Guest Post #2- It's the most Magical Place on Earth

Hello?

… Is anyone here? It’s so dark – where’s the light switch? Ah, here we go.

*Click*

Oh! There you are! My goodness, there are a lot of you, eh? Julie is one lucky blogger to have you all reading with her adventures every day. My name is Lara, and I can usually be found at my own site, Life: The Ongoing Education, but today I’m blogsitting here at Julie’s.

She’s living the sweet life at DisneyWorld right now, so she asked if I had any special Disney memories to share with you all. Well gee, let’s see: I spent the first 18 years of my life living 20 minutes away from Disneyland in Anaheim, California. So do I have memories? Oh yeah.

I could tell you about the time my family spent all day at the park only to go to the parking lot and find that our car had been broken into and our stereo stolen. Or I could tell you about another family day trip about a year later where the exact same thing happened. (I kid you not.) I could tell you about the time my sister and I went to Disneyland and lost our car keys in the park – though they were fortunately returned by some kind park-goer to the Lost and Found. Or I could tell you about another time my sister and I went to the park, where we thought we’d lost our keys again, but then we found out that we’d actually locked them in the car.

Yeah, my family and Disneyland? Always seems to equal car troubles in some way.

But honestly, I have always loved Disneyland, and I probably always will. As a child, I loved it for the excesses it offered. That park was everything fun and frivolous that I wasn’t allowed to have on a daily basis. At Disneyland, I got to eat fattening food until I thought my tummy would burst from the pure joy of so many sweets. I got to run and jump and play with all my favorite cartoon characters, ride the carousel over and over again, watch fireworks that didn’t even start until an hour past my bedtime. I remember my father carrying me out to the car after long days of fun in the sun, so tired that I was already falling asleep even as happy memories of the park still filled my head.

When I was a teenager, I loved Disneyland for the coolness it offered. At my high school, going to Disneyland was just what you did on Saturday nights – some high schools had cool diners that were the local hang-outs, but we had Disneyland. My friends and I would all get together and drive out to the park every weekend, not for the rides, but for the social interactions with our peers. How I laughed, spending hours standing on “Main Street, U.S.A.” with my girlfriends and watching the cute boys pass by and show off for us. I had my very first kiss after a night at Disneyland, and later, I made that same boy (once he was my boyfriend) stand in the middle of the bridge to Sleeping Beauty’s castle and kiss me again under the fireworks.

Now that I’m a grown-up – whoa! I’m a grown-up?! – I love it for the magic. I love that when I go to Disneyland now, my eyes grow wide and get a little misty, and I think that maybe it really IS the happiest place on earth. I love that when I’m there, I start to believe in kindness and sharing and good old-fashioned American values, for no other reason than that they’re marketed so obviously. I love that I try to take in everything around me with every single one of my five senses, just so that no matter how long I live, I’ll never forget what Disneyland is to me. And I love that when I walk through that place, where I’ve spent so much time over the years now, life seems a little bit better, a little bit brighter, and a little bit easier to bear.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think Disneyland will always do that for me. And really, couldn’t we all benefit from a place that makes us believe in magic again?