Yesterday I went to Animal Kingdom with Christina and Greg and we had a perfect Disney day.
Elements of Disney perfection:
First, the weather has to be mostly nice, as in not sweltering, not chilly, not stormy. Yesterday was hot enough that I could get soaked on Kali River Rapids (and I did!) and still be perfectly comfortable wandering around the park in my soaked clothing, but it wasn’t so hot that there was ever a moment when I thought, “ugh, this is miserable.”
Second, the crowds have to be reasonable, and the lines, ditto. Yesterday was more than reasonable. We paid extra for the Lightning Lane pass for the Avatar ride, where you’re flying on a dragon over the Pandora landscape, but when we arrived we were about ten minutes too early for our time window. Meanwhile the stand-by line was only 30 minutes long, so we joined that line and wound up riding the Avatar ride — in Christina’s opinion, the best ride in all the theme parks — twice! (For context, back in 2018, when I took Rory and his girlfriend to Animal Kingdom, the line for Avatar was never less than 3 hours long and we didn’t get to go on it at all.) Yesterday, the line for the Safari ride was about twenty minutes, and the Everest roller coaster and Kali River Rapids were both close to walk-ons, ie you never really stop moving in the line. Not only was none of the lines long enough to get tedious, none of them even lasted long enough to start playing games.
Third, it helps a lot to be on the same wavelength as the people you’re with. Christina, Greg and I were like a well-oiled Disney machine, with exactly the same ideas about what we wanted to do and the appropriate order in which to do those things. We went Avatar, Avatar, Safari ride, snack (Dole whip ice cream for me), Everest, Kali River Rapids, ordered lunch, the Asia walk through exhibit with plenty of time in the aviary (the best part, IMO), a little souvenir shopping, picked up & ate lunch, then home. We were at the park from 9-2, approximately, which is about the perfect length of time in my opinion. Long enough to make it feel worthwhile, not long enough to feel exhausting.
Bonus points if the food is good, triple bonus points if the food is not just good, but excellent. My dole whip was delicious, but my lunch was amazing. We ate at the Satu’li Canteen quick service restaurant, aka the Disney version of fast food. I had a chimichurri beef and wood-grilled chicken rice bowl, with crunchy vegetable slaw, (the gluten-free version, of course) which was delicious, although helped a lot by the hot sauce Christina carries around with her, but for dessert I had this:
It’s chocolate mousse with raspberry on a tiny flourless chocolate cake and it was incredibly good. 10/10. Maybe 11/10. So good that the restaurant is my new favorite restaurant at Disney. Counter service! It cost $6.29! (Which I think is a really weird price, tbh, but I also think is an incredibly good price for a dessert that pretty and that tasty.)
More bonus points at Animal Kingdom, in particular, if you get to see some cool things. I posted a video of the baby elephant to Instagram so you can see it from the sidebar, but the lions, the anteater, the komodo dragon, and the birds in the aviary were also fun.
I worried, a little, before we went, whether Animal Kingdom was a park that held too much nostalgia for me. Last year, when I went to the Magic Kingdom, I wrote about how it was hard because of the time I’d spent there with Rory when he was little. Nostalgia isn’t grief, of course. It’s possible to remember the pleasant past without getting stuck in the pain of the present. But it can definitely trigger the pain. And Animal Kingdom is much more nostalgic than Magic Kingdom for me because Rory was so fascinated by animals, and once it opened, it quickly became our favorite park. Six-year-old Rory would have adored the Avatar ride. And I couldn’t pause by the anteater and the Komodo dragon without thinking about how thrilled he would have been to have such a great view of them. The anteater, especially.
But that was six-year-old Rory. And six-year-old Rory was already long gone when 25-year-old Rory decided to throw me away. Remembering that helped. And then I had a fun time remembering all the Rorys over the years. Two-year-old Rory was fantastic: solemn, earnest, curious, determined, with the absolute best laugh. Three-year-old Rory was a challenge. I read a lot of parenting books that year, as determination turned into obstinacy. Still a delight, but I had to learn a lot — and change a fair amount, too — to stop the endless power struggles.
Four and five year old Rory, I saw far too little of, IMO. During those years, I was working full-time, taking him down to Santa Cruz on weekends for visitation with his dad. Ugh. I remember the first week of kindergarten, when his teacher sent him home with homework. Worksheets. I looked at them and wanted to cry. Instead, I brought them back into school and told her, “No, we will not be doing these.” And then I mapped our schedule out for her: I got him to pre-care at the school by 7:45 so I could get to work by 9, I left work promptly at 5 — always! — so I could pick him up by 6, we made it home at 6:25, he watched Zoboomafoo for half an hour while I got dinner ready, we finished dinner at 7:15 or so, we did bedtime routine and bath and maybe played a little if there was time, and then I read him stories until he fell asleep. And then on weekends, I took him to his dad. The window in which we could do worksheets was so small, and was inevitably going to steal from the time in which we could actually enjoy our life. No. I was not going to do them, I was not going to make him do them. Fortunately, his teacher sympathized.
Ah, but six-year-old Rory! When he was six, we moved to Santa Cruz. I was still working full-time but remotely, commuting back up to Berkeley one or two days a week at most. He started first grade at the local public school and lasted approximately 8 days. Then I pulled him out. I wonder if I’ve ever written about that before? Talk about an agonizing decision. Talk about a decision that no one in my life remotely agreed with! It was insane. And those were some really hard years, to be honest, as I juggled home-schooling with a full-time job.
I remember them as full of sunshine, though. We had so much fun, we did projects and had adventures and read books and played & played, as I redefined “play” as education for the homeschool program. (It was educational, really!) And yeah, I was chronically exhausted, and always stressed, but he got to keep his sense of curiosity and wonder and… well, peacefulness. After two years, I did manage to get him into the alternative school, which was a much better fit for him.
And then, well… it’s pointless to look back over the years to try to see where they went bad. But it wasn’t awful yesterday to remember delightful two-year-old Rory and charming six-year-old Rory and highly entertaining twelve-year-old Rory and sixteen-year-old Rory who could make me laugh so hard I cried. I’m glad that boy existed in my life, I’m glad we had so many chances to admire the anteaters and the otters at Animal Kingdom. I hope someday he gets to go on the Avatar ride and appreciates it, if not the way he would have as a six-year-old, at least with an awareness of who that six-year-old was.
I did a deep dive into my archives this morning, though, looking for mentions of specific years, specific events, and stumbled upon this: “I’ve had enough practice with grief by now to know that the only way out is through. You don’t get to make the feelings go away by avoiding them. They only go away when you’re finished with them.” My own words from years ago, and what I’ve realized now is that you’re never actually finished. Never. But in the same way that nostalgia is bittersweet, you can miss someone deeply and intensely, and still have an absolutely perfect Disney day.