In the winter of 1979, when I was 8, my family set off from Boston for a vacation at Disney World. On our first day, when the monorail picked us up at our hotel, the ride felt so weightless that I was certain we were flying. After discovering Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a roller coaster just scary enough to make me feel brave, I screamed my way through it 13 times over the next four days, memorizing each twist and dip. Somewhere in my childhood home resides a family photograph of the five of us laughing and clinging to one another after a turn on Space Mountain. Even though minutes after the shutter clicked, my mother fainted from the shock of the jerking ride, and years later my family would fracture in all kinds of unforeseen ways, in that moment, in the moist Florida heat, we were happy.
While I only went on that one memorable Disney vacation, my husband, who grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, took annual trips to Disneyland. He remembers the thrill of being dismissed early from school so his family could beat the weekend traffic down to Anaheim. He maintains that working up the courage to ride the Matterhorn was his first serious accomplishment—and spurred a lifelong love of adventure sports.
So last summer, when we headed to Disneyland with our 4-year-old son, Carlos, 14-month-old daughter, Clara, and my mother-in-law, we wondered what memories would follow our kids home. We knew they were too young to fully appreciate the park or even go on many of the rides, but we still wanted to give them a taste of what we both remembered as childhood bliss. Love it or not, Disney has always provided something that other amusement parks don't—a sense of being sealed off from reality, embedded in a vast fantasy world where cartoon characters mingle with mortals and castles cast shadows on Main Street. But we wondered if it was still possible for us grown-ups—the ones shelling out the money, sprinting back to the hotel for a pacifier, and maneuvering the stroller through the throngs—to experience that magic.
On our first morning in the park, it took a while for the kids to get used to the overwhelming setting—the din of crowds and piped-in music, the scenery that changed from old West (a.k.a. Frontierland) to space age (a.k.a. Tomorrowland) in just a few steps. Not surprisingly, Carlos gravitated toward the low-tech attractions like Tarzan's Treehouse, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, and the King Arthur Carrousel. In the late afternoon, our flagging son slumped against his dad for the final ride of the day: a journey on the old-fashioned railroad that rolls around the park and through fading dioramas of the Grand Canyon and the Primeval World. When I met them afterward, Carlos ran into my arms and proclaimed that he'd gone to the Grand Canyon. I'm pretty sure he actually believed that he had.
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