Back in 1989, my boyfriend at the time, Paul, and I decided to fly down Florida to see my Dad. At the time my father was a butler for a woman who would winter in West Palm Beach and he offered a bed for a few days. We decided to hit EPCOT for one of the days we were down there.

It was the worst travel decision I have ever made.

We arrived at Florida without a hitch. The night before we went to the car rental agency whose name I didn’t “nationally” recognize but was dirt cheap. I didn’t care. I was going to EPCOT!

You see, I grew up in a family of 5 kids. The possibility of my parents wrangling us unruly rug rats all together and make the trip to Florida was extremely remote. While I heard stories of how awesome the park rides were from lucky kids in the playground I would have to be satisfied with watching Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on CBC, and remotely marvel at the shots of the parks in the fancy title sequence. I yearned

The morning of our big day we got up real early and jumped into the car. The trip would take us close to 5 hours to get to EPCOT along the interstate. While we weren’t going to make it for rope drop, we’d be there before the mid day rush, no problem.

Somewhere along the way, something dragged itself out of the swamp and decided to lay across the warm highway cement. We never really saw what it was, but we felt it as our front passenger side wheel ran over it and it flew up into the engine compartment, where it dislodged something important. The engine started to run like it had cancerous asthma. We limped into EPCOT’s massive parking lot and Paul called the rental company. After a shouting match ensued, the company said they would replace the car but someone had to be at the front gates of the park to meet the representative, driven in from some suburb of Orlando.

We went into the park but didn’t do anything for fear of missing the agent and be stranded at EPCOT. After the fourth hour went by and we had had our 5th snarkfest at each other (of course after the second hour we resolved ourselves not to leave the spot we were in), the rep showed up with a mechanic and a replacement car. After an hour, keys and car were exchanged. We headed back into the park.

By this time it was early afternoon and the place was packed. Rides and pavilions were experiencing an hour’s wait to get in. We wandered some more and decided that we should choose one ride at least.

We made the obvious choice: the iconic Spaceship Earth it was!

If you know your early EPCOT history, Spaceship Earth was notorious for breaking down, which was part of its charm I guess. We got half way up into the sphere and of course, klunk… we stopped. For 45 minutes. We were stopped in front of a teenage girl who lived in an underwater research facility who was fixing her jet ski while video conferencing her boyfriend somewhere on dry land. In retrospect today, I hope to god she had a good data plan. The last 15 minutes, the audio and animatronics just shut off and we sat in the dark. Then, we moved forward in the dark. I never saw the original ride in its entirety.

After a large argument as we exited the sphere, we confided to each other that the day couldn’t get any worse and we had to battle traffic on the way home. We decided to go home early.

About 2 hours from West Palm, the replacement car started to shudder. And shudder. We stopped by the side of the road and let it cool. After getting home the two of us were barely talking to each other.

You can see how my view of Disney was directly and indirectly turned sour.

However, my first moments inside Magic Kingdom erased all the bad –

But that’s another blog post…