Days In The Park: A Year In Review

Looking around we can't help but notice how many, almost all in fact, of the blogs that we read have done end of year reviews.  Granted, we realize that ours will be a few days later than the norm at this point, but we wanted to get in on some of that action too!  

Problem is we haven't been around a year!  We haven't even been around for four months yet!!  

So in the spirit of not taking ourselves too seriously (we genuinely try not to), we thought it might be fun to take a look at where we are now and where we hope to be, and what we hope to accomplish, at the end of the first full year that we have this time in 2012, with some lessons learned this year thrown in for good measure. 

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We feel like even though we've only been around for a short time, we've already gotten to do many things we thought it would take much longer to accomplish.  We've made tons of friends, gotten to meet many of them, and participated back and forth with them in many ways.  

We truly enjoyed being able to participate with Al & Joyce and their podcast, "Tales From The Mouse House", and are definitely looking forward to doing so in the future.  

We also partnered up with Magical Mouse Radio's "Cosmic Reid's Starlight Cafe" and you can expect to hear us there from time to time as well; something we didn't even know was a possibility before we began.  

Also, something we longed to do that we got to do very early on was become personal friends with FindingMickey.com.  We've been reading their site for quite some time, and to be able to meet up with them on several occasions now, and consider them personal friends of ours, has just been amazing.  We love those guys!  It might not seem like much, but to us it was a very big deal.

It's also a time to pause, though, and think about how we can further our own work and get ourselves out there more.  We think we're fun guys, and we want you to have fun with us.  

Over the next year we really hope to begin doing some new things we're really excited about.  Some we can tell you about, and some it's not quite time yet.  We plan on adding a character's page to the site so we can document some of those hard-to-find characters that hopefully we'll catch in the coming year.  We'd also like to start doing a monthly podcast ourselves.  Our medium will continue to be the written word with photographs, but we like to dabble, so we'll see how that goes.  We'd also love to find some way to generate some video content for the website, so we're beginning to think of some fun ways to incorporate that as well.  And of course, we're always looking to form new partnerships! 

All in all, we think we have some fun things lined up.  We'd love to have each and every one of you tell someone about us!  We love our readers and want to do all that we can to keep you guys entertained. 

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Statistics!

We want to stress that the numbers really don't mean much to us.  Other than showing us that people are actually reading what we throw out there, we try not to get tied up in the numbers too much.  

That said, we thought it might be fun to post what we have so far, and see where we are this time next year!

Looking to the right there, we can see that we have 29 Google Connect Followers and 72 Facebook Fans.  We also have 392 Twitter Followers.

From a purely numerical standpoint, we started keeping stats 67 days ago (if our math is right).  We've had:

• 2596 visitors (~39 per day)
• 3559 page views (~53 per day)

Our best day so far yielded us 90 visitors and 116 page views.

Fun stuff, eh?  We love you 39 people and 53 views a day!  Should be fun to look back on this next year and see where we are.   

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Bucket List!

Website, and what we do to generate content aside, we still love just being in The Parks.  There's still so much to accomplish for ourselves!

What mountains would we like to climb in 2011?

1. Participate in (or win) a Disney Parks Blog activity or contest
2. Complete our first Vinylmation set
3. Attend Mickey's Halloween Party
4. Finally ride 'Grizzly River Run'! 
5. Participate in the "A Walk In Walt's Footsteps Tour"
6. D23 membership!
7. Attend 1 day of the D23 expo
8. Attend 2 days of the D23 expo
9. Attend ALL 3 days of the D23 expo
10. Meet a celebrity in The Park
11. Somehow, some way, be one of the first to ride Star Tours and The Little Mermaid
12. Ride the Columbia
13. Break our 'Splash Mountain' record and ride it six consecutive times without leaving our flume
14. Break our High Score on 'Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters' (Mark currently has the site high with ~750,000)

Food wise?

1. Dine at Napa Rose
2. Dine at Steakhouse 55
3. Dine at Goofy's Kitchen

 And the big three that rise above all else?

1. See the Candlelight Processional the entire way through
2. Ride in the Lilly Belle
3. Dine at Club 33

Should be simple, right?  It'll be fun to revisit this next year and see what we managed to knock off and how quickly. 

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The moral of our story?

It's time to wind this up, but we wanted to leave you with some very important lessons we learned around The Parks this year.  We hope that they will serve you well.

• Dole Whips are so, so, good.  We can't stress this enough.
• Please close your popcorn buckets when boarding 'The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror', or risk an Orville Redenbacher incident of epic proportions on the first drop.
• Going to ride 'The Matterhorn'?  Procure the services of a good chiropractor first.
• Being stuck on 'Space Mountain' is not as much fun as one might think that it is.
• Chad and Mark absolutely SHRED on Rock Band 2 in 'Innoventions'.  At least, we do as long as you choose Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69".
• Wanna see and BE seen while you're at The Park?  Sit on The Front Porch.  People won't be able to keep their eyes off of you.
• 'Captain EO' is not only fantastic 80's vintage cheese, but an excellent earthquake simulator as well!
• The caves on Tom Sawyer Island and rotund adults don't play well together.
• Getting stuck directly in front of Zurg on 'Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters' is basically god-mode for that attraction.
• Minnie Mouse wears lingerie.
• The line at 'Peter Pan'.  Seriously?!
• 'Pirates of the Caribbean' has a very distinctive... fragrance, about it.
• The Toy Story Parking Lot rules.
• Strollers are dangerous, murderous creatures.  And the people steering them aren't half-good, either.
• The 'Mission Tortilla Factory' factory was invented by the Aztecs.

And lastly, Cast Members can make or break your Day In The Park.  Let's all do our part together to ensure everyone has the most magical day they possibly can anytime we're in The Parks ourselves.

We're sure there's more we learned this year, but these stood out.  

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And with that, we've officially close the door on our 2010.  Bring on 2011!

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