Neck fans, complimentary water, and bringing our own water bottle to double as a souvenir all sound like pretty solid options at Disney World when trying to stay cool — but get ready, because we’re adding one more to the mix!
Ahhhh, cooling patches!
With as hot as the spring and summer have been in Disney World this year and several rides struggling to stay open all day long backing up the wait times, it’s no wonder we’re all looking for any extra ways we can think of to stay cool. While ducking indoors for a show or to eat only works for a few occasions, we may have uncovered another solution to add to the mix when standing out in the blazing sun in unavoidable.
If you can think of an accessory to bring with you or purchase while you’re in Disney World’s parks to do your best at staying cool, you can bet we’ve tried them all — or so we thought! We recently discovered another alternative that we’re not seeing many folks use in the parks so we decided we were the guinea pigs for the job!
Our latest way we’re beating the heat!
On a latest visit out to Magic Kingdom, we thought the extremely hot temperatures were just the right conditions to test out our latest cooling obsession — cooling patches!
©Amazon
To our surprise, these simple things worked really well! We ordered ours from Amazon and they came in a box of 20 which gave us plenty of opportunity to try them out over and over again. If you’ve not had a chance to see these before, the cooling patches are small strips of gel stuck to a gauze like mesh on one side and the other side that sticks to your skins is covered in a peel-away plastic until ready for use. They each come individually packaged making them lightweight, and easy to pack multiple with you for yourself or your entire family.
Once we opened our package and peeled away the plastic coating on the side meant to stick to us, that’s when the hard part began. Just kidding, but in all seriousness, choosing the right place for the most optimal cooling proved to be more of a challenge then we initially thought! We tried these cooling patches in a variety of places including our foreheads and on our upper chest, but the best spots we settled on was across the backs of our necks or on the inside of our shirts at just about the middle to lower back area. This also helped conceal them a bit more (along with staving off a few of the stares we started to get walking around with a strip on our foreheads). But hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it… right?!
Opening the package
The cooling strips on their own have a mild menthol scent to them like vapo-rub or an icy hot patch would but there’s never a heated sensation to them. They’re squishy and fun to play with and don’t worry if you don’t get the exact spot to your liking on the first try because we were able to peel them off and stick them back to us in another spot before they stopped loosing their ability to stick well.
The full patch!
We thought they were a great alternative to keeping cool without something bulky to carry around OR a soaking wet cooling towel that you have to stow away even when it’s not fully dried. We also thought they were fairly durable for a moderate amount of theme park fun and we didn’t experience ours peeling up or trying to come off while we were going about our normal day in the park. Or only hesitation with these is that they’re actually much longer than you would think! They’re surprisingly long.We were expecting them to be shorter and maybe more child sized because of the cartoonish packaging, but there’s a chance you could cut them down into shorter strips if you wanted them to fit more comfortably somewhere like your wrist or forehead.
Overall, we’d honestly opt to grab these guys to pack into our bags over a fan since you don’t have to recharge them and they’re disposable once they’ve lost their effect. We also found that after opening them out of their packaging and immediately before applying them to your body if you were to shake them back and forth (like a developing photo) it helped to intensify that immediate cooling sensation and made it more profound. Admittedly though, we’re pretty adapted to the Florida heat and intense summers so if you’re someone who’s coming to Disney World from out of state, you could feel the cooling patches effects more effectively than what we were able to.
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What other cooling devices have you used in Disney World to beat the rising temps? Tell us what has worked best for you in the comments below!
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I’m curious as to how long they last? How often do you need to replace the patch?
Have you seen the Mickey version? I have been buying them at Walgreens for years but never thought to try them in Florida!