When I was a young boy, my mom began attending a yearly work conference in Orlando. One year, she decided to take me with her and told me about this place called Magic Kingdom. Up until that point, my experience with amusement rides started and stopped with the dingy traveling carnivals that popped up in church parking lots and empty fields. The ones with rusted rides, loud rock music blasting through cheap speakers, cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and operators who looked like they hadn't slept in three days.
Then everything changed.
Even now, more than 35 years later, I can still remember the feeling of awe as the monorail made that wide turn and Cinderella Castle suddenly came into view. It didn't even feel real. Up until then, places like that only existed in commercials and on TV specials. Seeing it in person was something else entirely.
I remember the pride and determination of carrying around my autograph book everywhere we went, making it my mission to somehow meet every character in the park. I remember finally getting Mickey's autograph and feeling like I had accomplished something monumental. I remember Minnie hugging me at a breakfast buffet with such enthusiasm that I later came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. True story.
That trip left a permanent mark on me.
My love for theme parks only grew over the years. Soon, I found the same feelings at Universal Studios. I overcame my fear of Kongfrontation and ended up riding it fifteen times in a row. I fell in love with the Jaws ride so completely that it sparked a lifelong fascination with sharks and marine biology that still exists today.
And I can still vividly remember walking into the Islands of Adventure Preview Center, a fairly nondescript building tucked beside Kongfrontation, in what is now basically part of the Revenge of the Mummy locker area. Inside were sprawling models and plans for an ambitious new theme park that was still two years away from opening.
Two years.
As a kid, that felt like forever.
I never wanted to vacation anywhere else. Mount Rushmore? No thanks. Niagara Falls? Maybe another time. I was completely hooked on Disney and Universal.
Years later, I got to bring my nieces for their first visit and experience those places through their eyes. It was familiar and completely new at the same time. The same awe and wonder I had felt as a kid was suddenly mixed with something else. Pride. Nostalgia. The strange feeling of watching something that shaped your childhood suddenly begin shaping someone else's.
Then my son was born in 2018, and I could hardly wait to bring him. I wanted him to experience that same sense of wonder that had stayed with me my entire life. The anticipation of walking toward the gates. The music drifting through the entrance tunnels. The first glimpse of the castle. That feeling that the outside world had somehow disappeared for a little while.
When we finally took him shortly after his third birthday, it was everything I hoped it would be. And now my second son is just as big of a Disney fan.
My love for Disney, Universal, and theme parks in general eventually led me here. CrowdLevels.com was born from the idea that there should be better ways to understand crowds, wait times, trends, and how to make the most of a vacation that people spend so much time and money planning for. I'm just a fan who wanted to build something useful for the community and honestly, for myself too.
We've got some exciting things planned
It's still the early days, and CrowdLevels.com is absolutely a work in progress. You'll encounter bugs. You'll probably run into some weirdness. Features will move around. Entire sections of the site will evolve and change as I continue building this thing out. A lot of late nights and a lot of diet Mountain Dew have gone into it already, and there's still a long road ahead.
And speaking of new features... there's a ton planned.
I can't fully tip my hand yet, but we'll be adding new parks, deeper data analysis, more crowd forecasting tools, guides, news stories, weekly trend breakdowns, and maybe even some very interesting ways to combine this mountain of data with newer technology to help people spend less time frustrated in the parks and more time enjoying them.
But I've probably already said too much.
Good things are coming, and I'm glad you're along for the ride.
-Brian