easy it would be for anyone, say, a murderous heiress, to plant real bullets and then escape to Venice,

You’re mentally miles away from the terrifying middle seat of the Haunted Mansion Doombuggy that turns you into a skeleton.  A skeleton! Forced to confront your own mortality, sandwiched between your parents, who are just pissed that they spent all this money on Disney, forgoing international travel, and here you are crying, again.  You recall that existential meltdown, so thorough in its hysteria that no amount of Dole Whip could fix it, years later, when you come across that story every teenager knows about Jim Morrison and the soul of the dying man, but you don’t yet possess the mental faculties of discernment to know that Jim Morrison was kind of a fuckboy.  You have at least figured out that the skeleton was just a mirror.

All that’s behind you.  Now you’ve achieved what you’ve dreamed of since you were a kid: neverending rides through It’s a Small World, with nobody around to make fun of you for crying at every other ride.  At last, you’re completely and utterly alone in a dark, damp, and winding labyrinth filled with the echoes of wide-eyed dolls singing together and dancing in unison. 

You’ve got no cares in the world.