Guy Scores a Disneyland Record 8 Years in the Making

You know how sometimes some guy wins the Super Bowl and screams, "I'm going to Disneyland!" Well, sometimes some guy finds himself out of a job and with some time and an annual pass to Disneyland on his hands, so he just starts going. Every day. It gets him out of his head, out of his house, gets him some fresh air—it's great. Then on the 60th day at the happiest place on Earth, he wonders if he's onto something. This, as the LA Times reports, is the very non-fairytale of Jeff Reitz, who was recently awarded a Guinness World Record for far exceeding those initial 60 consecutive visits to Disneyland. "It started as a joke between friends ... as a free source of entertainment," he tells People.

Beginning in those unemployed days in 2012, Reitz visited the park in Anaheim, California, every single day for 2,995 days, or eight years, three months, and 13 days. That's just five days short of his goal of 3,000 days—which was thwarted in March 2020 when the pandemic shut the park down. “I was happy and sad at the same time,” the 50-year-old Reitz says. But when notified last week by Guinness that the record was his, he tells the Times, “I was actually shocked. I wasn’t actively going for a Guinness World Record all eight years. It was just something I was keeping track of.”

Pulling it off wasn't exactly effortless—Disneyland keeps track of when annual pass members show up, but on days of computer glitches or power outages, Reitz had to get his visit recorded at Disneyland City Hall. He kept all his parking passes. And once he did land a job, that daily routine either meant an early or late visit, or even a day off from work. Now though, when Reitz visits, it's not with the purpose of notching another number to his tally. It's with an eye to the nuances of the park that often go unnoticed. "You’re in such a rush that you won’t get a chance to stop and listen to the sounds and the jokes of the background audio," he says. "Most people don’t get to hear and realize how much thought and magic the engineers put into it." (More Disneyland stories.)