Mousefest 2006 - Epcot and the Mega Mouse March

Friendships

One thing I wanted to get more pictures of this trip are the "Friendships", these boats travel the waters of Cresent Lake, and the World Showcase Lagoon, as well as the canal connecting them, and the canal to the Disney-MGM Studios. I've done a page on some of the other ships of Walt Disney World and it has been one of the most responded to pages in the section of my site that deals with the history of Walt Disney World. The Friendships are all have similar names ranging from Friendship I to Friendship VIII. Over the past few Mousefests I had gotten several great photos of these ships (including the 2005 fest for which the pictures still have not been posted). I began to realize looking back at these photos that one of the details of these ships are that they each have thier own paint scheme, so, I knew I wanted to get a lot of photos of these this trip it really didn't take long for me to occasionally, stop, focus and shoot, but like all the other things in my trip from the brunch at the ball until I got to the Mega Mouse Meet this is one of the things that just added up in the time passing. Still, here's the fruit of that labor (eventually this information below will end up in the History of WDW side of the site)...

I'm gonna borrow here, from Lou Mongello of WDW Trivia and do a "Did You Know"... Did You know that there are eight almost identical ships that ply the waters of the World Showcase Lagoon, Crescent Lake (of the Boardwalk and Beach Club area), and the Canal from the Studios to the Swan and Dolphin. These eight ships are known as "Friendships" and have almost Identical names too from "Friendship I" to "Friendship VIII", despite having almost identical names design and function they have a few Individual characteristics to tell them apart, first off the easiest way to tell them apart is the obvious one, if you are looking at the sten of the ships there is a huge nameplate with the name of the individual ship, also there is a much smaller inscription of the ships name on the "front hood" just below the base of the Windshield, but if you really want to be the ultimate Disney geek you can tell them apart even from a distance and from the side ...how you may ask? well they each have thier own Paint Scheme, all following the same pattern, but with a different set of colors for each ship the main body of all of the Friendships is white, they then have an accent color for the roof stripes, and a second accent color for the trim around the windows (this color also continues as stripes across the "front hood" of the ship), these two colors are then repeated as a pair of stripes around the boat, the upper wider stripe matches the roof color and the lower "pinstripe" matches the window trim.

As I got closer to the Dolphin I saw another ship docked there, in addition to the Friendships. As I got closer I saw that it looks like it possibly has a bar on board. Under its name you can also see that it says Walt Disney World Swan Walt Disney World Dolphin, so I'm guessing that rather than being owned (and rented out) by Disney it belongs to the Starwood hotel group that owns those two hotels.