Travel: mars 2003 Archives

Disney has released a new toy for guests of the Walt Disney World park, an interactive pal :-

--- Material from Disney press release:

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- He’s the ultimate insider at Walt Disney World Resort, a cheerful friend who helps enhance a theme park visit with timesaving tips and fun facts. Who is he? Pal Mickey!

Pal Mickey is a talking, huggable Mickey Mouse toy that shares timesaving tips, fun facts and jokes while guests visit the four Walt Disney World theme parks in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

"It's almost time for the parade!" Pal Mickey says. "We better hurry if we wanna see it!"

Available for rental or purchase at WDW beginning in April, Pal Mickey enhances a theme park visit by:

* recommending theme park attractions
* offering reminders about parades and show times
* sharing stories
* playing games
* helping locate Disney characters in the parks

The interactive toy will be available to all guests as a daily rental for $8 per day plus tax and a refundable deposit, or as a $46.94 purchase plus tax at merchandise locations in each of the Walt Disney World resort hotels starting in April.

Pal Mickey will be offered at select locations in Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom beginning in May.

Copyright 2003. THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY.

---

A picture of th critter can be found here!

We have some new projects going together with Umeå University and the Interactive Institute in Umeå, so I will be traveling to Umeå quite a few times in the future and my first trip between Luleå and Umeå was last Tuesday. I took the bus down and I took the chance to try out their new business class. They had transformed the last 5 (?) rows on the second floor into 3 three rows with 3 larger chairs (very comfortable), a 220V power outlet for your laptop, free headphones for the movie, free coffee/the, free sandwich and very good service. The price for the upgrade was 80 SEK, about 9 USD. I was all alone in this section which added for extra peace (the rest of the bus was almost full). The extra money was well worth it (as if it was I personally paying anyhow ;-) The business class is available on bus 100 Luleå - Sundsvall. More info on Länstrafiken Norrbotten.

There is tons of information about Walt Disney World on the net (somebody wrote that the two travel sites in the world with the most information is Walt Disney World and Las Vegas) and a couple of days ago I got a tip to check out Waltopia. It contains among many other things Walt's last movie where he presents his vision of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow - EPCOT. The movie is very interesting to watch even if you aren't interested in details about Disney as it presents a real vision (not too many of those around these days) of how people might live. It is 24 minutes long. After watching the movie head over to the EPCOT survival page for a view of what parts of the vision exists today.

During February 2003, we spent two weeks in Hurghada, Egypt on vacation and I finally put my travel report online. We also have 379 photos from the vacation online as well the rest of our photo album. Unfortunately, this wasn't out best vacation and I cannot really recommend Hurghada to anybody!