The Disney Frontier Blog

I’m hope that by writing about this, I feel better about the incident.

On Sunday afternoon, we ducked into the Aladdin show at the Imperial Theatre in Disney’s California Adventure to avoid the rain. As usual, it was a great show, and with my two year old sleeping on my shoulder, my wife, four year old daughter and I exited to find our stroller. I looked for it where I left it, and realized that the cast members had moved all the strollers to a designated area. We looked and looked. After about 10 minutes, all the strollers had been claimed and ours was missing.

My wife and I spoke to show cast members and were told it could have been taken accidently by someone else or possibly stolen. Since there were no other strollers remaining, let alone one that looked like ours, it seemed implausible that it was taken by accident. However, with optimism in our mind and a believe that only good things happen while in the parks, we headed off to lost and found. As we walked, I eyed each stroller. Ours has many distinguishing characteristics after years of use.

In my mind, I was thinking about my kids autograph books that were in the strollers. This was the first trip that my daughter was old enough to be interested in the idea and we had really pumped it up in the days leading to our trip. I also thought about the Princess book and Ratatouille kids cookbook that we had bought earlier in the day. But more pressing in my mind, was how this could happen in Disneyland. Did I need to rethink everything I thought about our safe happy place?

As we walked down the main street of the Backlot, we came to a concession stand that was sitting just outside the path to the Monsters Inc. ride. And there was our stroller. It didn’t have any of our stuff in the carrier compartment, but it was undeniably our stroller. It also had a backpack hanging off it and a girl - probably 10 years old - holding on to it.

When we approached the stroller, there was obviously a family standing around buying some treats at the stand and the girl, with her backpack, was part of that family. They had three strollers counting ours and the parents looked suspect. When we confronted them, they played dumb, then they tried to intimidate us, then they denied it, then they conceded. After a loud verbal exchange that lasted about 10 minutes - in front of our kids and there’s - we were able to retrieve our stroller, the books we had purchased, and my daughter’s autograph book. My son’s autograph book and Mickey pen was gone. A change of cloths we had for him in the stroller was gone. And a piece of our Disney Magic was gone.

I was proud of how my wife kept her cool and didn’t back down. I was proud that I didn’t loose my temper - which I easily could have. I think we set a good example for our kids on how to handle it and after the exchange, we sat down with them and explained what had just happened.

However, since the incident, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling of having such an experience in the happiest place on Earth. We didn’t report it to Disney security. Should we have? Did these parents run off and steal someone else’s stroller? I hope not.

I’ve been embarrassed that it happened. I’ve been sad that it happened. As someone who evangelizes the Disney lifestyle so adamantly, I was crushed by the experience. Victimized is such a strong word, and I don’t use it lightly. As annual passholders in Phoenix, we invest a lot of time, energy and money in our frequent trips to the park. We do it because of our love for the magic of being in a different world. At that moment, we were violently yanked out of this magic world and back into reality.