Last Day in America : Magic Kingdom

Wednesday 14 July 1993. To recap: it's our last day before returning home from Orlando back to the UK and we have spent it in the Disney parks, specifically the Disney MGM Studios and then EPCOT. We got on the Monorail around five o'clock and transferred over to The Magic Kingdom. It was still pouring it down with rain.

We ate in a restaurant close to Liberty Square where (only with the greatest difficulty) we resisted the clam chowder and enjoyed a more familiar meal, watering the gravy with rainwater drips from the head...

Then it was a race to repeat as many of our favourite rides as we could before the fireworks display brought the night and holiday to an end.

We rode the cablecar to Tomorrowland and went on the Carousel of Progress where the audience seating rotated around tableaux of different periods with animated robots saying how wonderful the new technology of that age was - it mostly automated some chores so the wife could do others... Having running water let her do more sewing, having a sewing machine let her do more ironing etc. Quite right too... Agh! No! Stop that! Yeowch! Ok, ok, I was joking!!! Someone's child was screaming throughout most of it, there was applause when the ride staff eventually came out to suggest they should take it outside. I thought the ride was excellent, we hadn't realised how old it was and it was dismantled the following year and disappeared into the very history it had depicted.

Another ride shortly to disappear was the Wedway People Mover, a train without drivers, based on the magnetic field induction principle where the magnetic field creates electricity as the train passes over it which gives it enough boost to reach the next magnet in the track. [Edit: the ride had a reprieve, but underwent a name change and was still there when we visited again in 2016, some 23 years later.) As we travelled on this we saw the most glorious sunset over the park.

Then it was back to the castle for the firework display. Disney don't sell you short on this, there's a great display every night and afterwards the park closes and a huge mass of people leave all at once, laughing, singing, dancing and as entertaining as any of the park's formal parades. It had been a holiday like no other. We had never before been out of the UK and our holidays were normally spent mooching around the old or picturesque places in the south of England. It was an unforgettable two weeks that we have never yet repeated, but one that I still hope we will sooner or later. (See my spoiler above...)

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