Alright, It’s Dylan again, back with another post I’ve been putting off for a while. This is probably gonna be a pretty long post, so if you don’t have the time/patience to read through, I’ll give you a little summary before I start: We basically went on the best field trip known to mankind and it was pretty great. Wanna stick around now? Yeah, I thought so. Let’s get into it.

So there has been quite a bit of field trip drama this past school year surrounding PLP. We were going to go to Silicon Valley, and then that got cancelled, so then we were supposed to go to San Francisco, which also got cancelled due to a shortage of staff available to come on the trip, and it was a little chaotic. When we heard the idea about going to Florida, we were all praying nothing would happen. Months of prep went into the trip so we were really looking forward to it. The night of the trip came, and my alarm was set for 3:00 AM to wake up to get to the airport early, and I could not get to sleep. Finally, after an hour or so of tossing and turning, I dozed off, only to awake to sun shining through my window and the time on my phone saying 7:09 AM. “Dad… DAD!!!” I shouted as I realized the situation unfolding in front of me. All those months of prep, but alas, the flight had been cancelled due to weather. Turns out my dad just went and turned off my alarm to give me some extra sleep, and we ended up scoring a flight a few days later.

I’m getting ahead of myself though, I should probably explain the idea behind this field trip and the projects that went alongside it. The driving question for this project was:

“How do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors?”

The final goal of the project was to answer the driving question with a movie made as a group, a blog post, and five trend videos all revolving around Disney. This was a little confusing, as Maker and Humanities kind of blended together over the trip, and a lot of the work we did was shrouded by some amount of ambiguity. It was honestly a lot more confusing than you would have thought, but life always finds a way, and I’m back home in one piece.

The flight was a bit of a hassle since we had to be at the airport really early in the morning, and by the time we finally got on the plane, they spent two hours just de-icing the big hunk of metal. The travel took the whole day, since we had a layover in Dallas, and by the time we got to Florida, it was some ungodly hour of the night, but we were all too excited to notice. My first meal in Florida was fittingly a Big Mac, Large fries, and a Fanta, which set the stage for the size of most of the meals I would be eating at Disney. Almost all the food there was at least twice the size of the portions you would expect in Canada or anywhere else for that matter. The thing is, the food just tastes too damn good to not finish. I felt like a bear preparing for hibernation with the amount of carbs, sodium and fat I was ingesting, but good heavens, was it ever delicious.

Anyways, the days we spent in the parks were very very long. I’m pretty sure the first day was something like 17 hours in Magic Kingdom (worth every minute). A lot of the free time we had in the parks was spent filming and doing interviews, so it wasn’t all fun and games.

It was crazy, being somewhere like that on a school trip and doing work while there’s all these distractions constantly bombarding you. It was also my first time in Disney World. Disney Land doesn’t hold an unlit match, let alone a candle, to Disney World. They really know how to use all 5 senses to create an experience unlike any other.

There’s not much to talk about for the other days, they were mainly just filming, interviewing people, leaning about the history of the corporation, doing workshops, and going on rides.

That’s basically all there is. I’ll link my five trend videos and the movie that my group made at the end of this post. Thank’s for taking the time to read all 775 words of this long post and I’ll see you next time.

Dylan