THE BEST FAMILY TRIP
OF ALL TIME
Teddy, then 11, insisted we go to Disney World. He wasn’t abiding his mother’s posturing about how Disney World would deliver no “sense of mastery” to him. Let’s go!
This would be Ted’s second Disney trip. He had been to Orlando five years previously with his grandmother, sister and me.
The repeat trip turned out to be the greatest family trip of all time. Ted and his siblings, Lucy and Jack, went absolutely nuts for Figment, Miss Piggy and the Ninja Turtles. And Epcot was cool. The kids spent some time on the floor there — Lucy on top of Jack in the Moroccan restaurant lobby, putting him in a full-nelson.
Ted had researched the vacation, using Unofficial Guide to Disney World. (This was 1993, pre-Web.) Teddy devised our personalized Disney itinerary. We got on popular rides at odd hours and walked in counter-intuitive directions. This was before priority passes and VIP lines. This was when America was Sweden.
Prior to the Disney trips, I had been a snob about amusement parks. If an amusement park was new-ish, we weren’t going. It had to be old and rickety. We had gone to Memphis (Avenue) Kiddie Park, Geneva on the Lake, Kennywood in Pittsburgh, and Conneaut Lake Park in Pennsylvania. Conneaut was the best; it had a carnie booth of caged chickens playing tic-tac-toe. You bought corn kernels from a gumball machine and fed the kernels to the chickens, to motivate them to play tic-tac-toe. The contraption was like out of a B.F. Skinner behavioral-science experiment.
Conneaut closed in 2010. Luna Park closed in 1929. (I didn’t make it to that one.) Euclid Beach Park — the classic Cleveland amusement park — closed in 1969. Geauga Lake, for some reason that was never on my radar.
Disney forever.
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Teddy’s itinerary . . . This is just the first page (the next two pages are lost to history). 1993. Typed on a Compaq x386. WordPerfect 3.1.
6 comments
Please briefly explain the enigmatic “….when America was Sweden” remark.
You and yours should visit Seabreeze in the Rochester suburb of Irondequoit. It was always a lot like Euclid Beach in character and is still going strong! Probably a lot like what Euclid Beach would be like in 2025!
My kids maintain that they suffered childhoods of deprivation since we never got them to Disney. The closest they made it was when my employer at the time had a company/family day at 6 Flags. Now grown up, they seem to have not been too negatively affected by this impoverishment.
We went on a slow day. As soon as my daughter got off Small World she got back on. I think we went on it 7 times. Saw it first at the New York Worlds fair. Rocky Point Park was in Warwick Rhode Island. It closed probably 20 years ago. My senior prom was there. They had a banquet hall then we all went on the rides in our tuxedos. They had a baseball park there where Babe Ruth played on Sundays when the Red Sox could not play in Boston because of the blue laws.
Compaq x386, on WordPerfect 3.1
An 11-year-old wrote that itinerary?
What became of him as an adult?
Ted, thanks. Will change to “Compap x386.” (Originally I had written “Commodore 64.”)
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