It had been an extremely hot day at the Magic Kingdom and it wasn’t cooling off. A family of five was leaving about 6:00 PM when Lauren and I were coming back in for the evening. They looked miserable, not the way people should look when they are exiting the happiest place on earth. The mom and dad looked shell shocked and the kids beet red, sweaty, and beside themselves with raw emotion. The littlest girl, about 5 years old, was screaming. “I’m hot! I’m thirsty! I don’t want to go back to the hotel! I want a Tinkerbell costume! I want it! I want it!”

No one in the family was even looking at her, they just kept walking, faces frozen straight ahead. It was pretty clear that this had been going on for awhile and everyone had given up trying to settle her down. Lauren and I stopped to look at her - everyone did, as a matter of fact - she was just so loud and obnoxious for such a pretty little thing.

And then she tripped. A really big, bad trip, her flip flops flew off and she tumbled to the ground. And her family, stopped, just kind of looked down at her, and then they started to laugh! Big, merry guffaws that released all the discomfort they were feeling. And we all started to laugh - no one was even thinking that the girl might be hurt. And she wasn’t. She got up and looked madder than ever, but she was silent and seething. You could practically see the smoke coming out of her ears, and it was just what the family needed at that point in the day.

These hottest of hot Florida days at WDW - these are the days that make friends and family turn on each other.

That was a particularly hot summer in Florida and Lauren and I were there for it. It was still early in June, but the temperatures were staying over a hundred degrees every day and never dipped very low at night. I remember leaving our resort room at 6:00 AM and it feeling like I was getting hit with a blast furnace, leaving the air conditioning and going outside. Forest fires had broken out all over Florida and you could smell them every time you took a breath.

While not all Junes are quite this hot in Florida, let this be a reminder to all of us who can only go to WDW in the summer that it can be this hot and that we have to take it into the consideration.

It can’t be said enough - Take the afternoon break! Go back to your resort and get in the pool or go into the air conditioning for awhile. Return later in the day, and look for the extra magic hours that will let you stay latest at parks.

Drink lots of water, use the sunscreen and blah, blah, blah...We all know what to do when it is hot outside, but we just don’t do it, particularly when we’re at WDW. Why? Because we spent all that money and we don’t want to waste a minute. We cut of our noses to spite our faces. We try to cram every ride in and then don’t enjoy any of it, at least like we should.

Don’t take your family on a death march through WDW, take it easy. You don’t want your kids to remember your family vacation as the one that everyone was yelling or crying the whole time.