what I'm getting at is that this blog about Treasure Island got me thinking. Even though many years had passed since its closing, I figured it might be cool to do some "Urban Exploration" at Mowgli's Palace. Take some photos, write about my experience, and probably see if there was anything I could take home as a memento.
I'm not going to say I wasted no time in getting there, because honestly it took me another year after I first found that Treasure Island article to get around to going up to Emerald Isle.
Over the course of that year, I did a lot of research on the Palace resort... or rather, I tried to.
Naturally, no official Disney site or resource made any mention of the place. That had been scrubbed clean.
Even odder, however, was that nobody before myself had apparently thought to blog about the place or even post a photo. None of the local TV or Newspaper sites had one word about the place, though that was to be expected since they had all swung Disney's way. They wouldn't be out there lauding their embarassment, you know?
Recently, I learned that corporations can actually ask Google, for example, to remove links from search results... basically for no good reason. Looking back, it's probably not that nobody spoke of the resort, but rather their words were made ineaccessible.
So in the end I could barely find the place. All I had to go on was an old-as-hell map I'd recieved in the mail back in the 90s. It was a promotional item sent out to people who had recently been to Disney world, and I guess since I had been there in the late 80s, that was "recent".
I didn't really intend to hang onto it. It just got shoved in with my books and comics from my childhood. I'd only remembered it months into my research, and even then it took me another few weeks to locate the storage bin my parents had shoved it all into.
Hanging on the gate was a sheet of metal, some random scrap, with hand-painted letters scrawled in black. "ABANDONED BY DISNEY". Clearly the handiwork of some past local or an employee who wanted to make some small protest….seriously … approached the main building - the PALACE - only to find the outside of the building covered in grafitti where the orginal paint hadn't peeled and chipped away. The front doors weren't just open, they had been taken off their hinges and were stolen.
Above the front doors, or the gaping maw where they had been, someone had once again painted "ABANDONED BY DISNEY".
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