For Ralph Walters Jr. (Left, at arrow) it was a lightning-like jolt of horrific surprise, followed by a lingering greasy, stroke-like sick realization when while standing at the front gate of the Magic Kingdom in Orlando it dawned on him that he left the entire family’s Disney World tickets in his other pants back home in Doswell.Walters claims he “froze in horror” when he realized they drove for three days, booked into the French Quarter Hotel and took the shuttle to the front stoop of the happiest place on earth with no tickets. His 5 kids, ranging in age from 2 to 13, and his wife Margaret stood anxiously, grinning in gleeful anticipation as Ralph patted his pockets, his intestines slowly being pulled from his rectum with red-hot tongs and wrapped slowly around a thorny stick.
“I was dying a slow agonizing death, right there in front of my kids, who were literally hopping up and down with excitement.” Explains Ralph, who said that he both vomited in his mouth and soiled his boxers as he thought of how to explain to his family that the paradise beckoning on the other side of the turnstile was out of reach without the 5-day park-hoppers that lay uselessly in a pair of blue Dockers on the foot of his bed back on Level Drive. “Disneyworld was all they talked about for months.”
How did this happen? “The morning we left I put the tickets in my pocket for safekeeping,” Ralph explains, “but our youngest was so excited she threw up on my pants. I ran upstairs to change, and in all the turmoil forgot to transfer the tickets to my new pants. As God is my witness, I never thought once of those tickets all the way here.”
Ralph said he told his family to wait while he quietly explained his problem to the front gate attendant. “He told me he was sorry, but there was no way he could trace the tickets, because they are scanned and matched when people enter the park, both for security reasons and to stop counterfeits. He said he would be happy to sell me replacement tickets – totaling $3,546.00. I had about $200 cash with me, and a Discover card with about $300 left on it. That was it.”
“It was as if Goofy were repeatedly slamming his oversize steel-toe boots into my exposed testicles, crushing them like pickled eggs floating in brine, just for the pure hell of it and laughing that horrible, goofy laugh while he did it.”
Locked out of the park, and unable to buy new tickets, Ralph took a deep breath and turned to face his family.
(photo courtesy Walt Disney World, Inc., monorail "Daffy-cam")
