Towel Animals Extinct?

I love Disney's towel animals.  When my dad & I stayed at All Star Music in 2012, we had 2 towel ghosts with pipe cleaners and sticky eyes hanging in our window.  It was the cutest thing!  I have always appreciated this unnecessary gesture from "Mousekeeping."  I told Jim about the towel animals we'd get on his first trip with me last year, and all we got was the Mickey head on the bed (I think I posted a picture and wrote about the lack of towel animals in a previous post).  When we returned to Pop Century a couple weeks ago, we didn't even get the Mickey head!  Nary a towel animal was seen in our room the entire 7 days of our trip.  I was pretty upset.  I was thinking of leaving a note asking for one, but part of the magic was getting one out of nowhere, not having to ask for it.

Then I read this:   http://disboards.com/threads/no-more-towel-characters.3422508/

It's a discussion board about how towel animals are apparently no longer allowed to be made and left for guests because of a recent survey where people said they'd rather have cleaner rooms than towel animals.  Can't someone clean a room and then leave a towel animal?  I thought it was part of the Mousekeeper training, in addition to cleaning a room!  I'm very upset if this is how it continues.  We want our towel animals.  Maybe we can start a secret code to let Mousekeeping know it's okay to leave us towel animals, like those pins people wear that say "It's OK to wish me a Merry Christmas!"  If I knew how to make pins, I'd probably try that.  And we can leave them on our night stands.  But if the towel-makers are getting reprimanded for doing that, we still might not get our towels.

Dole Whip RIP?

Given all the choices of flavor combinations and floats at the Dole Whip stands in Walt Disney World, I have never been sure of what constitutes a real "Dole Whip."  Is it pineapple soft-serve?  By itself or on top of a cup of orange juice?  The Dole Whip air freshener my mom brought home for me last year for my car is a pineapple-vanilla twist in a cup--is that it?

Anyway, with the swapping of booths in Adventureland as some sort of preparation for the forthcoming Jungle Cruise-themed restaurant (which is a whole other story--is this something we want or have asked for?  Will the "skipper" waiters make puns of our orders?  What will the cuisine feature?), you can now only find pineapple soft-serve at one stand, and orange and vanilla at another.  I don't know about the floats.  But I do know that pineapple-vanilla twist did not find a new Magic Kingdom home in the shuffle.  It is gone.

Photo and great opinion piece from blog.wdwinfo.com.

When we asked about this, we were told that since Disneyland in CA did away with their pineapple-vanilla twist, WDW was required to follow suit.  This cast member added that the Polynesian resort serves it.  I don't understand why we now have to take a ferry over to the Polynesian just to get a treat that was always available in the park.  (There is a very in-depth article on the new Pineapple Lanai shop at the Polynesian from Disney Food Blog--you now have the option to purchase your whip in a souvenir cup or bowl!) 

Apparently you used to be able to make your own pineapple-vanilla soft serve towers at a restaurant in the Polynesian called Captain Cook's--I love this picture from the blog easywdw.com!  They used chopsticks to make a very impressive tower!

 I settled for an orange-vanilla twist and was sorely disappointed. At least this interaction kept us in the area long enough to realize that Rafiki had shown up for photos!  Is that new?  

BFFs!!

Still to come: Duffy, Dapper Day, Pirates of the Caribbean, cute merch, Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party 2015 edition, Epcot Food & Wine, pins, Downtown Disney/Springs!