🏡 DVC's "Welcome Home Weeks" kicked off, and this year comes with a milestone. The annual perks season (running July 22–August 26) marks 35 years of Disney Vacation Club, and the lineup is stacked: up to 40% off food and non-alcoholic beverages Monday–Thursday at select table-service spots like Hollywood & Vine and Tusker House, complimentary ice cream rotating through resort locations, character meet-and-greets at BoardWalk's Atlantic Dance Hall, and a shot at a 2027 DVC Member Cruise sailing the Pacific Coast. Members just need a digital membership card and photo ID to cash in.

🏎️ Test Track is somehow the hardest ticket in EPCOT right now. A year after its reopening, guests are waiting up to two hours for it — longer than for Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind Nobody's fully cracked why a ride that's "been at EPCOT forever" has a longer queue. Could it be test track has a smaller rider load capacity?

🎃 Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party 2026 dropped its full food guide. New this year: Doom Buggy Dumplings at Sleepy Hollow, a Fang-tastic Garlic Butter Burger at Cosmic Ray's, and a Skull-icious Cake, alongside returning favorites like the Buffalo Chicken Hand Pie and the Ursula Cone. The party runs select nights August 7–October 31, with tickets ranging $119–$229 depending on the date.

🍁 Small addition worth a mention: La Poutinerie has settled into its new home in EPCOT's Canada Pavilion, hosted by Air Canada, replacing the long-running Refreshment Port with two poutine options and a Spiced Apple Mule for anyone looking to toast Canada Day a few weeks late.

🚀 Space Mountain might be about to get the Big Thunder treatment. Multiple sources are reporting Disney is in early planning for a full interior rebuild of Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland icon — a complete retrack, plus reworked queue and load stations, following the same playbook as the Big Thunder Mountain overhaul that just wrapped this past May.

Why now: Big Thunder's track replacement kept it down from January 2025 to May 2026, and Imagineers reportedly used that project as a direct blueprint for what's being planned here. With Big Thunder back online, Magic Kingdom finally has the ride capacity to absorb another major coaster going dark — timing that lines up conveniently with Piston Peak still years from opening. Magic Kingdom's Space Mountain opened in January 1975 and is the oldest operating version of the ride anywhere in the world — older than Disneyland's, older than Tokyo's, older than Paris's. Three years of retracking have left it visibly rougher than its neighbors; standing next to a freshly retracked Big Thunder and a brand-new TRON Lightcycle Run, that original '75 track is starting to show its age.

What to watch for: an announcement could land as soon as D23 in August. Nothing's been confirmed by Disney yet — this is all sourcing and planning-stage reporting for now. If it happens, expect a closure window sometime in late 2026 or 2027.

Disney's golf game has quietly had a glow-up — but the story actually starts 55 years ago.

Disney's Magnolia and Palm courses opened on October 1, 1971 — the exact same day as Magic Kingdom itself. Both were designed by "Gentleman" Joe Lee who designed Lake Buena Vista course a year later in 1972. This gave the resort three championship courses before it even had a second theme park. Golf wasn't a side project for Walt Disney World — it was baked into the original master plan from day one.

Magnolia immediately became a PGA Tour stop, hosting the Walt Disney World Golf Classic every year from 1971 to 2012 — a 42-year run under a rotating cast of sponsor names (Oldsmobile, National Car Rental, Funai) that made it one of the longest-running tournament venues on Tour. The winner's list reads like a Golf Hall of Fame ballot: Jack Nicklaus (three times), Tiger Woods, Payne Stewart, Ray Floyd. For over four decades, the same fairways your family might putt around on vacation were hosting the final official PGA Tour event of the season.

The Mickey ears were there before Grumpy ever showed up. Magnolia's 6th hole has had a Mickey Mouse–shaped bunker built into it for years — proof this course has always had a sense of humor buried in the sand, long before the recent renovation leaned all the way into it.

Which brings us to now: Magnolia just wrapped its most extensive renovation yet — new teeing grounds, redesigned bunkers, re-contoured Bermuda grass greens. Every one of the 18 holes now carries a Disney-movie-inspired name and a quote from either Walt Disney or Arnold Palmer, but the headline sits on the back nine: holes 14 through 17 have been reimagined as "Grumpy's Gauntlet," a punishing four-hole stretch named for Snow White's famously grouchy dwarf.

The whimsy doesn't stop at the scorecard. A new six-foot Grumpy statue, carved from Carrara marble using an AI-powered stone-carving robot, now greets golfers at the 14th tee — complete with a seven iron in his bag as a nod to his six fellow dwarfs, and a golf ball styled after a period-accurate 1937 dimple pattern.

It's paying off: Walt Disney World Golf was just named the National Golf Course Owners Association's 2026 Resort Course of the Year — 55 years after Joe Lee first broke ground.

Every day, thousands of guests walk right past two of Magic Kingdom's most overlooked ghosts — a pair of quiet, empty stations tucked at the edges of Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. For 28 years, they were the terminals of one of Walt Disney World's original opening-day attractions: the Skyway.

It was there from day one - When Magic Kingdom opened on October 1, 1971, the Skyway was technically two attractions running as one — Skyway to Fantasyland and Skyway to Tomorrowland. A one-way, aerial gondola ride built by Von Roll of Switzerland… The same company that built similar sky rides for over 100 parks and fairgrounds worldwide. The very first Von Roll sky ride in the U.S. had actually debuted at Disneyland back in 1956 — a year after Disneyland's own opening day. Riders climbed in what guests nicknamed "devil buckets": two-seaters with an awkward center post that Disney Legend Bob Gurr later redesigned into four-person gondolas with no post at all.

🎨 The two stations had completely different personalities. The Tomorrowland terminal leaned futuristic to match its land, while the Fantasyland station was built to look like a Swiss chalet — a nod, whether guests noticed it or not, to the ride's Bern, Switzerland-based manufacturer.

🚡 The ride - Guests loaded into four-person open-air gondolas — 42 of them in rotation — and drifted for a little over three and a half minutes, suspended 30 to 40 feet above the park at a leisurely 4 mph. From up there you could see the Tomorrowland Speedway, Space Mountain, the crystal-clear lagoon that once housed the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarines, and the crowds filing into it's a small world and Peter Pan's Flight below.

🔁 The L-turn made Florida's version genuinely unique. Unlike Disneyland's straight shot, Magic Kingdom's Skyway had an engineering quirk found nowhere else in the Disney gondola world: the gondola would descend almost to ground level, bank a hard right turn, and ascend again for the final leg into Tomorrowland — enough of a "gasp" moment for anyone riding backward through a support tower they didn't see coming.

⚰️ Tragedy - In February 1999, a Cast Member named Raymond Barlow was tragically killed while cleaning a Skyway loading platform when the ride started up unexpectedly — he grabbed onto a passing gondola, fell 40 feet, and died. For years, fans assumed that accident was why the Skyway closed. It wasn't. The ride had already been slated for closure well before the tragedy, and it stayed open for several more months afterward. Disney's real reasoning, confirmed by a company spokesperson at the time: an aging attraction with low hourly capacity, high staffing and maintenance costs, and a desire to "keep the parks exciting" for repeat visitors. The Skyway closed for good in November, 1999.

🌎 It wasn't just closed in Florida. Disneyland's Skyway closed first, in 1994. Tokyo Disneyland's version, which opened in 1983, closed in 1998. Magic Kingdom's was the last of the three original Skyways standing, and its closure quietly ended a 43-year run of the concept across Disney parks worldwide.

🏗️ What replaced it? Nothing, for a while. Despite Disney's stated reason of wanting "new things," no new attraction opened in that space until The Magic Carpets of Aladdin debuted in Adventureland in May 2001 — a year and a half later. The Tomorrowland station eventually lost its second story in 2009 to make room for Space Mountain-adjacent work, with the remaining floor repurposed as a restroom — nowhere near as Instagrammable as some of the resort's other reclaimed spaces. The Fantasyland station lingered even longer as unused stroller parking before quietly vanishing into park history.

🚠 Its true legacy is still flying today — When Disney needed an aerial transportation solution again decades later, the Disney Skyliner picked up right where the Skyway left off, connecting EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and several resorts with modern cable-propelled gondolas that seat up to 10 and come decorated with different Disney characters. In a twist, the Skyliner opened on September 29, 2019 — and had its own temporary shutdown due to an “incident” less than a week later, on October 5. Some legacies really do repeat themselves.