My girlfriend and I visited Disney World this past weekend along with 5,521,639,514 other people and their four children.

Oddly enough, it was the shiny new fingerprint scanners at the entrance that coaxed the first smile of the day. Perhaps that’s because an hour earlier, the boarding pass scanner at Miami International Airport was on the fritz. The gate agent compensated by ripping our “boarding passes,” which could just as easily have been Denny’s coupons. In other words, feel free to board my plane without a ticket, but I’d better not see you on It’s a Small World.

by Gareth Harfoot

Like airport security, Disney World is all about putting on a show. It did not disappoint. Shoulder to shoulder with 40,000 others, we watched fireworks dance on a shimmering castle to When You Wish Upon a Star, then turned around to an equally captivating Main Street awash in holiday light. There are few experiences in life that can mesmerize to the point of absolute stillness a crowd so large and so irritable after a day of long lines and loud kids.

But it takes more than a single moment to land in the alternate reality that Walt Disney set out to build. Disney understood that it’s often the details which disarm the imagination.

And so you won’t find a sign in Disney World that says “Staff Only,” because they aren’t staff; they’re “cast members.” You will never see the same character in two different places at one time, or a character on break without his costume head. Most remarkably, you will never see the outside world while standing anywhere inside the park. I urge you to read more about Walt Disney’s obsessive commitment to his guests, because it is tremendously inspiring. I try to incorporate his principles on a much smaller scale.

Some former Disney Imagineers chronicle in a terrific blog how corporate ambitions are edging out Walt’s vision, but our visit found a park that remained keenly aware of itself. A string of holiday lights went dark and was fixed 90 seconds later by a pair of men in black who came and went silently through a passageway we never found. Then there were the napkins. How easy, how cheap it would have been to order “the usual.” But the folks that choreographed a massive fireworks show also took a moment to Disneyize a pedestrian artifact of everyday life: the recycling mark.

The Disney experience is so immersive that everyday events become jarring. The Wild West-themed McDonald’s fry stand in Magic Kingdom is thoroughly Disney, from the anachronistic “Potatoes” sack on top to the soft, cavernous lighting beneath it. But when a burly McDonald’s employee shoved a cart through the line and began noisily unpacking (whump!)  boxes (whump!) of frozen fries, something broke—you could see it on the faces of bystanders.

(I don’t even want to know why the boxes have “salt the fries” in quotes.)

There was nothing unusual about what she was doing, and perhaps that was the problem: for the first time in hours, the ordinary violated the extraordinary. Forget the fries. The lady was unpacking mortgages, deadlines, and wars that had been briefly but eagerly sealed away in the recesses of the mind.