Disney Has Changed — Here’s How I’m Relearning to Enjoy It

A while back, I found myself driving somewhere I’d driven probably a hundred times before. I knew the road well enough that I didn’t need directions, knew where the turns were, and knew roughly how long it should take to get there.

Except this time there was a detour. The road I normally took was closed, there were orange signs everywhere, and some very official-looking person in a reflective vest was pointing everyone in a direction I was fairly certain was not where I wanted to go.

Naturally, I did what any reasonable person would do. I became personally offended by the detour.

I knew a better way. I’d driven this road before. In fact, I’d driven it enough times that I was pretty confident whoever put up those signs simply didn’t understand my situation. So I spent the next several minutes trying to figure out how to get back to the road I already knew. Eventually, after a couple turns and probably more frustration than the situation deserved, I gave up and followed the signs. And you know what happened?

I got where I was going.

It wasn’t the road I remembered. It wasn’t necessarily the road I would have chosen. There were a couple turns I didn’t particularly like, and I’m still not convinced the detour needed quite that many orange cones. But I got there.

I think we do this with more than roads.

Sometimes we become so attached to the way we used to get somewhere that when the route changes, we convince ourselves the destination must have changed too. We spend so much time looking backward for the familiar turn that we barely notice where the new road is taking us.

I think I did that with Disney for a while.

For years, I knew exactly what a Disney vacation was supposed to feel like. I knew the rhythms of the parks, the traditions my family had created, the places we went, and even the little insignificant things that somehow became important simply because we had done them so many times before. Then the road changed. And for a while, instead of seeing where it might lead, I just kept looking for a way back.

If you told me five years ago that I’d be writing an article about relearning how to enjoy Disney, I probably would have looked at you confused, chuckled to myself, and said, “There’s no way.” Partially because I wouldn’t have believed you, and partially because I’m not sure I could have comprehended what the next five years of Disney entertainment—particularly in the Florida parks so many of us have a habit of claiming as our own—would look like.

Maybe I’m a little biased. I started this site nearly 11 years ago now, and I’ve been visiting these parks for essentially my entire life. But I genuinely believe the Disney experience has changed more in the last several years than it did during the previous two decades I spent visiting. At the very least, the sheer amount of change condensed into such a short period of time has been unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

There have been new attractions, reimagined attractions, things that disappeared completely—and, for the sake of my own sanity, we’re not going to talk about Tom Sawyer Island right now. But I don’t really want this to be another article about what Disney changed. There are plenty of those. Instead, I think the more interesting question is what happens when the place changes, but so much of what you expect from it was built around the way it used to be.

More importantly, how do you learn to enjoy it again?

Context Is Key

When I think about Disney in the late ’90s and early 2000s, my mind rarely goes first to the attractions. Instead, it takes me to places like the Fiesta Fun Center at the Contemporary. I think about the Year of a Million Dreams in 2006. I think about summer nights at Magic Kingdom and park hours that somehow seemed truly endless.

You could wake up in the morning and it felt like you had 18 hours ahead of you to spend in a park—or several parks—and somehow still have time left over. Maybe some of that was youth rather than reality. Time has a funny way of stretching when you’re a kid. Summer days feel longer. Vacations feel bigger. A week feels like an eternity. But I know I’m not the only one who remembers Disney that way.

We’d bounce from attraction to attraction, collecting paper FastPasses and riding our favorites again and again. For my family, there was almost a game to it: How much can we possibly do today? Then, somehow, we’d do it all over again tomorrow.

That’s the Disney I grew up with, and it’s certainly a juxtaposition with today, when many days operate on similar schedules and truly late nights are often reserved for an After Hours ticket or select resort guests. There’s more planning. More screens. More reservations. More decisions to make before you’ve even walked through the gate. Sometimes it feels like a little bit of the spontaneity has been pulled away from a place that, in my childhood mind, somehow felt magically always open.

I miss that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with admitting it. But I’ve also started to realize that missing what something was and enjoying what it is don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

A Feeling That’s Hard to Grasp

I could spend plenty of time complaining about all of this. I could talk about the strange feeling of being handed what sometimes feels like a modern version of a coupon book and being asked to buy your way into a better experience. But somewhere along the way, I realized that complaining about what had disappeared wasn’t bringing back the feeling I actually missed. And finding that feeling again took me longer than I expected.

Maybe some of that is simply getting older. Knocking on the door of 30 isn’t quite as fun as it sounded when I was 15. Or maybe it’s finally understanding what actually made all those old trips seem so perfect in my mind.

Many of you have read some version of this thought process in the stories I shared in The Storybook Project, but I have to admit something: it took a lot of work for me to really enjoy these parks again. That realization also came alongside a very long break from writing.

For probably three years, I kept going to Disney largely because going to Disney was simply what I did. I still enjoyed it. There were still good trips and great moments. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was constantly comparing the experience in front of me with one that existed 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

That’s an impossible comparison to win.

Nostalgia has a way of moving the target. We remember the music and forget the heat. We remember the laughter and forget the argument about where we were going to eat. We remember the attraction but rarely remember how long we waited for it. Memory keeps the good parts and quietly edits around the rest.

About two years ago, I made some new friendships in the Disney realm, rekindled some old ones, and slowly started figuring this all out again. Eventually, something became incredibly obvious. I wasn’t frustrated simply because Disney had changed. I was frustrated because of what I had chosen to focus on.

At one point, I hated writing because I dreaded the comment section. Think about how ridiculous that is. We’re talking about theme parks—a place that had been a source of joy and an escape from reality for most of my life—and I had somehow turned writing about them into something I actively avoided.

Somewhere along the way, the thing I loved had become a scoreboard. What closed? What changed? What costs more? What perk disappeared? What did Disney do wrong today? Some of those conversations are worthwhile. Some of the criticism is completely deserved. But when that becomes the only lens you look through, eventually it’s the only thing you can see.

Figuring It Out

As I worked through what I can only describe as a mouse-focused midlife crisis—and yes, I’m super cool at parties—it became glaringly obvious that I was focusing on all the wrong things.

There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. But I think there’s also such a thing as being too close to a good thing. You start noticing every imperfection. Every operational change. Every price increase. Every attraction closure. Every announcement that doesn’t quite live up to what you hoped it would be. I was firmly in both camps.

When I finally stepped away from it all, I realized something: my reason for going had gotten completely backwards. I was going because there was something new I needed to experience. Something new I needed to photograph. Something everyone on social media was talking about. Something I needed to have an opinion on.

And I forgot the whole point.

Because when I actually thought about the memories I treasured most from nearly 30 years of visiting Disney, remarkably few of them had anything to do with whatever was new at the time. They were about people.

They were about laughing with my family on the Grand Fiesta Tour. They were about sitting somewhere far longer than we probably needed to because the conversation was good. They were about walking through a resort with friends I didn’t get to see nearly enough. They were about inside jokes that made absolutely no sense to anyone else.

Disney was the setting. The people were the story. I had become so caught up in how the setting was changing that I failed to notice that what made it special in the first place had been standing right next to me all along.

That’s When It Changed for the Better

I can tell you all of this and then turn around and give you a list of 10 things I don’t like about modern Disney. Please don’t get me started on Genie, Lightning Lanes, or any of the various incarnations of that system. Trust me. Neither one of us has that kind of time.

The difference is that those things don’t define the experience for me anymore. Frankly, I rarely participate in many of them, and that has been weirdly freeing. I don’t walk into Magic Kingdom trying to ride 16 attractions anymore. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, I’m not going home disappointed. Because I finally realized I couldn’t tell you how many attractions I rode on some of the best Disney days of my life anyway.

What I can tell you is who was there.

I can tell you where we laughed. I can tell you about the night we stumbled into a new favorite fireworks spot. I can tell you about walking around a resort with nowhere particularly important to be. I can tell you about the restaurant we tried on a whim that somehow became part of every trip afterward. Those things don’t require a Lightning Lane. They don’t require a spreadsheet. They don’t require you to wake up at 6:58 in the morning with your phone in one hand and a credit card in the other. They just require you to be there.

And, increasingly, I think that’s the secret.

Learning to Be There Again

For lack of a better phrase, I’m learning how to simply be present at Disney again, and it has unlocked the parks for me in a way I genuinely didn’t expect.

If you’re someone who grew up visiting these places and now finds yourself wondering where the experience you loved went, I’d encourage you to try something on your next trip. Stop rushing. Stop chasing the next thing simply because someone told you it’s the thing you’re supposed to chase. Let the day breathe a little.

If your kid wants to spend an hour playing on a playground, let them. Yes, you paid a ridiculous amount of money to get them access to that playground. I understand the irony. But that hour might also be the thing they remember when they’re 30. I know because I’m almost 30, and I still remember the Fiesta Fun Center. I remember walking through Magic Kingdom at night and hearing Starlight, Star Bright drifting through the park after the fireworks. I remember tiny moments that nobody would have put on a touring plan.

I couldn’t tell you how long we waited for most of the attractions on those trips. I couldn’t even tell you where we stayed on some of them. But I can hear that music in my head more than 20 years later, and it still brings a smile to my face. That has to mean something.

I think we all have those moments. Maybe yours is a certain smell when you walk into a resort lobby. Maybe it’s sitting on a bench with your dad. Maybe it’s your kids dancing to music in World Showcase when you were supposed to be hurrying somewhere else. Maybe it’s the last boat ride of the night. Maybe it’s nothing anybody else would understand at all.

That’s probably the point.

Because the strange thing about the moments that become the stories of our lives is that we almost never recognize them while they’re happening. Nobody stops in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday night and says, Remember this. You’re going to miss it someday. We just live it. Then 15 years pass and somehow that insignificant little moment is the one we’d give anything to experience again.

Maybe That’s the Real Magic

Disney has changed. I don’t think pretending otherwise helps anyone. There are things about today’s experience I wish were different. There are things that disappeared that I genuinely miss. There are decisions Disney has made that I still don’t understand and probably never will. But I’ve stopped requiring Disney to become what it was in order for me to love it again.Because maybe the thing I was looking for was never really something Disney could bring back for me anyway.

They can rebuild an attraction. They can bring back a parade. They can extend the park hours. But they can’t make me eight years old again. And that’s okay. What they can still give us is a place to make the next story.

That’s what I’ve started looking for. Not the perfect touring day. Not the highest attraction count. Not whatever everyone online decided I absolutely have to experience. Just the little moments. The laugh that catches you off guard. The walk you didn’t plan on taking. The conversation that lasts a little longer than expected. The song floating through the park as everyone else is headed toward the exit.

Those moments existed in 1999. They existed in 2006. And despite everything that’s changed, they’re still there today. Maybe enjoying modern Disney isn’t about figuring out how to recreate the vacation we remember. Maybe it’s about giving ourselves enough room to create the one we’ll remember next.

I spent a long time trying to find the old road again. I wanted the familiar turns, the familiar landmarks, and the comfort of knowing exactly where everything was supposed to lead. I don’t think I’m looking for it anymore.

The road changed. There are still a few turns I don’t particularly like, and there are probably more orange cones than I think are necessary. But I’m starting to realize the destination was never a certain attraction, a certain park hour, a paper FastPass, or even Disney exactly as I remember it. It was the people beside me and the stories we were creating along the way.

Maybe I didn’t need the old road back after all.

Maybe I just needed to remember where I was trying to go.