As we walked into the Magic Kingdom on Sunday, Ben was approached by a cast member who asked him if he wanted to be a sorcerer for the Magic Kingdom. Of course he did, and so our adventure began!
If you are not familiar with what the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom is, it is an interactive game played at Walt Disney World, using maps and special trading cards that cast spells and open portals, which are located throughout Adventureland, Liberty Square and Frontierland, Main Street USA, and Fantasyland. It currently is in a soft testing phase right now, only available on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday; however Disney announced today that it will officially open sometime in late February.
We walked into the Fire House to sign up, and were asked for our room key. We received a map, 5 spell cards, and 1 key card and were instructed to wait for a training mystic portal to open, that allows you to meet Merlin the Magician who instructs you on how to play the game.
Our first adventure occurred on Main Street USA; here is the portion of the map that shows Main Street and the location of the different portals.
The key card opens the portal by holding it up to it, and you then need to make sure you are standing on the Sorcerer’s symbol on the ground, to play the game effectively.
You cast your magic spells by holding up your card to the portal. You may use more than one spell card at a time for now, but it is uncertain whether that will continue once the game is in full operation. There are currently 70 spell cards available, with more rumored to come once the game has officially launched. If you plan to play regularly, you may want to consider taking a picture of your cards with your phone (thus eliminating the need to bring them with you) or enclosing them in plastic. After you defeat the villain, you may stop playing, or follow the directions to continue playing.
What did we think? We all enjoyed playing the game, though as residents we had the luxury of being able to walk from portal location to portal location at a leisure, and wait in line for our turn. If you will be visiting Walt Disney World on vacation, you will need to consider setting aside approximately 25-40 minutes per game quest you plan on playing. We discovered it’s not as much fun to play on Main Street USA, as we were simply just going back and forth to portals; there’s no attractions to break up the walking. We observed just as many adults playing as families, and we only encountered one portal that didn’t read a spell card. Our opinion is that this game will provide a huge merchandising boon to Disney, as people will want to buy cards and accessories in the stores to maximize their playing potential.
If you have a chance to play, comment here and let us know what you think!
We passed the one year anniversary of our decision to move to Florida a couple of weeks ago, and it felt a little strange that we didn’t even think to recognize it. We now have been residents of Florida for six months, so in recognition of both anniversaries, we thought it a perfect time to update our readers on how life is progressing for us now.
We love the city of Clermont. It has everything we need within a five-to-ten minute drive, and the people here are very friendly and welcoming. I don’t believe we have encountered one rude person here yet. We love our apartment complex; it was a little unnerving when we first moved in, because we have always rented houses in Wisconsin, and were a little concerned about noise and privacy issues. However, we never hear our neighbors, so it’s totally not an issue at all. We really have embraced apartment living–we love not having the responsibility of lawn care and pool upkeep, and maintenance is extremely efficient when it comes to repair issues. The apartment is a little smaller than we’re used to, but we have plenty of room for the four of us, and when our lease is up in October, we plan to renew. We may consider purchasing a home in the future, but for the time being, we are content here.
A favorite saying of ours is “Toto, we’re not in Wisconsin anymore”. As much as we love the area, it becomes obvious that there are definitely different attitudes and experiences that are prevalent here. Some experiences are very good, such as 80 degree weather in January. What northerner wouldn’t absolutely love that! We’ve had a couple of chilly evenings (30s and 40s), and cooler days, but we’re proud to say that we have not yet turned the heat on, nor have we needed to use a winter coat.
Unfortunately, the middle school experience we have to put in the negative column of attitudes and experiences. The school Ben attended is very strict, and really not supportive of children with special needs. It was so detrimental to him that we made the decision to pull him out and homeschool him the rest of the year. It was very discouraging to us to think that all schools in Florida may be similar, but we recently learned of a middle school in Orlando that is autism-friendly, so it really gives us hope that not all schools are deficient in addressing the needs of students with special needs. We will not be able to send Ben to this school next year; it would require a three hour daily drive just to take him and pick him up, and that’s simply not feasible. We are in contact with another middle school in Clermont, and we are hopeful that it may give him a more positive school experience for seventh grade.
Another regional difference is the availability of our favorite foods. In Wisconsin we shopped at one store, Festival Foods. In Florida, we shop at five different stores: Publix, Sweetbay, Winn-Dixie, Super Target and Walmart. Each store offers something unique that the others don’t, in terms of products and specials. Prices on groceries do tend to be higher here than in Wisconsin. Our most-missed snack products from Wisconsin, apart from the variety of cheeses available in the dairy department, were bagel dip (from Festival), Baker string cheese and Johnsonville Summer Sausage. Festival Foods, bless their hearts, gave us the recipe for bagel dip, we’ve discovered certain brands of string cheese that are an acceptable substitute, and we believe we may have found a store that sells Johnsonville Summer Sausage. We will say that the Florida citrus is amazing! We’ve never cared for grapefruit, but when it’s fresh off the tree, it’s a whole new experience.
You may be wondering if we have any regrets. We need to be honest with our readers and say yes, there have been regrets. It was extremely hard to say good-bye to Nick at the airport after Christmas. We know that Ben would have had no issues with the middle school back in Wisconsin, and he would have been successful there. It’s very difficult to walk away from what is familiar, and it is very easy to look back and say “what if”.
However we wouldn’t trade the moving experience for anything in the world. Nothing can recreate the atmosphere in the car as we drove through the state of Florida towards Clermont. It was absolutely amazing. The kids are settled and happy, Ben a lot more so now that he is away from the negative school environment. Really, who suspends a child for being autistic? They have a lot more experiences here available to them: we’ve been to both the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, Walt Disney World numerous times, a Disney Cruise is in the works, as are passes to Sea World and Lego Land. It’s been amazing to meet people we’ve known only from Facebook, but meets are so hard for our son Ben that we don’t make as many of them as we’d like.
Will we consider moving back? For us, it’s not an option. We believe that when you allow it to be a possibility in your mind, you always have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. You will not make a concerted effort to acclimate yourself totally, and eventually will rationalize the move back. Will we look back on Wisconsin? Of course, we have friends and family there, and it was our life for several years. However, we are Floridians now. We embrace the Floridian life, all that it has to offer or not offer. We hope our blog provides some insight and perhaps even wisdom as to what a relocation a thousand miles away looks like, and we hope our readers know that even though our posts are now infrequent, we still welcome any questions regarding the relocation process. Thanks y’all for reading and following along!
A few days ago a FB Disney friend let me know that they had seen a comment on FB about Jen and I being ‘stand offish’ about meeting people when they visit Disney. I wanted to clear things up a bit. For those who don’t know, our youngest son Ben is autistic. For us this makes meeting people a little more difficult as part of Ben’s autism is that he struggles when he needs to ‘wait’. This is especially hard for him at his favourite place…Disney. So, we do often have to keep our meets shorter than we’d like and sometimes have to miss meets, like Lou Mongello‘s Meets of the Month, on short notice; or leave them very quickly. It also makes it harder to plan meets on a short notice as we can never tell what level Ben’s autism will be at on any given day. And we always do our best to explain why.
We do love meeting our new friends and the time we do get to spend with you all, no matter how short it may be. So, we hope you’ll understand and keep our full situation in mind if we do have to cut a meet short or cancel one; if we do it’s only for Ben’s sake.
Wishes And Pixie Dust 