839 MWG - The Venue

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Over the next few entries I intend to report on my vacation at the Mensa World Gathering at Disney World in Florida. Topics:

1. the venue,
2. the programs,
3. the people,
4. the visit with my sister.

I got a ride to the Newark airport on Thursday, the 8th, with a friend who had a meeting in Manhattan later that afternoon. I flew first class, and it was good. Arrived in Orlando at about 4 pm and took a Disney-provided bus to the Disney Coronado Springs Resort. Disney retrieved my checked bag - it mysteriously appeared in my room later that evening - just like on a cruise.

This is a map of the resort (the bright spot in the middle of the lake is from the flash):
The large orange building at the bottom left is the conference center, which also had the only restaurants (2), the bar, and a gift shop. Around the lake are clusters of buildings, which are the hotel rooms, health club, guest laundry room, etc. My room was in the orange group at top right, specifically in the square building closest to the lake, where the point of the lake sticks up at the top center.

This map makes it all look deceptively small. The conference center was itself about a quarter mile long. The route from the conference center around the lake to my room was about a half mile. When I registered and realized how far it was, I was tempted to ask for a closer room, but then realized that the walk would be good for me. With going back and forth to my room and back and forth in the conference center, I know I walked at least three miles every day, and usually at least five. Probably more.

A view across the lake, taken from the path intersection just below my building. The conference center is the building with the gray stripe to the right of the dome. To help judge the distance, the buildings are mostly three stories high.



The lake had two kinds of fish, ducks, turtles, and cormorants. I bought some animal crackers (no salt) and spent a lot of breaks feeding them. I noticed that the ducks were afraid of the turtles, the turtles were afraid of the larger fish, and the fish were afraid of the cormorants. The cormorants were afraid of me, but everybody else loved me and my animal crackers.

This shows about half of the largest swimming pool. It continues around past the fountain on the right. Water flows down the pyramid steps, and there's a long high water slide off to the right.

This is the spa at the large pool. I fell in love with it, and spent several late nights in it. The corner behind the dark-haired guy was "my" corner. It had four good strong jets that hit my back and feet, and enough light at night that I could read my book. This photo was taken early in the day, when it was often almost empty. In early evening it was packed solid with twenty-somethings, but by late night (10 or 11 pm) there'd be maybe eight people, mostly older. That was my time.

Yes, there were some flirtations, but I wasn't interested. I really DID read a book in the spa. One guy noticed I was smiling while reading a John Grisham book, and said "Careful. People watching you might think that's an especially good book." I answered, "The book's not good, but it IS inadvertently funny. Actually, it's the jets. I've got some interesting ones here." He didn't know quite how to respond to that.

The view from the balcony outside my (third floor) room. Everybody spent a lot of time outside because cell phones didn't work in the rooms. At about 10 every night (or 9, I forget, the sound called us) we could watch the fireworks from one of the Disney kingdoms just beyond the trees.

Everything was horribly expensive. A bottle of water, soda, or iced tea was $2.50. One of the restaurants was like a fast-food place, with various stations for Chinese food, soup & salad, pizza, etc. A simple bowl of fish chowder was $7. The other place was fancier, and you could expect to pay a minimum of $25 for the simplest entree.

My biggest problem was that even at the fast-food place, you couldn't get anything small, all by itself, except maybe a piece of fruit. Everything came on a platter, with three or four other things, and it was simply too much food for me all at once, and mostly I wasn't going back to the room (where there was a refrigerator) so I couldn't doggie bag it. I ended up paying like $20 for a taco, AND rice and beans AND a slice of melon AND corn bread. I'd eat the taco and the melon and throw the rest away. Very annoying.

At most Mensa gatherings, there's a hospitality room with loads of free food, and you can pretty much live on that - like subs and pizza and salads, and so on. This time, the hotel wouldn't let them bring in anything but snacks (and the only drinks allowed were coffee, tea, water, and Coke products). They had instant oatmeal packets in the morning (I scarfed up one of them every day for breakfast in my room the next morning), boiled eggs and raw cauliflower and broccoli at lunch time, and the rest was just snack stuff. And they had a LOT of that! You'd do fine if you could live on jelly beans, all kinds of candy and chocolate bars, cupcakes, pudding snacks, pretzels, potato chips, cheese crackers, granola bars, cheese puffs, pepperoni sticks, and on and on. The food committee did a fine job on snacks, given their constraints.

The first couple nights, when I walked back to my room in the dark and passed a woodsy spot, I enjoyed the frogs that would start up as I passed. There was a "baroom baroom" frog or two, several "threepit threepit" frogs, and many "treep treep" frogs. Then it occurred to me that there was something wrong. Frogs sing when no one is around. When you come close they stop. These frogs were silent when no one passed them, and started up when you got close. I tested it by sitting on a bench nearby and waiting for other people to pass. Yup. They got it backward. I forgot this was Disney. Fake frogs on motion-detectors!

But there were oodles of live unprogrammed wading birds, crickets, rabbits and lizards. I never heard any real frogs.

Next entry - the programs. The answer to the question, "What do Mensans do at a conference/convention/gathering?"