Visiting the Saddest Place on Earth

I was, as all my friends were, very saddened by the closing of Disneyland in California a while back. So I enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to visit the old abandoned park recently and well... It turned out to be the most depressing thing I have ever done.

The first thing that struck me was how overgrown everything had become. The perfectly manicured landscaping had gone downright bohemian.

Being a rail fan, the Main Street Station was one of my favorite places. I could still hear the Station Masters announcements: "Your attention please! The Disneyland Limited now arriving..." Fortunately that still lives on at Disney World in Florida which is still alive and thriving.

Despite the Disney Co's best effort to keep the park updated, the basic concept is very 1955. With every passing year, Disneyland looked more and more like a miniature golf course.

The Jungle Cruise has become, well... a jungle! Such an attraction had become less attractive ever since video gaming made visiting adventuresome places so much more submersive than just riding a boat with a stand-up comic with viewing the "backside of water" as the highlight.

Once hailed as the way of the future, the "highway in the sky" is now a relic of the past. I really had thought that monorails would have been everywhere by now.

This post might be a little off topic, but Disneyland was really a scale model layout. Main Street scales out to roughly 7/8th scale. A very large scale layout that you could actually walk around in. But Disneyland, just like model railroading, can't compete with the limitless virtual world. 

 So sad. The whole time I was walking around I kept hoping I would wake up from this nightmare and find it was all just an April Fools joke. Yes sir! Just an April Fools joke!

Dandy