2024, Family, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized

Amusement Park Blues

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Our daughter phoned the other day to tell me that her friends are shocked and appalled that we never took her to an amusement park when she was little. To make up for this neglect, Daughter and three friends are planning a trip to Disney World next April for Daughter’s birthday.

We live rather a long way from any amusement parks. Even the Cities was kind of far to go just for that. When we traveled, we visited family, and they lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There aren’t that many amusement parks in those locations. Summer was for work, summer activities, and gardening. We just weren’t that family that has big summer vacations. Husband remembers being unutterably bored on his family vacations, usually taken by car. My parents drove to Florida when I was about 12, but there was no Disney World then.

Two of the friends going on the April trip did college internships at Disney World, and they are devising elaborate spread sheets for daily schedules and activities. We agreed to atone for our neglect by contributing to lodging expenses, so it is shaping up to be a pretty fun trip.

What kind of vacations did your family go on? Any vacations with friends?

23 thoughts on “Amusement Park Blues”

  1. Very low budget trips. Camping trips mostly, pulling a pop-up camper. We went to Cape Cod one year, the Grand Tetons another year, and South Padre Island and Monterey, Mexico on a third trip. Otherwise, mostly state park camping or canoe trips with Dad. Mom might have done one or two trips with us–can’t recall. But she was a great campfire cook.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  2. I guess we were a lot like your family. I have a very vague memory of a trip to Yellowstone when I was too young to remember much about it. I remember sleeping in our van in a sleeping bag on the floor and feeling anxious. That’s about it. We took a family Christmas trip to Hawaii when I was 15. I enjoyed that. I love swimming and the ocean was amazing. I met a boy from Canada and had a little crush on him. We went to Makaha Beach and went “body surfing.” My little brother surfed himself onto the beach and just laid there face down in the sand. Mom panicked a little but he was just feeling blissed out. I remember it rained almost every day around noon, then cleared up again and was lovely. I remember the air smelled good. When we came back, right after the New Year, the ground here was frozen, the snow was old and dirty. We had to go back to school. It was the first time I ever remember feeling depressed.

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  3. I don’t recall any vacations until we went to Colorado for those three summers in the Trailer Court. From our home base in Greeley, we would do side trips to places like Colorado Springs, Central City which had an Opera House, and Yellowstone, where we got a cabin. On one trip we didn’t spring for a motel, but slept in the car. Mom and Dad basically sat up in the front seat, I was on the back seat, and they had two small suitcases on the back seat floor (because of that hump in the middle) with blankets over them for my little sis.

    When I was older, we did lots of trips back to the mountains, I remember the YMCA Camp… Also Bejidji and Chicago.

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    1. I visited Central City once in 1967. It’s an old gold mining town, but by the time wasband and I visited, it was pretty much a tourist town. We did pan for gold, but didn’t find any, but we did see the painting of The Face on the Bar Room Floor of the Teller House.

      At the beautiful old Opera House we saw a melodrama, the title of which was “The History of Sweet Shy Anne.” It was subtitled “She was Chaste on the Plain, and Won in the West.”

      Prior to the performance the audience was coached in oohing the hero, awing the heroine, and hissing at the villain. It was a fun and memorable evening.

      I just looked up Central City and was horrified to discover that there now are five casinos there. Even worse, neighboring Black Hawk has twelve.

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  4. My family went on a car trip one summer when I was about 5 or 6. One of my father’s cousins lived in Orange County, and I think we stayed at their house, though I don’t recall a lot of details. There were many motels along the way, and my sister and I collected the miniature bars of soap from the rooms and wrote the names of the motels on the wrappers.

    We went to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. I recall going on the flying Dumbo ride. We had our pictures taken with a donkey at Knott’s Berry Farm.

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  6. I have avoided Disneyland three times. The ticket price would have been wasted on me.

    when I was 9 we drove to Sheldon WA to visit my mother’s delightful brothers and undelightful mother. When I was 12 my mother and sister and I rode trains on railroad passes to visit again THAT grandmother my mother’s two sisters and families and my brother in the navy. We once drove up to Thunder Bay when it was Fort-Port, Fort William Port Arthur. I think that was it. Looking back it is sort of a miracle we found the money and someone to handle farm for that trip. My normally tense father was astonishingly relaxed on trips, even for a few hours at Gooeberry.

    Clyde

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  7. I don’t recall any family vacations, except for the occasional weekend camping trip.

    Nevertheless, my sister and I did go on vacations, sometimes together, and sometimes separately. One of the together vacations was a week in a small cottage on the shore of the Baltic Sea together with two other kids from the boarding school. I was eight, my sister five, and the two other kids, a boy of twelve and a thirteen year old girl; they would hide out in the dunes and smoke cigarettes while Randi and would play in the water. I have no idea who the woman who owned the cottage and who looked after us was.

    I was sent off to England and Ireland by myself when I was ten years old to attend the wedding of one of my mother’s brothers. A couple of years later, mom and my sister traveled to Drogheda, mom’s home town, for a month long visit. Dad and I stayed behind in Stubbekøbing, and went fishing every chance we got.

    When I was fourteen I spent a week camping with my girl scout troupe on the island of Tåsinge, and the following summer, one of our neighbors invited me along on their family’s road trip to Jutland. They had a daughter,Lene, a year younger the me, and a son, Kield, two years older than me. The three of us sat in the back seat of their Volvo station wagon.

    The summer of 1959, I bicycled with three girlfriends across the islands of Sealand and Funen, and the northern part of Jutland, staying in youth hostels along the way. The following year, Lene and I bicyled through the southern part of Sealand and the islands of Falster and Lolland, again staying in youth hostels.

    As an adult I’ve vacationed both alone and with friends.

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  8. when I was a kid, my dad worked construction building bridges for my mom‘s dad and it was not conducive to vacations because summer was the busy time for building bridges

    he would take us up on the weekend in June or July drop us off and head off to work, leaving us with the cousins and the Anson uncles in the rented cottages of Detroit Lakes. It was glorious hanging out with the cousins learning how to water ski fish for sunny and get into Huckleberry Finn kind of mischief my mom’s family on the other hand had a beautiful mile long white sand beach on 200 acres, but they were such a bunch of backbiting snarky not fun people that we didn’t spend any time there my dad worked for my mom’s dad, and it was a bad scene all around until he quit, which was a different kind of problem

    when I was 16, I jumped in the VW van with my brother and my girlfriend, and drove out to pick up one of my buddies who had moved to Salt Lake City to go out and do the Rocky Mountain and West Coast holiday that I had always dreamed of and it was glorious it was an eight week long journey that included Yellowstone glacier Banff, Jasper and Highway one running all the way from Washington state down to Los Angeles. That was the first time I did my long term travel ride solo back because we were having such a good time. We stayed out in Los Angeles until 48 hours before we were doing Minneapolis and I had to basically drive from LA straight through the Minneapolis I believe it took 27 hours , no one else drove

    my first wife and I separated when my kids were three and one and my favorite part of parenting at that time was taking them on vacation in the summer. We would head out to Yellowstone primarily and go camping my friend who had been living in Alaska move back to Minneapolis for a short while then out to Montana where he bought a grand hotel in livingstone which is one of the coolest cities in Montana, and that became our regular spot to go out for skiing in the winter and on route to Yellowstone in the summer also had enough money to be able to do Disney usually twice a year covering Christmas vacation and one more time when we would figure out how to squeeze in along week kids we would go back to their hotel rooms for sleep. We would get up at 6 o’clock in the morning. Get off to the park and stay until midnight when they closed , all the rides and stuff that there was it was very incredible. We went to Alaska our last fling as my business ran into trouble and I ran out of money and my girls complain that they were about three and one when we went to Alaska and they don’t remember it, but they enjoyed the pictures showing that they were there , they did get to go to Disney where we had points in a vacation club that I ended up having to sell, but those points would get us two weeks in glorious hotels in Orlando on Disney properties along with tickets to the theme parks I have been on a legitimate vacation for more than an extended weekend in about 20 years I enjoy my trip to every year and hope to be able to get more than that in the near future. I’d love to get back to the Canadian Rockies again and I love the west.

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  9. No vacations with friends. But before second year of college my best friend’s parents ask me to drive him to Grand Forks for start of his football training season. Another friend rode along. We had the parents’ very good car. It was only a two day trip for two of us, one day and evening for three of us. We bonded strongly, now closer to adulthood talking more deeply. But we have never been together again except two of our weddings and I have spent only 3-4 days with other than the weddings.

    Clyde

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  10. Rise and Shine, Baboons from JacAnon; I don’t ever remember going to an Amusement Park, with the exception of the decrepit Arnolds Park at Okoboji. After that experience I thought all amusement parks were run down heaps with half the rides un-ride-able. That is now beautifully redone, though. My favorite vacations were the ones with my Aunt and Uncle in which we would drive somewhere: Colorado, California, Kansas to see his parents, etc. Such adventures those were! We packed our lunches and took gallons of ice water, stopping along the way to picnic, play and pee in the ditches. I think we were feral children!

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  11. For amusement parks, I remember Jacque’s Arnolds Park, when it probably wasn’t as run down, and the Elitche’s in Denver. When I got to Mpls, I thought Valleyfair was way overrated – I can get all the rides I need at the small local festivals – Robbinsdale’s was Whiz Bang Days, Winona just had its Steamboat Days. But then I was never one for the big Roller Coasters, etc. I liked the tilt-a-whirl when I was younger, but now, just give me a good ferris wheel.

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  12. We actually made 6 family road trips during my school years. Mom had 2 sisters in Seattle so we took trips there in 1958 (not a lot of memories of that one) and 1962 – the World’s Fair with the Space Needle and a visit to Mt. Rainier National Park. On the 1958 trip we made a stop in Yellowstone. In 1962 we made stops in the Badlands of South Dakota and Glacier National Park. Another one of Mom’s sisters lived on the East Coast – trips to Ballston Lake, New York in 1960 and Portland , Maine in 1969. In the summers of 1964 and 1965 we spent about a week in Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. Clear Lake was very cold so we didn’t do much swimming but there were quite a few other activities to partake of. Once we were at our destinations we had a nice time. But getting there was not particularly fun – Dad just wanted to get to the destination so we didn’t do much in the way of sightseeing along the way.

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  13. Most of my family vacations were taken in northern Wisconsin. And the way it normally worked was that we would leave St. Louis at three or four in the morning and then drive until noon, which usually got us to about Rockford. Then my parents would play tennis while my sister and I played in the motel pool. Then the next day again up early to get to Hayward around noon.

    The only trip that varied from this was the horrible trip that we took out west that I’ve talked about before. The one bright spot of that trip however, was that we did go to Disneyland when we were on the West Coast. I don’t remember much about our day there except that we had all kinds of leftover ticket booklets from my cousins who lived out there and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we could get with these tickets.

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  14. i’m awful at amusement park rides. I don’t like things that go too high. I don’t like things that go upside down. I don’t like things that spin too fast. I am a serious wuss.

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    1. I like all the big scary rides. my kids like big scary rides. Debbie rode them so the kids could go. One year at Orlando Disney had a deal where if you were staying on site you could get in an hour early and stay two hours late so we did 7 am til midnight or something like that. Morning race cars and flying at Epcot evening the roller coaster space mountain which normally had a line of 2 hours was a matter of getting off, running back through the empty line and getting back on. After 5 or 6 trips they showed us how to cheat to go from finish to start through side doos in 30 seconds, after 10 more times we may have been only ones left so the took us from finish up some stairs to our waiting car to go again. Maybe 50 trips for the night

      rock and roll roller coaster and twighlight zone falling elevator were similar deals on a later trip

      devin was a high anxiety about weather. One year in Orlando a tornado came by our hotel in the middle of the night 6 inches of rain in a short span , big wind , trees down they closed Disney and we Didnt dare tell Devin the tornado was less than a mile away from our Fairfield inn.
      Florida had rain clouds swirl back around 5 pm every day . Yellowstone was the same , vacations were interesting magical times. I remember putting Kleenex in Devin’s shoes so he could be 1 inch taller and rife the roller coaster

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