Memory Day: Disney World

The last major family vacation we ever took was a week-long trip to Florida in August of 1994. Neither my sister or I were very excited about this trip -- she was only days away from leaving for her freshman year at UVa and would rather have been hanging out with her friends doing nothing, and I was going on the trip directly from a week-long stay at a Boy Scout Science and Energy camp without any time in the middle to simply be at home and recharge.

The vacation didn't get off to a rousing start, despite the novelty of taking the auto-train. For the unenlightened, the auto-train isn't an electronic system to keep the train on or pretty close to the proper tracks -- it's a direct train from Lorton, Virginia to Florida that will also ship your car down so you don't have to rent one. Evidently this trip was popular enough to warrant daily runs.

On the train overnight, I slept with my mouth slightly open, and when I woke up the next day, all of my teeth had shaken loose from the train vibrations and I could move them with my tongue. I was in pain for the first two days, and ate a squeeze packet of cream cheese for breakfast, because everything else required chewing.

Once in Florida, we spent a day at each of the three big parks, Universal Studios, the Magic Kingdom, and Epcot Center. Universal easily had the best rides (and the longest lines), and going to the Magic Kingdom while you're in high school is about as fun as playing Sorry! with two people -- I think we hit Space Mountain twice and then spent the rest of the day looking cooly bored with our caps on backwards, surrounded by tots.

More important to a hormonal teen was the eye candy index (ECI) of each park. Everyone in the Magic Kingdom was 4, which automatically disqualified it from the rankings. Universal Studios easily had the hottest girls, but Epcot Center was filled with all the European tourists with fun accents.

On days when we weren't at the park, we hit a Gulf-side beach, got rained out while playing mini golf, toured a mall, and walked across the campus of the University of Central Florida, which looked just like every other college campus my sister had toured in the year before.

Finally, the week was up and we returned home to a REAL vacation -- staying home alone with the parents at work, watching I Love Lucy reruns and eating entire pans of bacon for breakfast.

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