The Letters WILL Be Missed

We fully accept the fact that Disney California Adventure is changing.  In fact, we welcome it with open arms.  We're extremely excited about all of the upgrades, updates and new attractions that are going to be assaulting our senses in the coming months.

In some ways, the first salvo in all of this was fired over the summer when all of the changes began to take place in the Paradise Pier area.  The dismantling of Maliboomer, the closing of Mulholland Madness, and the closing of all of the restaurants in the back-end to make way for new ones and the new park they are installing signaled "The Coming".  Not to mention all of the changes (read closures and construction) near "A Bug's Land" and "Sunshine Plaza". 

That said, to us at least, it was really brought home this week when pictures began appearing on Tuesday (1/4) of the construction wall going up around the letters outside of DCA, and subsequent pictures of the letters slowly disappearing one by one.

We've read a lot of different articles from a lot of different people over the past few weeks about the changes coming to this Park.  Some were totally sad to see the changes, some seemed a tad cynical about the whole thing and seemed to focus on little other than how "underwhelming" DCA was to begin with, and some were pretty even-keeled about the whole thing like we think ourselves to be.  This isn't one of those articles.

Rather, here's our official statement on the whole matter, in case anyone cares.

We can all find something to complain about in The Parks, and we do, frequently if we're honest about it.  Even those of us who love The Parks the most will always be able to find something negative.  We don't decry that at all.  Things happen that we're not happy with all the time.  It's the nature of the beast.  Do we think that DCA was being utilized in the best way that it possibly could?  Of course not.  Proper image?  Ditto.

But all that said, something we have learned to do while we're at The Parks is take something that might not be "the best", and look for the magic there anyways.  The letters are kind of like that.  There's probably a million reasons why it's better that they're not there, and some of them are quite legitimate.  But when we're looking through pictures of past trips with our kids and families, and the letters are in a good many of them, and we see the smiles on their faces, as a father it becomes hard to find those same faults.  Knowing that as they grow older and look back, hopefully with joy, at the Days In The Park we spent together and think of those letters, we only see the magic.

The letters will be missed.  There was magic in them, and that's worth missing at least a little bit.