Last weekend, I went to see Up (a good movie!) but thought it would fun, ironic, and just my shade of geeky to first go "up" in the Downtown Disney balloon, since I was at Downtown Disney anyway for the movie. We wanted to go UP before we went to UP. And for a change, the Aerophile balloon was operating on this afternoon! Given my run of bad luck (there has even been a further unsuccessful attempt or two that I didn't even chronicle here online), I was ecstatic to finally have my chance on Characters in Flight.

Let me say right out of the gate that I liked it! I had a good time on the balloon, the views were tremendous, and yes, it was worth the $16/adult ($10/child) price that we paid.

A winch pulls in the balloon, it's filled with helium.

Admittedly, the five minutes you spend at the fully aloft height go by way too fast. Certainly I felt disappointment as I realized we were descending (the pilot didn't announce it or anything, but you could tell).

The ride is smooth, silent, and even do-able for the faint of heart. My wife, scared as she is of heights, swallowed her fears and climbed aboard (albeit by tricking herself in that she didn't think about it too much beforehand), and she did fine on the trip itself. Mostly. She did hold on with both hands most of the time, and admittedly she got rather spooked once she realized that there was an (intentional) hole in the floor at one of the floor seams. This scared her badly, almost as much as it would have if she had looked over the side and looked down.

The gondola is a doughnut-shape. How strong is your stomach?

You're allowed to move around the gondola, albeit slowly, once you reach the full height. The signs at the attraction say the balloon goes 400 feet, but other signs around Downtown Disney (and on the websites) say only 300 feet. This might be hedging their bets, since a slight wind will decrease the maximum height to only 300 feet, according to our pilot.

Don't look down!

The pilot further elaborated that Aerophile built multiple balloons like this around the world, but only kept (and operated) two of them: this one and the one at Disneyland Paris. He closed by urging us to return at nighttime, when he said the view and the experience were totally different.

Epcot is in the distance.

I had a great flight. But a few days later, I heard something third-hand which really gave me pause. This rumor claimed that the chief pilot had quit, and several other pilots were considering leaving, because management (Aerophile) was insisting that pilots fly in unsafe conditions. Furthermore, the nephew of the French owner was said to be one of the pilots, flying without an FAA license on the strength of nepotism alone.

Downtown Disney.

This got me thinking. On the day I went up, our pilot reduced the crowd from twenty (already reduced from the max of 30) down to ten. This happened literally as we got onto the gondola, and he had to seek volunteers to wait for the next batch. The idea is that they can fit 30 people when there are no winds, 20 people with 3-12 MPH winds, and 10 people with 12-20 MPH winds. A sign out front declares that over 20 MPH means the balloon is grounded.

The Marketplace, and the nearby hotels to Downtown Disney.

And yet, the last time I was here, about to board the balloon, we saw them cut the line to just five people per gondola, when the winds were gusting to 25 MPH. This wasn't part of the advertised schema. Over 20 MPH should mean a grounded balloon. So was there something to this rumor of "forced flights" after all?

It's true that the pilots are only thinking of safety when they reduce the number of passengers. The principle is not unlike an upside-down pendulum: the more weight there is on the business end of the tethered balloon, the more wildly it will swing when there is wind. One pilot shared with me that he was up there once with 31 knots (about 35 MPH). Ouch! Now that I think about it, the fact that he was up there with 35 MPH wind implies maybe they do fly when they shouldn't!

As the balloon comes in for a landing, it rolls around a bit.

And yet, this could very well turn out to be just rumors (remember that I heard it third-hand). When I asked an Aerophile employee about this on the most recent weekend, he asserted that they had lost no pilots… and I noticed he was wearing a nametag that declared HIM the chief pilot. So either I had his number but he wasn't talking, or the rumor had no weight to begin with.

I didn't do any further digging, but I did ruminate about the balloon in general. It is already closed a huge amount of time, due to the high winds so common around here in summer. I could easily see how management might be anxious to run when it's unsafe. And it's not just the winds which keep it shut. When there is lightning within 30 miles of the balloon, they are not allowed to run. I wonder if anyone at Aerophile, in researching this new attraction, looked up the fact that the Orlando-Tampa corridor is the lightning capitol of the United States! There is lightning here every summer day.

Grounded! (The gathering storm is behind the camera)

This same Aerophile employee gestured at the gathering clouds on this Sunday afternoon and said that's why they were closed at the moment, but they had managed to bag 300 riders earlier in the day. I did some quick math; that's some $5,000 for the morning, and presumably an equal amount in the evening after the storms.

Even on a bad day like that, $10,000 is a lot of money, right? Certainly enough to cover costs (even without knowing how much their admittedly-high lease at Downtown Disney must cost them)? I have to hope so, because otherwise a summer full of lightning and mild winds might prompt Aerophile to pull up stakes entirely. And that would be good for pretty much nobody.

Paradiso 37, the newest Pleasure Island restaurant, opened this past Friday with little fanfare and no reservations (and none possible just yet). This new eatery occupies a newly rebuilt "barn" on the PI waterfront, opposite the closed 8-Trax dance club (in an area that was formerly a store, if memory serves).

The concept is slightly-upscale, and definitely up the scale when it comes to price. On the whole, we found the restaurant to be of average quality but above-average prices. The appetizers were delightful (though expensive) and the entrees were plain (and even more expensive).

The regular reservations phone number will not work here.

As we sat down, we were excoriated to try the white sangria (a certifiable hit) and the 29-degree-draft-beer (much less of a hit; I've had colder beers out of a cooler full of ice). The server pointed out the 37 Mexican tequilas available, but I wasn't interested in tequila. I wonder if they have misjudged the audience. Of the five beers listed on the menu, only two were still available on draft. Did they have a big opening weekend by the time of our Sunday afternoon visit?

The number 37, part of the name Paradiso 37, comes not from tequila, but from the 37 countries which are part of the (North and South) Americas. It's actually a pretty neat concept for a restaurant. This way, you can include "exotic" dishes and yet neatly include familiar American dishes and claim them all to be a part of the theme.

We were excited by the sign outside the restaurant advertising a $20 appetizer sampler, since indeed the appetizers all sounded good. Alas, such a thing doesn't exist. It flitted across my mind to wonder exactly what was going on. Was the menu finalized after they printed those A-frame advertisements on the sidewalk? There was no sampler platter at all.

We settled instead for two appetizers, the crazy corn ($8) and the chorizo meatball skewers ($12). The crazy corn was good in its way, but worth $8? A Google search for the term reveals one possibly-similar concept from recipezaar.com: mayo, mustard, cheese (white cheddar?), and cayenne spread atop a roasted ear of corn.

Appetizers are a little minimalistic.

The chorizo was better, though there were only four, very tiny skewers, and the promised red onion salad was miniscule indeed. A tzatziki sauce and some herb bread medallions provided a rounded texture and taste, though I couldn't really shake the overly greasy porcine waft of the skewers.

Our entrees came soon after, but alas, they came out of order and confused. I ordered the tacos and my wife the enchiladas, but I was handed some enchiladas and she got a burrito. We questioned the person bringing the food (not our server) and she asserted the correctness of our order. The server, blissfully only a few moments behind, recognized the error and took everything away. He delivered to me a plate of tacos, and then, after a few moments also returned with the exact same enchiladas, this time placing them in front of my wife instead of me.

The enchiladas were bland, frankly, and the tacos managed to capture ethereality in a food dish. They were light, fresh, and somehow not heavy at all, seeming almost to weigh nothing. There were plenty of vegetables diced up nearby to insert into the soft taco shells, and that was fine as far as that goes, but the tacos were vanishingly small, and almost as soon as one began, one finished eating the entrée. The accompanying cilantro rice sounded good in theory, but was practically tasteless in practice. Surprisingly, the un-labeled black beans had the most flavor, due to the cream sauce drizzled above.

Tacos: one pork, one chicken, one blackened Mahi Mahi (the best of the bunch)

The kid's meal ($8.50) was minimally satisfactory. We had the grilled chicken, and it came with no sauce and seemed to have no spices sprinkled atop it. Like the side item of roasted carrots, it was apparently meant to taste "like itself," with no attempt to dress up the flavor. The side scoop of mac and cheese, though, was flavorful due to the real cheeses used.

Having the food taste like the ingredients is probably more authentic to the country's origin, but it makes for a poor showing in Orlando. Moreover, the prices are entirely out of whack with the delivered product. If the idea is to deliver simple food, the prices ought to be simple. A single glance at the menu, reproduced below, illustrates that the prices are anything but.

The view from the elevated half of the seating area.

The bar in the elevated half of the dining room.

Child Meals (drinks not included)

Dessert

• Sundae, Churros, Chilean Sopapillas, Mini Ice Cream Cones - $5.99-$7.99

Finally, in a non-sequitur even I could not conjure up out of thin air, I bring you a sighting of one of the Internet's crown jewel celebrities: the guy who dresses up like Peter Pan. Yes, Randy Constan, whose site (www.pixyland.org/peterpan) was a phenomenon some ten years ago, randomly appeared before my eyes as I wandered through Adventureland. Only this time, he sported a purple ensemble not normally associated with Peter Pan. But how could you miss that haircut?!

It's Peter Pan--in purple!

There was a somewhat befuddled boy in the tiny water playground with Randy when I encountered him. A few moments after my arrival, Randy was sufficiently doused by the tiki jets to move on, and the brush with celebrity was over.

Kevin is the author of many books on Disney theme parks, including:

• Mouse Trap: Memoir of a Disneyland Cast Member provides the first authentic glimpse of what it's like to work at Disneyland.
• The Walt Disney World Menu Book lists restaurants, their menus, and prices for entrees, all in one handy pocket-sized guide.
• Tokyo Disney Made Easy is a travel guide to Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySeas, written to make the entire trip stress-free for non-speakers of Japanese.
• Magic Quizdom offers an exhaustive trivia quiz on Disneyland park, with expansive paragraph-length answers that flesh out the fuller story on this place rich with details.
• 101 Things You Never Knew About Disneyland is a list-oriented book that covers ground left intentionally unexposed in the trivia book, namely the tributes and homages around Disneyland, especially to past rides and attractions.
• 101 Things You Never Knew About Walt Disney World follows the example of the Disneyland book, detailing tributes and homages in the four Disney World parks.

More information on the above books, along with ordering options are at this link. Kevin is currently working on other theme park related books, and expects the next one to be published soon.