My Editor Made Me Give Up Soda For Disney Water For A Day, Here's How It Went

Something you may not know about me, but almost all my coworkers do, is that I don’t drink water.

Figment’s Inspiration Station at Festival of the Arts

It may sound wild, but it’s true! I’m much more of a soda, coffee, etc. drinker, water honestly isn’t a big part of my daily intake. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the taste of water, but when one of my editors got wind of this, she decided to issue me a challenge — she made me give up soda for water in Disney World for a whole day, and here’s how it went.

A lot of my coworkers are big fans of grabbing free water at the quick service locations in Disney World, and as I’ve written about them many times before, too, I knew where to grab them.

I started my adventure at 10:27 AM in Magic Kingdom when I didn’t want to wait in the breakfast lines to grab a quick service water, so I decided to stop by a water fountain instead. This was classic Disney tasting water — kinda lukewarm, but starting to heat up with the middle of the morning, so it wasn’t great. I rated it a 4/10.

When lines died down a little bit later at 10:42 AM, I stopped by Friar’s Nook to grab myself an actual cup of water. This was from the fountain soda machine and it was much cooler. Honestly, crunching on the ice helped mask the taste of the water for me (which again, I’m not a fan of water taste anywhere), so that brought it to a 6/10 for me.

About an hour later, at 11:48 AM, I stopped by Casey’s Corner to grab water from another fountain machine with ice. It didn’t really taste much different than what I got at the Friar’s Nook earlier and it still wasn’t my favorite. I walked around with it eating the ice until it started to taste like I was drinking the paper of the cup and then decided it was time to give up on this one.

So what did I learn from my experiment? Well, sometimes finding times to grab soda, especially early in the day before the sun gets really hot, is challenging. I didn’t have that same problem with getting water! I did however have to take more frequent bathroom breaks because my body wasn’t holding the liquids quite like it does when I’m drinking soda, so that was a huge change for me.

I don’t know that I felt any different from just one day’s change, but it does make me curious to see if I’d be more willing to bring a reusable bottle and some flavor packets in favor of an expensive soda cup a few times each day.