Being both passholders as well as Disney Vacation Club, it goes without saying that my family spends a good bit of time going to Disney World.  Personally, I’m pretty long past over most anything in regards to The Mouse, but my wife and kids still enjoy it a lot, and there’s not much I won’t do for them, especially when I have little idea what to do with my vacation time in the first place.

However, the big story of this last extended Disney trip was Hurricane Helene, which I didn’t even know was bubbling up in the Gulf of Mexico until two days into the trip, when suddenly everyone in person and on social media are talking about this megastorm that’s forming, and how it’s not only going to wreak havoc on Florida where we were, but appeared to have Atlanta firmly in its crosshairs, leading me to feel all sorts of anxiety about shit happening to my home while I wasn’t there.

Fortunately for us, the storm conditions didn’t really come into play until the last day of our trip, to which at that point we were pretty bushed and fairly content to spend more time at the resort than more time at the parks, and it didn’t really affect our trip.

In fact, other than watching some serious winds from the safety and comfort of our resort, not only did we avoid the storm in Florida, much to my relief, Helene kind of banked hard east, which we all know by now, really fucked the western parts of Appalachian North Carolina, but as far as Atlanta was concerned, really managed to avert disaster.

It was interesting driving back, because as we traversed from Orlando back to Georgia, there was plenty of evidence of the carnage that Helene brough, even as far central as I was coming from, with trees down all over the shoulders and sides of the road, and pretty much every billboard in the state was stripped and barren.  Piles of sawdust on the shoulders indicated where trees actually affected the highways themselves, and this was the case all the way up into Georgia, and right before getting to Macon, it all kind of stopped, and this was presumably where the storm banked hard east, and miraculously swerved past Atlanta.

Insert ironic joke about how not even category-4 storms don’t want to visit Atlanta.

As for the rest of the trip, I wouldn’t exactly call it a vacation; I knew this was most likely going to be the circumstances going into it.  It was a trip, and there was a tremendous amount of work involved, wrangling the little monsters of mine, who are bursting with excitement and curiosity and the want to run around and explore the vast World of Disney, and as is often times the case, the lion’s share of labor falls to me to do, and I don’t really get to have the same sense of vacation, relaxation, recuperation and entertainment as everyone else does.

There were really only two things that I wanted to do that would have been self-serving and when the trip was done, I didn’t get to do either of them.  Between kid wrangling, the time it takes to do absolutely anything at all, and the weather coming into play, there simply wasn’t any space for anything for me to happen, and the fact of the matter is that as much as I love my kids, if there’s any chance at all for me to not go completely sour on Disney World and the Disney brand, there have got to be some kid-free trips lined up in my future where I can actually relax, unwind and not be a dad for a fucking minute.

I kind of knew what had happened was going to happen, and that it really wasn’t going to be that much of a vacation for me personally.  But my kids and their safety always come first, and trying to keep them in a modicum of line is also high priority, and it’s often times frustrating when trying to stick to good habits while on the road is challenging, and even more so when I don’t really have anyone but myself to rely upon to handle the load of keeping an eye on my kids.

But the girls seemed to have a good time in spite of the weather and some of the challenges experienced while there.  They got to ride a lot of rides, eat a lot of junk food, spend some time with me at the pool, see a lot of characters, eat more snacks, and watch a whole lot of television at the resort and while in the car, so as long as they’re happy, I can take victory from that.

I just wish that I didn’t have to feel like I have to be the one who constantly has to sacrifice everything, because I already feel like I’ve sacrificed just about everything that makes me, me, and there’s really nothing left for me to sacrifice left, except for whatever it is that prevents me from being a complete husk of a living organism.