I love Disneyland and just took my kids there for the umpteenth time.  So we did the submarine ride and got in a line for the Matterhorn and I accidentally bumped my iPhone screen where the email button is and next thing I knew I’d downloaded 140 emails that I didn’t really feel like reading on vacation.  But I was stuck in a line so I thought maybe I would just clean up the mailbox by deleting things that didn’t require a lot of reading or replying.  I get pretty engrossed in this and have marked nearly 100 messages for deletion when I’m surprised that it is time to board the toboggan car.  I climb in with my five-year old and get our seatbelts sorted out but I don’t want to quit the email app until I’ve finished, so I’m holding the iPhone carefully as the ride begins and am feverishly trying to delete these 100 messages while we’re on the ramp up to the top.  But I don’t quite make it and off we go down the Matterhorn and I am desperately clutching the iPhone – this thing is my life and any moment my life could go flying into the abyss!  My kid is slamming into me and I’m being tossed left and right and I can’t use my arms to brace or hold on because I have to hold both my child and the iPhone.  I’m getting pounded around all the way down the mountain, scared I’m going to lose the dang phone; this is perhaps the most terrified I have been on a theme park ride.  However, it’s only the second-weirdest experience using a mobile app that I know about.  My favorite is still Jason Ford’s story about a Sprint customer putting their phone in a plastic baggie so they could keep playing a game in the shower.  I’m crazy but not that crazy.

Then we go to ride the carousel and we get very lucky – the live band from the Mary Poppins’ movie, the scene where the characters ride horses off a carousel into a horse race – actually gets on the carousel with us.  I’m really thrilled by this special moment because we find a horse on the outside that goes up and down that is immediately following the band – we are literally imitating in real life the scene from the film.  But my son is grumpy throughout the ride.  It later develops that he wanted a certain horse and a little girl had beaten him to it.  He was apoplectic and I could not talk him down from the ledge.  So we had to then wait one entire ride cycle to get to be first in line for yet another ride where I could then outrace the other parents to make sure he got the horse he wanted.  If I were to ask him in 20 years about the time we got to ride in the horserace from Mary Poppins, I am sure he’d only say, “All I remember is that girl stole my horse”.  Ah, parenting!

I then enjoyed the hilarious irony of the Pinocchio ride that features Pleasure Island – a place where self-indulgent adolescents go to overindulge and are turned into overstuffed herbivores.  I wonder if Disneyland realizes they are doing a parody of themselves?