After a few days in Disneyland, your children will love you forever, but your bank account may never forgive you. Luckily, there’s a neat trick that can help you cut some serious costs from your trip. Here are seven simple tips for passing your daughter off as a crawfish so you can get away with only buying a single pass.
1. Prepare your daughter to go through bag check in a cooler labeled, “Crawfish—MUST KEEP WET”: According to park rules, coolers as big as 24 inches long, 15 inches wide, and 18 inches high are totally acceptable, which should be just enough room to fit a small child inside. Plus, any space in the cooler that your daughter doesn’t take up can be used to store snacks, thereby letting you save money on the park’s pricey dining options.
2. Provoke a crawfish’s natural predator to attack your daughter while waiting in line at Disneyland’s entrance: This can be achieved by spraying your daughter with crawfish fluids and pheromones of various predators to attract them to her. Considering the wealth of animals in Disneyland’s Safari, this should not be difficult. Otters, minks, herons—even raccoons in the dumpsters behind the park will do for verifying your daughter’s authentic crawfish-ness. Once your daughter is pinching back at a raccoon trying to eat her, casually assure the entrance workers and other visitors in line that this is always happening to your crawfish.
3. Have your daughter shimmy out of a plastic dry cleaning bag to show that she is molting: As your daughter plops out on the ground with her former “exoskeleton” dangling off one of the entrance turnstiles, announce that your crawfish has molted and that you need to get her to the dark interior of Space Mountain to protect her raw skin from the sun as fast as possible. For good measure, making your daughter get severe sun poisoning prior to this will sell her as a crawfish that much more convincingly.
4. Skip the lines while you’re at it by disguising yourself as a blind person and your daughter as your service crawfish: You can pick up some sunglasses, a walking cane, a leash, and a service dog’s vest for far under the price of a Disneyland entrance fee, let alone two Fast Passes.
5. Have her pinch another park guest and then beg them not to call animal control: Be sure to explicitly make the distinction between calling animal control on your daughter rather than normal security. A pinch isn’t enough for another guest to feel that they’re in any sort of danger, but it will be enough for them to feel sure that your daughter is a crawfish. In their mind, they’ll be sparing someone’s over-excited crawfish from trouble, and in your mind, you’ll be wondering whether you want to take your daughter to The Haunted Mansion or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride first.
6. Wear a custom vacation T-shirt that reads, “SOLO TRIP TO DISNEY WITH MY CRAWFISH 6/15/2018: VACRAWTION IS ALL I EVER WANTED”: The small details will count here.
7. If security starts asking questions, offer to boil her, assuming that no park employee would actually go through with it: By asserting that you were going to boil her in Cajun spices, crack her in half, and suck the meat and juices from her later that day anyway, they’ll have no choice but to let you in—no Disneyland employee has time or a large crawfish boiling pot on hand to verify that your daughter is in fact a crawfish. Call their bluff, and you’ll be on your way to making your daughter one extremely happy little girl in the happiest place on Earth.
