Retro Disney World Post 2007

For Halloween 2007, Julie and I were in Disney World.  TopCoder invited me to be a reviewer for the TopCoder College Championship design track.  I reviewed software component designs submitted by “college” students.  While it does say “College Championship”, “University Championship” would be more applicable, as I believe a majority of the competitors were post-graduate.  The competitors did a bunch of qualifying work for a month and a half before the competition, focused on 3 designs.  If you want to be bored, you can read the synopsis here.  I wrote the description of the Faceted Classifications design.  Fascinating stuff, I know.

Anyways, Julie and I got to go to Disney World where the “finals” were held.  We were at the Contemporary Resort, which the monorail comes right into, and I only had a couple hours of stuff to do a day, so we had plenty of free time to explore.   Our room was awesome, but it overlooked the themed restaurant about 6 or 7 floors below and every 15 minutes from 7 AM to 10 PM they sang the same song about how great it was to be at Disney World, or something like that.   Awesome.  I was singing that song for like 2 weeks after we got back.

On one of the days I finished a bit early and there was a PGA event in town, so we took a taxi over, bought some tickets and got to watch the pros golf for a few hours.  Definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip

One of the nights, TopCoder bussed everyone over to Epcot where Disney had a dessert spread and open bar set up for everyone, right on the lake where the fireworks and laser light show happens every night.  This was definitely one of the more posh events we been a part of with TopCoder.

The last day we were there, TopCoder treated all the competitors and reviewers, including Julie (thanks Jessie), to full passes to the Disney ecosystem.  We got a card that got us into everything at the resorts, including Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom and MGM.  So, to get full use of the passes, we hit everything except for MGM in one day.  We started at Animal Kingdom.  When we there, my only goal was to pet a goat, so we set out for the petting zoo.  Turns out it’s hidden in the way back of the park, so we had to walk like 6 miles and take a weird train to get there.  Once we were there, all you can really do is pet goats, but it fulfilled the goal.  On the way out, there were employees with a giant bag passing things out, so we each grabbed one.  Turns out they were passing out “Dream Passes” for the park for that day.  Each pass had little pull off tabs that took you to the front of the line on all the popular attractions, so we got to do pretty much everything at Animal Kingdom without waiting line, which was awesome!

After Animal Kingdom, we popped over to Magic Kingdom for a little while.  I had been there when I was 8, and we found it was definitely geared a little more towards younger kids than we expected.  It was still fun to do the haunted mansion and just walk around and see all the Halloween decorations.  My other goal for the day was to eat a turkey leg, and that happened at Magic Kingdom.

Finally, we took the monorail back to Epcot since it was the Food and Wine show, so there was food everywhere and we really just wanted dinner  We ended up eating Turkish food since it had the shortest line and we were dying.  It was probably one of the best meals we had all week.  We then stumbled back onto the monorail and crashed in our room for a very long time.  All in all it was a really fun “bonus” trip that we wouldn’t normally have done otherwise.