Sunday, January 24, 2010

The Happiest Place On Earth.


There is no better way to relive your childhood for day than to go to the happiest place on earth. From the moment you set foot in the park and are surrounded by children and their parents taking in the magic, you can’t help but travel back in time.

Yesterday, my roommates and I went to Disney World for the day. For me, it was the first time I had ever been without my parents, and, as silly as it sounds, it was extremely odd taking it all in without them. To me, Disney was always a place you went as a little kid with your mom and dad, so to go as a big kid was a totally different experience.

Not having our parents there didn’t make us act any more mature. The day started out in Magic Kingdom where we happily skipped through Tomorrowland and onto the Buzz Lightyear ride and Space Mountain. We also had a restful moment on The Carousel of Progress, an all-time favorite of mine. We floated through It’s a Small World and picked out our favorite dolls. Katie judged the quality of all the characters and got really angry that Ariel hides in her Grotto all day.

Then it was off to Animal Kingdom, a park none of us had much experience with. So I played mom and strategically planned our route while we scarfed down some burgers. We waited in the underestimated 20-minute line for Dinosaur and listened to Katie freak out about the potential scariness of the ride. But we forced her on and she nearly broke my hand off. The resulting picture was by far one of the highlights of the day: both Benny and Suzanne have looks of shocked surprise at the attacking T-Rex and Katie and I are cowering in fear (I’m pretty sure my one free hand was covering my head). We all had a blast on Everest for the first time, and we even sucked it up and rode the Rapids. Of course, I was the only one who got wet. Suzanne said it was because she willed the water away. We also saw tons of fun animals on the safari.

After much inappropriateness on the bus back to Magic Kingdom and many resulting laughs, we all had gotten our ab workout for the day. We finished out the park with much depression that my favorite ride, Splash Mountain was closed, and navigated our way through the mass exodus of people on our way out of the park.

We finished out the day at Epcot to see Illumination. It was the perfect ending to the day. I stood there with my head facing straight up, chocolate all over my nose from my ice cream cone, in complete awe of the fireworks. I felt like I was five years old again and I couldn’t have been happier. Sometimes when you’re growing up, you need to stop and remember what it was like to be a kid. You need to skip through Disney World with chocolate on your face with your best friends and pretend like you don’t have a care in the world. Because if you pretend hard enough, they just might disappear.



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