Welp, my final birthday gift was a fantabulous 104.6° fever. Thank you, Florida and plane traveling and being surrounded by thousands of children.

Other than that, I had a fun birthday. Got to do a lot of fun things with my best friends at Disney World (which I hadn’t been to in 20 years!), ate some good food (when I could eat), and made some great memories. A few of which I shall share with you now:

We stayed at the Coronado Resort, which was gorgeous (and the cheaper option). Our first night we did some light shopping at Disney Springs, which wasn’t called that the last time I was in Florida. It was called Downtown Disney (much like in California), but had distinct areas. There was the Marketplace, Pleasure Island, and other places I can’t remember cause I was only 10 years old and didn’t care about it cause there weren’t any rides there (obvi). Well, it’s nothing like that now. I mean some things were the same, but mostly everything got overhauled.

Day 2 was Epcot. Epcot was exactly how I remembered it, minus some rides that were completely gone or tweaked into less than stellar updated versions (Frozen and Adventures Through Imagination I’m looking at you…how could you do that to Figment?!). Though I definitely enjoyed Dame Judi Dench (or Dame Dudy Jench as I kept accidentally calling her because her name is itself a frustratingly frustrating tongue twister) narrating Spaceship Earth. I DID NOT however enjoy the ride breaking down right at the end and being evacuated off. But it made for some fun pictures and I got to catch a lot of pokemon while sitting for 20 minutes.

Day 3 I woke up half dead. The night before I woke up with a fever and chills. But I fought through the death and we headed off to the Magic Kingdom. We didn’t plan to stay there long since a lot of rides we have here in California.  But we did go on Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain (TWICE! Thank you Sjonnie [pronounced “shaw-nee”]), and the People Mover. Then we bussed over to Hollywood Studios. Of course we did Hollywood Tower of Terror and Rock ‘n’ Rollercoaster. We also walked through the new Toy Story Land but didn’t go on anything. Then we had a delicious dinner at the Brown Derby before I crashed and we went back to the hotel. I passed out at 9:30 or maybe 10 and slept until….

Say 4 MY BIRTHDAY! We went to Animal Kingdom since some of the best rides were there. Plus the last time I’d been to Florida was when the park was still kind of new and under construction. They hadn’t quite figured everything out yet. Animal Kingdom actually had trees that blocked your view and more than three or four rides in operation. It was basically unrecognizable to me except for very oddly specific things. The Dinosaur ride (which was called Countdown to Extinction when I went on it as a kid), the Tree of Life, the 4-way cross in Africa where they have tumblers, singers, and dancers every five minutes (though I remember a parade with wild costumes and lion king characters). A lot of things (of the few things that were there) are gone. The riverboats are gone, there was a Tarzan show that I only remember catching a brief glance of (now replaced by Finding Nemo the Musical). Anyways, the first thing we did was go on Everest which was amazing. HIGHLY recommend it. Then we went on the aforementioned Dinosaur. Then we went to Pandora, land of Avatar. We rode Flight of Passage twice (AWESOME!) and the River Journey (eh). We watched the Finding Nemo musical which was cute, but as my good friend described it: “Finding Nemo on crack!”

After we finished in Animal Kingdom we hopped on the busses to go to my birthday dinner at the Hoop De Doo. A kitschy western show that’s been running at Disney for 20 years. It’s an all-you-can-eat barbecue dinner with fried chicken, ribs, beans, corn, mashed taters, and salad. It was fun, if a little out of date, but I felt so bad I couldn’t eat more since my illness was starting to really get going.

We headed back to the hotel to sleep for TWO hours before waking up at 3am to catch the bus to the airport.

Made it home fine. Ate some food okay. Took a nap great. Woke up with a 104.6° fever…hooray. And here I’ve been. Taking medication, drowning the fever with so many liquids, force-feeding myself, and sleeping so many hours I’m slowly losing track of when and where I am.

But my birthday weekend was fun so there’s that. It was all worth it.