Two Lost Boys Blog

Celebrating the Holidays at Disney Springs

Hello everyone,

During our Christmas trip to Walt Disney World, in December 2016, we spent some time exploring the festive offerings at Disney Springs. This year you could meet Santa/Santa Goofy, and they had added a Christmas Tree display, and a new "gift hunt". In addition to those offerings, they were also in the testing stages of the new drone technology that is widely anticipated to come to the parks soon. In order to test this new technology, Disney Springs had a nightly Christmas show over the lake.

Let's start with Stitch's Holiday Gift Hunt.

Stitch's Holiday Gift Hunt was actually a lot of fun, a cute idea, and - surprisingly - free! The idea was that you went around various locations across Disney Springs searching for Stitch, and when you found him, you would place the corresponding sticker into the little booklet. Once you had found all of the locations and placed the stickers, you could claim a free button at select locations.

















Before Christmas Day, Santa Claus was meeting at Disney Springs, and after the big day, Goofy took his place. We didn't meet Santa, but we did meet Goofy.



The Disney Springs Christmas Tree Trail was new this past season, and was a display of fifteen Disney themed Christmas Trees. While it was a nice idea, I feel, personally, that the execution of it was a little lacking in the effort department.

















The "Starbright Holidays - An Intel Collaboration" (yes, that really was its name) is the drone show I mentioned at the start of this report. We saw it once during our stay, and that was quite enough. I give them credit for utilising the expanse of the lake to test a relatively new, and potentially unreliable, technology, and using it as a way to offer a free show to guests, however, like the tree display, the execution of it was poor. Given the unquestionably epic reconstruction work that has transformed Disney Springs in recent months, the sound system there was dire; the speakers were crackling, hissing and dipping in and out more than they should have been, and then the drones themselves were actually surprisingly loud. I realise they can't necessarily do anything about the drone noise, but it was a little distracting - they sounded like an angry swarm of bees! Finally - as if those criticisms aren't already enough - none of us in our group could figure out what any of the images were supposed to be that the drones made. I barely caught a glimpse of a tree, I think, but the rest were lost on us. Complaints aside, like I said, it was a smart way to test the technology, and it was certainly interesting to see it in action, however, they have a lot of work to do before I can see this coming to the parks in any capacity.




Finally, I took this photo of some of the amazing looking treats at Amorette's Patisserie.


Ok, that's all for this report! If you want to read more about our trip to Walt Disney World, you can find all my reports over on the Character Central blog.

Have a great day everyone,

Dan.