DIY Disney Monorail Scavenger Hunt Cards

I've always had a love-affair with the monorail system in Walt Disney World. It's magical in it's own right, and such a cool way to travel! As a kid I longed to stay in the Contemporary Resort so we could see the monorail swishing through the concourse on a regular basis.

And as a kid, we always played a monorail version of the license plate game, keeping track of the different colors we'd seen. Today there are twelve monorails operating in WDW. Rarely are they all on-line at once. But if you are lucky, you could see most of the following: Red, Orange, Yellow, Gold, Peach, Coral, Green, Lime, Blue, Teal, Silver and Black.

In the spirit of making the most of our wait time (there can be A LOT of wait time in Disney, depending on your travel dates), I created these scratch-off cards for the kids in our party. I used a heavy card stock to print these, and I would recommend making several extras as you may need them for those adults kids who tend to lose theirs in the parks, or for a learning curve with the scratch-off paint.

Then, I used this tutorial from Artmind to make scratch-off paint. A couple of tips regarding the scratch-off paint: 1.) It bubbled up when I applied it, but most of the bubbles went away as it dried. The more you agitate the paint, the more bubbles you will get. 2.) A lighter color of paint is recommended. I used copper and it didn't scratch off cleanly - as you can see in the photo below. The gold was much better.

To create the actual card, I used a scanned image of the monorail from a promotional Disney flyer. You may want to clean up the edges of the image in Photoshop. To create the different colored monorails, I selected the color stripe so it could be changed to the different colors I needed. Due to copyright laws, I can do this for my own personal use, but not, I am sorry to say, to distribute it to others. Therefore, I cannot offer you a PDF as I would like to. I can, however, refer you to my March 5th post about how to select an image and create a PNG from your own photo, and this tutorial on how to select an area of a scanned image in Photoshop and change its color. It was much easier than it sounds. Give it a try. And remember that if you are scaling down your image significantly, you will not have to be so worried about little detail areas that don't look right on a larger scale. Some of them just disappear. Don't stress yourself out about the little things.

Of course, it was only logical that each kid got a pressed penny to use as a scratch-off tool! The edge was perfect for removing the paint. I hope you give this scavenger hunt a try. We had a blast using them. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust.