The Massive Stroller Army

Robert Niles of Theme Park Review has a weekly segment I thoroughly enjoy as he shares his fond memories of working as a cast member in the Magic Kingdom. This week's entry got me thinking about how much I've loathed stroller duty for Pirates and Jungle Cruise. Pirates has an actual roped off parking lot for these horrid things, and Jungle Cruise just resorts to lining them along the edge of the hill leading upwards, which makes it rough to park these things. For Pirates, your duty was to keep moving the strollers over filling every available space (sound familiar as you enter any show?) And then grab all the strays because people love to just drop their stuff and their stroller right wherever they felt like it. Since I've rarely done Pirate Stroller duty, I'll talk about some of my repeat offenders while working as Jungle Greeter which also has to deal with strollers.



As a Greeter for the World Famous Jungle Cruise, your main duty is to stand outside and look pretty and answer dumb questions and tell people to turn around, this ride isn't worth a 10 minute wait, etc. As you're handling the crowds, you're also keeping strollers from entering the queue, and telling them where they should park it, come back and try it again. For grins, I come up with a completely pointless task for them to do before they're allowed to enter the queue, such as go back up the hill and they must skip down the hill singing I'm a Little Teapot or whatever our song of the day is, whatever I feel like. There are some times where the parents insist on bringing the stroller with them. I tell them there's no room, and we're all allergic to those things anyways. "But our baby's asleep!" Well, then they'll miss out on the Jungle Cruise, wake them up, take them out, and spin around in circles 5 times, and then 3 times in the other direction, and then count to 10 backwards. Usually by then I just get even more strange looks and then they just leave and head over to Pirates. You're still going to have to wake up your kid, and you'll have to deal with scary guys in fake beards and plastic swords, not the kind of people you'd want to argue about strollers with, believe me. So in spirit of Robert's entry, "The Stroller Police" I've decided to call these stroller felons the Cranky Wakey Angry Mommas or CWAMers for short.

Are there any other stroller felons that neither of us have mentioned? Let us know! What else bothers you while visiting the parks? Comment below!