by special guest Clark Ensminger (aka Heather’s husband)
So if you are reading this post, you are probably aware of mine and Heather’s #epicparkhop adventure. For those of you who haven’t, we embarked on a one-day journey whereby we would visit each US Disney Park on two coasts to celebrate our anniversary. We had special rules for our challenge and made a detailed plan on how it could be done (those details to be shared in another post). After our detailed planning, we were actually pretty confident that we could accomplish our goal as only a flight delay greater than a couple hours could derail our chances.
As much as we love Disney, Heather is a part of a couple Facebook groups where other like-minded fans discuss recent park news, planning tips, etc. We were pretty excited about our adventure (I even made a T-shirt design, and we made our own shirts using Heather’s vinyl cutter). We thought others on the Facebook group would get a kick out of it and might even be able to give us some helpful advice on travel between parks and to and from the airports. So we shared a post with a picture of our T-shirt and a rough itinerary of our plan.
From there, it took off!
Those T-shirts though…
We couldn’t believe how many comments we had (not all of them good mind you), and admittedly it was kinda fun seeing so many people interested in our anniversary trip. Many different folks wanted updates, and we were excited to share, so we put them on Heather’s travel agent Facebook page (we are not cool enough to use Twitter, or at least we don’t know how).
So in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 16th, Heather and I dropped off our kids with family and headed to the Nashville airport to fly down to Orlando the night before the #epicparkhop. While in the terminal waiting for our flight, we got a call from a writer at the Associated Press wanting to share our story. We didn’t think much of this, and we thought it was kind of fun, so we said, “Sure, why not!” The interviewer was very gracious and asked us several questions about how we were going to complete our trip, and what inspired us to do it. We hung up the phone, and joked with each other about how our vacation would end up on page 4 of some lifestyle section in a random newspaper. We would later find out we were very wrong…
After this call, several texts, messages, and other phone calls started trickling in from reporters while we were still in the terminal. Everyone wanted an interview and there was no way possible to meet everyone’s request. A local station in Orlando asked to meet us in Disney Springs (where we were having a pre-#epicparkhop date) that night with a camera man for a short interview. We agreed, and thought it was funny to see our travel-weary, sweaty selves (Florida was unusually hot last week for October) on the 11 O’Clock News that evening in Orlando.
The camera adds 10 pounds… of sweat
While this was happening, our Associated Press interview had been picked up by a huge number of news sites across the country and around the globe. We were a little more focused on our #epicparkhop the next day, so we went to bed not understanding how far reaching it had become.
The next morning we woke up very early to get to our “Early Morning Magic” ticketed event at Hollywood Studios (we highly recommend it by the way). We were sooooo excited to see Toy Story Land for the first time! Our first ride that morning was Slinky Dog Dash, and after coming off the ride, we were greeted by a Disney representative with, “You must be Heather and Clark.” They had heard about our trip and wanted to make sure we were set for success. They recommended we use their Minnie Van service between parks (which was a game changer by the way), and they asked if they could document our trip and write about it in the Disney Parks Blog. We agreed (we love the parks blog!), and for the rest of the day, we met several cast members in both Disneyland and Disney World who were excited to see us complete our adventure. Aside from the fact that everyone we met was super kind and gracious, we really appreciated the fact that they didn’t try to get in the way of our plan as they took pictures and asked questions about our trip. They knew we had spent a lot of time planning our trip to the T, and they didn’t inhibit us from executing our big day the way we wanted to. They were simply wonderful.
In all 6 parks, we had multiple park goers approach us and asked if we were “that” couple visiting all 6 parks. Others didn’t approach us, but we could hear them saying, “I heard about those guys!” as we passed by (literally like everywhere we went). Several guests wanted pictures, and we were of course happy to oblige. While the “celebrity feel” wasn’t the most important thing that day, it was admittedly fun to see so many people excited about our adventure. We just couldn’t process in our minds how so many of them had heard about it.
The two to our right (your left) were especially excited to see us!
While we were hopping from park to park (to park to park to park to park), other media requests kept coming in. We had multiple stations wanting to meet us outside the parks (like we had time that day…) and at the airport as we were embarking to California. It quickly got out of hand, and Heather and I decided that we would politely decline any subsequent requests. For the remainder of the trip we were contacted by radio, print media, local and national TV, internet columns, and talk shows, but decided our time would be better spent focusing on enjoying our vacation together (we will only make an exception for Ellen, because… it’s Ellen 🙂).
While the requests were overwhelming at times, we really have no complaints about the media itself or any individual reporter or news entity we communicated with. In fact everyone we spoke with was pleasant and kind, and even when we declined to interview, we were met with understanding and encouragement to enjoy the rest of our trip. For whatever reason, our story picked up steam, and these people were simply doing their jobs. What we weren’t prepared for was some of the negative attention our story received.
If we could give anyone advice on “going viral” it would be to stay away from the comments section. Our story had been shared thousands of times, and those thousands of shares include many more thousands of comments. While it is filled with tons of encouragement and support, it also has a ton of negativity. Even if there are eight supportive comments and two bad ones, you tend to only remember the two. We didn’t care so much if people thought our trip was dumb or simply not newsworthy, but the difficult thing to stomach is when people attack your character or spread things around about you that aren’t true. To be completely honest, it hurts. We made the mistake a couple times of scrolling through these comments (I even did some crusading trying to correct some misinformation), but ultimately it was a bad idea and not worthy of our time or attention.
We were called all kinds of names like “Attention Grabbing Whores” and “Rich Snobs.” Several said our trip a huge waste of time and money (which is kinda subjective, no?), and that if we were good people, we would have instead donated the money to charity. Lots complained that we weren’t the first to complete the challenge (a truth we readily acknowledged in every interview we did. You only control what you say in an interview, not what the reporter chooses to include or omit). Others “guaranteed” we were paid to go on our trip by Disney for their story. Many said it was a huge publicity stunt, and we were only trying to generate business for Heather’s travel agency since we put updates on her page. On several occasions, commenters claimed to know for a fact that we reached out to multiple news outlets to promote our story (when we knew full well they reached out to us, and we had turned down the vast majority of requests). Some of the hardest criticisms to stomach were those that suggested we conveniently included the story of Heather’s Dad’s passing a year ago to generate clicks.
After falling into the trap a little too long one day on our trip, we decided together to stop paying attention to it. We removed ourselves from the Facebook group that was causing us the most stress, and we stopped trying to respond to everyone’s criticism. Instead, we enjoyed the rest of our trip that began with THE. BEST. DAY. EVER.
If the only thing we did that day was eat these corn dogs, it still might have been the best day ever.
One thing we noticed was that anyone who knows us (even just a little) was excited to share in our adventure. We received countless calls, texts, and messages of support from family, friends, and coworkers. At times, we were too focused on what a few judgmental people on the internet were saying to notice what great love and support we had from our friends, family, and colleagues after the news story broke. Thank you so much for that!
At the end of the day, we had an absolute blast! I wanted to do this so bad for Heather (and maybe a little for me too ), and I couldn’t imagine it being any more adventurous, fun, or memorable. The media attention (while the main subject of this post), was not the main focus of our trip. Instead, it was about 10 incredible years with my best friend and an epic challenge to mark the occasion.
Since this is a post about the media attention though, there was one big lesson learned for us. The relative anonymity of the internet can embolden some people to judge, criticize, and tear down people they see in the media. I recalled this story from a girl who went through a similar experience, albeit much, MUCH worse. Some forget these are real people and throw caution to the wind. While that may always be the case, going through this experience makes me want to be the kind of person who uses my words to uplift rather than tear down. This experience has also helped me learn that no person’s unfounded judgements are worthy of my respect, attention, or happiness. Instead, I choose to be grateful for an incredible wife, family (shout out to a sister and mother-in-law for watching our kids last week!), and friends who support and care about us.
And for anyone who is still trying to understand the real reason for mine and Heather’s trip, Jimmy Fallon cleared it up yesterday (skip to the 7:10 mark).
Thank you all!
