John Wise

Epcot made up for any disappointment we might have felt yesterday in the Magic Kingdom. Caroline here is enjoying a cup of spiced wine which is also known as Glühwein back in Germany, which is also the theme of the area we are visiting right now in Epcot.

Notice the Euro Disney t-shirt she’s wearing? We bought that shirt back in 1992 for her 25th birthday at Euro Disney. Today is the anniversary of that day, meaning it’s her birthday. Caroline is turning 32. One other thing, the shirt worn around her waist was also bought that day seven years ago and then was subsequently worn on the day we were married back on January 12, 1994.

The parades and cast of characters are far different in this part of the Disney World complex of parks than we expected. Epcot alone is proving to be worth the price entry.

I don’t think I’ve ever taken a photo of this face and seen more freckles on it, must be the way the sun reflects off the Gulf of Mexico and the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Looking at her eyes, I don’t feel like she’s aged a year in the more than ten years we’ve been sharing in these adventures.

So I was going to end this blog post on the last photo, but there’s something special about this particular photo, and it has to do with what Caroline is holding in her left hand. She’s holding our photographs which we are saving to a floppy disk. After years of shooting rolls of film and often developing them ourselves, it is such a strange idea that our photos can be seen instantly and that they are on a floppy disk; crazy times.

History is kind of repeating itself, but more of that with tomorrow’s post. Here we are in Florida on the only cloudy day of the year they had in all of 1999, well, except for Hurricane Irene back in October, which attacked Florida with a lot of clouds, wind, and rain, so there was that. But otherwise, sunny Florida had to go and cloud up our arrival here in Orlando, Florida.

Our first partial day here in Disney World was kind of dismal, and while the Disney parks usually rank high with us, the Magic Kingdom here in Florida, compared to Euro Disney outside Paris and Disneyland in California, just didn’t measure up. No big deal, as we are just thrilled to be here in Florida, and there’s so much more to come.