We spent one final partial day at the Magic Kingdom. I assume that we used up all of our coupons because the ticket booklets that Mother saved in her scrapbook are empty.
These are the attractions that we visited on our final day:
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage "E"
- Liberty Square River Boat "D"
- Walt Disney World Railroad "D"
Ending our visit on Main Street, U.S.A., Mother wrote this:
Dale & I shopped while Joy & Bob watched a movie on Disney's life.
I guess that the film was in what the 1973 map calls "Cinema" requiring a "B" coupon. There's no longer a cinema in that location - it was about where the Uptown Jewelers store is now on Main Street.
From Orlando, we drove to Cocoa Beach. In the recounting of our California trip that I wrote two years ago, I talked about our family experience with swimming. By 1973, Dale and I had a couple more years of swimming lessons under our belts, and we were fearless. We both remember enjoying the big Atlantic Ocean waves for body surfing. Dad swam out to calmer waters, and we remember Mother being worried about how far out he looked from the shore.
Dale remembered that Mother found something on the beach that she couldn't identify. She used a stick to turn it over and was none the wiser. Dad identified it as a dead Portuguese man o' war. Mother's diary said that it "looked like a boiled onion." That matched Dale's memory except that he thought the sea creature was flatter.
When we talked about this at the London Tea Room on my birthday, we said that the Portuguese man o' war was a jellyfish. It turns out that we were wrong. According to the Wikipedia article, it's a siphonophore, which is a very strange creature - or rather, many creatures, because siphonophores are made up of lots of zooids. Apparently, scientists know remarkably little about the Portuguese man o' war, even though they are recognizable enough to be easily identified by amateurs on the beach.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
