The Secret about Walt Disney World (Disneyland Florida) - How I became the Grand Marshall
I had the best Disneyland day of my life in Disneyland Florida. Mind you, I've been to every Disneyland except Shanghai so far so this is a tall order. Basically, I was picked as the Grand Marshall, which is a lucky family or group friends that are handpicked to parade in front of everyone, and only 2 groups are picked per day. Can you imaigine! It has been almost a year but I'm still in shock how my friends and I were picked out of the 100,000 people or so that visit Disneyland on a daily basis!
Am sharing this so you can see if you can somehow be 1 of the lucky ones too.
How did we get picked?
I don't know, I think we were just lucky.
We were walking slowly and happily when suddenly someone in a light beige uniform, with a disney name tag, watching us, and suddenly came up and approached us. I was expecting this to be any other staff member, and wanted to ask her for a "I'm on my Honeymoon badge!" but her questions were very bizarre.
She asked if this was our first time, and whether we were tourists. My husband and I were tourists, but my couple friends lived there in Florida, so we gave conflicting answers. I will call the staff X from now on. So Staff X was asking why our answers were different, because she mentioned she usually picks locals as tourists don't know where the meet up point usually is.
After sorting that out, she asked if we had any plans at 3pm, which we didn't. We said we booked a lunch place at 12 and that's it.
Then she handed us a piece of paper inviting us to be Grand Marshalls.
At first we were like.... what? What's a Grand Marshall? But YES we will do it!
So, the Grand Marshall opens up the parade before all the floats come down, you're in a really nice car, waving and smiling to everyone, feeling like a crazy VIP and everyone smiles at you looking freaking jealous. Worse as we were asians, people probably thought we paid extra money to be picked. Lol, no we didn't.
The meet up point:
X told us to meet up at a spot near the Cast entrance in the middle of the park, at 2.30 or so. There, she helped us take photos, gave us an amazing Grand Marshall purple hat (at the back it says Grand Marshall), gave us a bottle of water, gave us a run down of what's going to happen, while we waited for the car to come over.
The actual parade:
At around 2.50 or so, the car arrived. It looks like this! We basically paraded around the entire parade square, with the announcer announcing our full names, where we're from (Singapore!) and you're supposed to smile and wave non-stop, wish people happy birthday if they're wearing that badge, and basically look happy.
