The drive down was wholly unremarkable (save our brush with the confederacy). I drove the entire way while Lisa slept for moral support. I had stocked up on podcasts and audiobooks which are like consciousness-kryptonite for my blushing bride.

When we went to Disneyland in California we drove all the way down from Sacremento and didn’t see a single Disney sign until we were 2 miles away from the exit. It was incredibly different than my memories of driving down to Disney World with my parents, when we would see South of the Border signs while we were still far up north. They would eventually give way to Disney billboards and finally to the actual green and white highway signs. Finally seeing your exit was a great release after countless hours of anticipation as you counted down the miles with each passing sign.

Here I was, driving down to Florida with my soon-to-be-wife. Here’s one of those highway signs I remember so fondly. Not only was I going to Disney, I was going to my wedding.

The suspense was killing me.

When we were young, my sisters, my brother and I would have fights to see who would be the first out of the car to touch the ground in Disney World. There was something about being the first to connect to the place that made us commit acts of physical violence against one another.

It may be that we were going to hit each other anyway and this was a convenient excuse.

It may be that, since our parents had bought a van with a TV and a VCR because we took so many of these long road trips, we had carefully selected the movies that would grant the person whose turn it was to pick the most satisfaction while simultaneously acting as violent torture to the others. My sister Lizzie had this down to a science as she had only two movies she ever wanted to see: Grumpy Old Men or the Drew Barrymore fairytale vomit-fest Ever After. I have hatred for those movies that burns inside me with the fire of a thousand suns.

It was probably both of those things I just spend too long describing. But it was also that it was Disney. Our parents took us to a lot places, but this is the place where just touching the ground bestowed something wonderful.

It only made sense to get married there.

This wasn’t the first time Lisa and I had made a big roadtrip together. We had driven to, around, and from Ohio when my family made a big trip to King’s Island and Cedar Point. That was probably 18 hours or so of driving altogether.

This time, however, 18 hours was only the first leg of our trip. There was a lot more at stake, too. We had to worry about everything we had with us. We had spent months making, preparing, sweating over all this stuff and now we had it crammed into boxes filling our minivan to the brim.

The stress. The worrying. There was so much still to do.

And yet that all went away when we saw the Disney signs.

It was raining, too. The weather was lousy for the entire drive that day. We would go through pockets of rain where it fell as if it were not in drops but in a solid block. You were no longer driving but moving through liquid space. Every time it would clear up we’d have a little hope that it would stay that way, but every time it would come back in full force just a few miles down the road.

The weather didn’t matter anymore, though. We were almost in Disney.

For the first trip Lisa and I ever took to Disney together we stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. Savannah View room on the Zebra Trail. We didn’t see one damn zebra the entire 9 day stay although we would sit out on our balcony throughout the day and just marvel at the animals. Our balcony overlooked a watering hole and there was something marvelous about watching the animals commune around it. It wasn’t one type of animal like you’d see in a zoo, but multiple species sharing the same space, standing only a few feet apart. We’d just sit there and watch, together.

Lisa did find a zebra, though. On our last day, as we were getting ready to leave, Lisa somehow got lost and made her way out onto a fire escape. Once she found her way back to the room, she dragged me out onto it to point out her miraculous find. There, peeking just beyond the corner of the building, was a zebra’s ass.

We were coming back. This time we were staying concierge but I had requested a view of the same watering hole. We got it.

Here we were, just a few minutes away from returning to our favorite place on earth.

All we had to do was follow the sign.