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Visiting Disney World was an annual experience of my youth. For decades, my family would spend a long October weekend at the Fort Wilderness camping resort. We'd run around the parks and skip through the numerous resorts and restaurants sprinkled throughout the Lake Buena Vista campus.
The Disney parks somehow felt futuristic and cutting-edge while also being nostalgic and magical. The trips made such an impression that I still find myself every September doing house chores with the animated "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" playing in the background or watching YouTube videos of park workers setting up the fall decorations.
So when my wife and I started taking our boys to the parks, I fell into the nostalgia trap of hoping their experiences would be just like mine. Time and economics had other plans.
I never appreciated the high level of planning it takes to visit a theme park until I became a parent. Ride line length and bad weather were my only concerns as a kid — with some minor concerns about food.
But as a parent, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of pre-visit requirements.
When you take pride in your theme park survival knowledge, nothing will humble you faster than trying to navigate the Dos and Don'ts of visiting a Disney park in the 21st century. Visiting a park these days requires weeks of planning, constant communication with everyone traveling in your group, and downloading phone apps just to enjoy certain parts of the park.
Further complications include things like Lightning Lane passes, blackout dates, rope drops, ride reservations, and premium annual passes — all things I never had to think about that have since become standard operating procedures for park visits.
My favorite part of visiting the Magic Kingdom used to be seeing the castle once I got through the front gate. Now, it's the bar stool at the resort because it doesn't require a reservation (yet).
In addition to the annual October visits, I frequently visited the parks through school field trips or group events like Grad Nite. I have memories of racing through the parks with my friends, sprinting from ride to attraction with minimal crowds to slow us down, feeling like those feral kids from "Pinocchio" before they got turned into donkeys.
The sheer volume of the Disney park crowds these days makes that notion impossible. Our boys have fewer opportunities to behave like wild, unaccompanied minors.
This reality doesn't bother me too much, especially since I get the feeling park security would be less tolerant of unaccompanied minors than when I was a kid.
Of course, none of these differences mean anything to my kids. I have no idea how they really feel about visiting the parks, but I know they enjoy it, and I'm getting better at letting them have their own life experiences without comparing them to mine.
That's fine because those comparisons didn't matter to me as a kid, either. Historians refer to the 1970s and 1980s as Disney's Dark Age, the years when the company produced some of its darkest films and the parks were not the IP-heavy juggernauts of today. But that didn't matter to a late-stage Generation X kid who watched "Robin Hood" and "Winnie the Pooh" until the VCR ate the tapes.
Visiting the parks felt like stepping into a pocket dimension where all the lands and characters showcased by Disney could be seen and touched. The Disney I experienced was the correct Disney, just as the Disney my boys currently experience is also the correct Disney.
Plus, I can feel them rolling their eyes whenever we talk about how much the parks have changed since we were kids.
