June 2007

Bright and Early

I usually seem to awakened fairly early when on vacation at Walt Disney World, and this morning was no exception I woke up around 5:30 AM and immediately started testing microphone, even as I went up the street to get coffee, there was a coffee maker in the room, but I prefer to hit a convenience store, just to get out of the room and into the morning air, especially since I tend to wake up well before Carlene. First I tested out the binaural microphone set and I discovered that just as in the few recordings that had survived from the previous day one channel was really strong and the other weak or quiet, not dead, it just seemed like perhaps I had two microphones of different sensitivities, so I started testing out other microphones I experimented with a pair of lapel microphones and a headphone splitter used in reverse so each microphone would feed one channel but the sound wasn't that great (they were two different models, so I think the channels were still uneven) and there was a huge mass of extra cord. So I pulled out my old, larger, hand held, powered microphone (I also have a non powered one but I had left it at home), it worked but I had left the wind screen I usually use with it at home and I haven't had a good microphone stand clamp for it since the last one broke, I would have tracked one down before the trip but I hadn't anticipated using this microphone, I like attaching it to my tripod collapsed to it's smallest size and holding on to the tripod rather than the microphone itself to cut down on that clumping thumping noise you often get handling a microphone, still it ended up being the best compromise and ended up working fairly well me for the remainder of the trip. While I had been testing microphones Carlene had been slowly waking up, actually I had probably speeded the process up by locking myself out of the room ...twice, while testing microphone set ups, and fetching a few things from the car, outside. So she had to keep getting out of bed to let me in, so soon enough she got enough coffee in her to get her eyes open and before you knew it she was taking me to the park to drop me off, this trip was only very loosely planned and the loss of the audio from the previous day helped to cement what quickly became the new plan. I had really enjoyed collecting sounds for the podcast the previous day so since I had lost most of the sounds of the previous day the obvious thing to do was to go back and do it again, concentrating on the parks with the greatest quantity of live entertainment.

By the time we got to the guest drop off (same location at the Taxi Stand), at the end of the Ticket and Transportation Center closest to the Polynesian Village resort it was still over half an hour until the park opened (closer to an hour I think), so this gave me an opportunity to look for the canoe I had looked for briefly the day before.

One of the neat things about this morning walk was getting out on the paths around the resort before many guests were out, those guests who were up were probably off getting breakfast somewhere. When I got out to the beach there was a cast member riding a riding mower sized tractor that was dragging a large rake that was "combing' the sands of the resort, making things pretty. Some years ago I remember seeing an episode of Walt Disney World inside/out where they interviewed someone who does this job, though this was quite obviously a different cast member, later I saw another CM doing the same thing at the Grand Floridian.