I’ve always been an unlucky person. All of my friends say I’m cursed. Its mostly because every time I get into a car, there will be at least three cars, right in front of the one I’m in, doing about twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. It can be quite annoying. But I realized the full potential of my so-called curse last Christmas when I went on vacation to Disney world with my best friend Stephanie.

The trip down was tiring, twelve hours in a minivan with six other people and luggage everywhere. The second we checked into our hotel we all went to sleep. Upon waking, we headed straight to Magic Kingdom for our first day of fun. And it was fun, until the rides started breaking. Nearly every ride I stepped onto broke down. By the end of they day we had been stuck on three broken rides. Peter Pan’s Flight was first, next was The Haunted Mansion, which broke down twice while we were on it and once while we were in line, and lastly, Splash Mountain broke down and left Stephanie and myself terrified. We were convinced that the log flumes had come off the tracks and that we were going to flip over when we went down the giant waterfall at the end of the ride. We didn’t, however, which was fine by us.

As the first day drew to a close, the entire party jumped on the monorail back to our hotel. That, too, broke down for ten minutes or so. At this point, I started getting all the blame. Or, rather, my curse did.

Over the course of the trip, two more monorails broke down, as well as three other rides. The most memorable of these was the Spaceship Earth ride in the Epcot ball. The ride started off with me losing my favorite hat in the darkness. I couldn’t reach it so I had to accept that I had lost it forever. As we reached the very top of the ride, ten stories up inside the Epcot ball, the ride broke down. For fifteen minutes we sat still in the darkness with only ambient lighting to see by. Every thirty seconds the “Spaceship Earth will be up and running in just a minute, please be patient and stay seating inside your time travel cars at all times, thank you” message would blare through the speakers, so often that even four months later I remember it word for word. We also happened to be sitting next to an animatronics renaissance painter that happened to be asleep. We had to listen to his four-second-long, constantly repeating, snoring sounds for upwards of twenty minutes. After what seemed like forever, the lights clicked on and illuminated the ride, and we were informed via loudspeaker that the ride couldn’t be fixed and that someone would be up shortly to let us out of our time travel cars. After being let out of our car, we then had to walk then ten stories back down to earth.

The last thing that I broke on our trip was a ticket machine entering Animal Kingdom. Simply put, my entire party entered through he same machine without any issues, but the second I insert my ticket, the machine jammed, broke, and shredded my ticket.

After all of the drama, I still had a lot of good times with my really good friend. And now that I look back on it, we had a lot of good laughs at my misfortune, too. Now that I’m home, its back to being stuck behind slow cars. But one thing is for sure, and that is that I will never underestimate my curse again.