Our Disney World Vacation—Peace Corps Style

When my wife and I found ourselves planning to go to Disney World and Universal Studios for a mid-winter break family vacation this year, we were both a bit bemused. After all, I am a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV). We don’t do Disney.

Many years ago, before anyone had ever heard of Joseph Kony, I lived in a remote village in the Central African Republic, a country that was obscure then and still is. My job was to raise peoples’ living standards through modern bee-keeping and the sale of market grade honey. It was the toughest job I did NOT love.

My wife Dina is also an RPCV. She taught English in Albania back when it was a post-communist European backwater where you were as likely to see a mule driven wagon as a recently manufactured or western-made automobile.

Our trips with our kids, since they’ve been babies, have strived for authenticity and a degree of adventure: swimming with 9-month-old Elan in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon; trekking with him slung to my back through a Puerto Rican jungle in the middle of a tropical storm; zip-lining with him last April (and his 4-year-old sister Ana) through a cloud forest in Nicaragua; or climbing an active volcano and horseback riding on that same trip. Even our domestic vacations have been a bit rustic: tent camping; ferrying to a remote Maine island; cramming into a tiny Vermont log cabin without electricity or bathroom.

Also, my wife and I are both urban planners by education, quite familiar with and sympathetic to the critical literature about the privatization and commercialization of public spaces, sneeringly referred to as “Disneyfication.” Luna Park and Astroland in Coney Island, decrepit relics of New York City’s past glory as an East Coast Amusement Park Mecca, were deemed worthy of our patronage. But we had turned up our noses at Hershey Park and Great Adventures. Disney World just wasn’t in the picture, even though Ana had developed a strong fondness for Minnie Mouse.

But for this trip, I had an excuse. I had won free tickets to Universal Studios and we had a good friend whose husband worked for Disney and could get us in for free. Reluctantly though, I had to admit to myself, I was becoming excited. 

I ordered Disney’s promotional vacation DVD and one evening, when no one was home, watched every minute of it. Then I played it for my kids and watched it again. I scoped out in advance every potential attraction and ride in Universal Studios and Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme parks. I stealthily took out from the library the Unofficial Guide to Disney and read it cover-to-cover on the airplane ride to Orlando. Most shamefully, I made a not-so-secret list of every ride at each park I HAD TO take, and forced my wife to watch the kids while I stood in line for hours with a bunch of eleven year boys and girls waiting for my turn to experience 3-and-a-half minutes of pure ecstasy.

In the end, I was pretty darn impressed by Revenge of the Mummy and Men in Black, Alien Attack. And I’m proud to say that my kids bravely withstood the shocks and onslaughts of automaton dinosaurs, holographic ghosts, hugs from Barney, and drenching water rides with nary a whimper. But I’m even prouder that Elan ultimately dismissed Disney as “kind of boring"; begged to return one last time to Gatorland, a decidedly low tech, low key place that is really more menagerie than Theme Park; and selected a bunch of sea shells as his parting souvenir, not a tacky, tourist key chain of Mickey Mouse. I may be wrong, but I see in him the makings of a future Peace Corps Volunteer.