Day 4
After two long days in the parks, where standing in lines for hours on end is tougher on our backs than riding a bike all day, it was time for a day off. For dinner, we went to the Hoop-De-Doo Revue, an intentionally-cheesy dinner theater at the campground. Because it’s Disney, the performers were quite good, but I had a surprisingly-difficult time taking proper advantage of the all-you-can-eat southern cooking.
Day 5
I still felt overly-full when going to bed, but I had no indication that my stomach would wake me up an hour or two later, and allow me to only get about five steps away from our tent before vomiting at the edge of our campsite. Unlike when Rett suffered similar misfortune at a New Zealand campground, it wasn’t a one-and-done for me. I was back out into the freezing night an hour or two later, hoping that for my second round I wasn’t kneeling in the scene of my first crime. Afterward, as I curled shaking uncontrollably on the cold campground toilet, it became clear that my body decided it needed to immediately flush the entirety of my digestive tract, by any route necessary.
When morning came around, I was able to eat some breakfast, but it was quickly clear that I didn’t have the energy for much else, so this would be a second day off from theme-park visiting. I essentially spent the entire day laying inside our tent, occasionally dozing, and (in the strongest sign of my incapacitation), not even reading anything on my phone or listening to music. It was another quite cold day, so our $25 space heater, which had already easily paid for itself, became even more invaluable. Also, the schedule flexibility that our retired life grants us again proved its worth.
Day 6
I was feeling considerably better two mornings after my pukefest, so decided to execute yesterday’s plan a day later with a visit to the Magic Kingdom. A fun thing about staying at the campground is that instead of taking a bus to the Magic Kingdom, you take a boat! The lake was calm enough that my stomach had no issues, and the short lines of morning led to an ill-advised (though ultimately vindicated) decision to dive right in with Space Mountain as our first ride.

Overall it was my least-favorite park of the four, though undoubtedly my condition colored my impression a bit. But it’s definitely the most kid-focused, and also the most well-worn. The designers are understandably in a bit of a trap, “forced” to keep old attractions running due to the chain of nostalgia that has parents bringing their kids to experience the same magic they felt as themselves 25 (and then 50) years earlier.

The “Beauty and the Beast” area in Fantasyland is a relatively new section, so of course one of the best, especially for a girl who wants adventure in the great wide somewhere. That’s where we had a fancy “character dining experience” (at lunchtime). Unfortunately it was a bit of a chore getting down my rich French food, but thankfully Rett enjoyed it enough for both of us.









For days we had been able to see some pretty great fireworks above the Magic Kingdom, just by walking a few steps from our campsite. But seeing them from where they’re meant to be seen, directly in front of Cinderella’s Castle, was easily worth staking out our spot 90 minutes in advance (and honestly sitting on the ground was about all I was capable of after the long day anyway).

When we saw Park Ridge’s fireworks with family last 4th of July, while they were fun and impressive, I commented how they had absolutely no choreography; it seems like they just picked shells off a shelf randomly and then fired them off in sequence. Apparently Disney heard my commentary, because I went from seeing the least-choreographed fireworks of my life to the most-choreographed. Projection-mapping on the castle merged seamlessly with lasers, lights, and blasts at castle-level, which merged with the big boys high above, all perfectly timed with the music and augmenting the themes and stories being told. It was an especially emotional experience for Rett, and even for me it was plenty on its own to make our visit to the Magic Kingdom worth it.

A few weeks ago, a couple of the internal baffles on our sleeping pad tore, making a big bulge near my head that would only get worse with time. Up until then, the Exped Dura 5R Duo had been by far the best sleeping pad we’ve ever owned, more comfortable than many beds we sleep on, and without a single leak over nearly two years of use (even with the bulge, I inflated it 6 days ago and haven’t needed to touch it since). It comes with a 5 year warranty, but I was still surprised when I contacted Exped and they offered to replace it! They were even willing to work with me through the challenge of shipping to us while in motion, and our lengthy stay at Disney provided an opportunity. Unfortunately I hadn’t heard anything from them for more than a week, when they just said it would be shipped, and with only a couple days left before we moved on, I was losing hope and wrote back this morning for any updates. While in line for “Pirates of the Caribbean”, I got an email saying it would be delivered today, and when I clicked on the tracking, it had been delivered to the office 7 minutes ago. Hooray, and thanks for the amazing service, Exped!
Day 7
Throughout our week at Disney World, we haven’t observed a single piece of political gear being worn. Given how many people we’ve seen, that’s extremely unusual, and I assumed that Disney having a rule against it was the only way it could be possible. But no, apparently everyone coming to Disney simply wants to escape the real world and feel the magic, and chooses on their own to avoid ugliness and confrontation.
Disney World itself also does an incredible (shameful?) job of running right down the cultural middle, neither woke nor regressive, in what can only be a carefully calibrated effort to sell to the widest audience possible. Yes, some places do the paper straws, but finding a recycling bin next to the garbage bin is relatively rare, and certainly there is no composting. They have their own extensive mass transit network, but it’s mostly entirely conventional buses, with no electrification (or even CNG). It essentially seems like the goal is to be able to welcome visitors from any state in the country without making any of them say “whoa, this is strange, how does this work, Martha?!”
Epcot is the park that makes it most clear how disappointed Walt Disney would be with the capitulated conservatism of the corporation that he birthed. After all, in Walt’s original conception, “EPCOT” was intended as an actual (E)xperimental (C)ommunity, a testbed for new concepts in organizing societies, where real humans would live and work. After his death, the corporation watered that vision down into a mere theme park, a toy model of his actual plan, but it still stands as a marker that reveals how his progressive vision has been continually downgraded. “Spaceship Earth”, the ride inside Epcot’s iconic sphere, is literally an ode to human progress, showing the stepwise work of humans across millennia cooperating to make things better. Walt Disney clearly intended to be a leader in the continuation of that progress, but Walt Disney World in 2025 lags well behind.

Despite the slowdown in progress (or maybe because of it?), Epcot was the most emotionally-affecting of the four parks for me. When I visited as a 10-year-old nerd, the park was only five years old, so its techno-optimist representation of the future (monorails! geodesic spheres!) truly felt like The Future to me. Flying cars must be right around the corner! Now nearly 40 years later, I’m living in that future, and while there have undoubtedly been a tremendous stream of technological advances, it doesn’t feel like “the future”, it just feels like “now”. So it was somehow inspiring to return to this nostalgic, obsolete version of the future, and feel again through that 10-year-old’s eyes his excitement to be alive now and able to be a part of what comes next.
Plus, I just really love the things that send pulses of water arcing over your head, which live on in a Moana-themed exhibit about the water cycle.


Even with Princesses and rat-themed rides, Epcot is definitely Disney World’s most “adult” park, and in the “foreign countries” section, we saw many friend groups walking around with $13 beers in hand like it was a street fair, the first time we’ve really seen any significant amount of drinking. It seems Disney strategically prices their drinks to prevent/limit drunkenness, but for whatever reason that wasn’t limiting people here. I overheard someone theorize that the Disney Marathon (happening this weekend) gave participants park passes and unlimited drink tickets, so we weren’t the only ones to notice. Before this, what I had noticed was a complete lack of loutish or belligerent behavior (like would be normal to encounter at Six Flags), and that didn’t even really happen at Epcot, but there were definitely some drunk-ass people stumbling around!
Those foreign countries were a bit more cartoon-y than their counterparts at Animal Kingdom, but one of the cool things was how Disney hires immigrants from those countries to work within them. In the “Venice” mask shop, the clerk and a couple of customers were naturally speaking with each other in Italian, and that’s certainly something that will make you actually feel transported!


Day 8
We had tickets that allowed five days of park visits within a 9 day period, but due to my unexpected illness (I was probably back up to 85% yesterday at Epcot), we would now need to do three consecutive park days to fit within the 8 nights of camping we had booked. That sounded like a lot of work, and with the Disney Marathon happening on our 8th day, that would likely slow down getting to a park (it took a long time to get to Epcot yesterday due to the Half Marathon). It would make the most sense to go to The Magic Kingdom, because the boat wouldn’t be affected by marathon traffic, but the marathon traffic would make it difficult for everyone else to get there, so lines would be minimal for the first half of the day. But it felt like we had done everything we wanted to do at The Magic Kingdom (though Rett would have gone again just for the fireworks). So we added a day to our campground reservation, and took another day off. Laundry (at the campground bathroom building) was the day’s big task.

Day 9
Even with The Magic Kingdom eliminated, it was still tough to choose which of the three other parks to revisit. We settled on Animal Kingdom, because we had spent the least time there (it has the shortest hours at this time of year), we had only done the Avatar Flight of Passage ride once, and hadn’t done the Safari expedition.
With most other stuff checked off, and the smaller, weekday, post-Marathon crowds, we managed to get on Flight of Passage three more times, and thankfully 3D got better (but still far from perfect; it seems that getting a seat closest to the middle of the giant screen helps a lot). The safari was also excellent; it felt like a slightly-tamer Jurassic Park, because you get driven around in a truck right through fields where African animals (giraffes, rhinos, wildebeests) are freely wandering! I was even more impressed with the city re-creations than I was the first time, since the chill crowds and expansive areas made it feel nearly like visiting a real city, where you could stumble upon a cafe and say “hey, want to get a drink here?”

But the best bit of extending one more day had nothing to do with the park; when we got back, a very valuable check that we’d had forwarded to the campground from our virtual mailbox was finally waiting for us at registration when the bus returned us to the campground! Phew!
For our final bit of joyful sadness at Disney World, we walked up to the lakefront where the campground pipes in music from the Magic Kingdom fireworks show across the water. You can’t actually see the castle, and it was surprising how far behind the castle the big fireworks are when seen from the “wrong angle” (they look seamlessly-combined from the “right angle” inside the park!), but it was still an amazing and emotional show. It’s still unbelievable to me that so many American (and international!) families can afford a Disney vacation, but I now I better understand the draw that causes them to drain their bank accounts!
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