Epcot's 30th: Pictures from Our First Visit

By March of 1983, my family had already visited Walt Disney World twice, but 1982 brought a couple significant changes.  The year started with the birth of my only sibling, when my sister arrived in February, then Disney World's Magic Kingdom added a sibling of its own, when EPCOT Center opened in October.  Thus, the pictures my father took commemorate our first visit to Disney World's second theme park!

[NOTE: I'm not sure why we have so few pictures of Future World, but I suspect it is because we visited those attractions later in the day and probably didn't have the high speed film needed to take effective night photographs]

We followed Disney's tips and visited Future World's attractions in the evening and avoided some of the ridiculously long wait times for the new attractions.

This was the first time we stayed on the Disney property and the view from the Contemporary, along with our Gold Key card kinda spoiled me from vacations to come.

My parents really liked the topiary on the road to the Contemporary.  This was the first time I ever heard the word "topiary" and I recall not being very happy that we stopped the car to take these photographs.  I liked being in the parks, at the hotel, and on the monorail, and during this photo session we were doing none of those things.

We visited the Disney Village Marketplace, on the way to our Breakfast a la Disney at the Empress Lilly Riverboat.  This area looks quite a bit different these days.

We also stopped to eat at the Polynesian Village Resort at least one day (maybe more, since I know we liked the old Coral Isle Cafe).  I didn't realize we had an actual picture of the catamarans on the Polynesian beach

OK. Now that you have a feel for Walt Disney World in the 1980's, let's see what EPCOT Center looked like.

We'll work our way around World Showcase, starting in Mexico

China, where my father seemed to like taking a lot of pictures every year

Germany

Italy

The United States, where we didn't seem to take pictures, but I guess living in Philadelphia we weren't too impressed by the faux-colonial style building (over the years, I've grown more impressed)

Japan

France

The United Kingdom

Canada

Other World Showcase pictures, including some of the bus transportation that used to be available around the loop of countries

As I mentioned above, we didn't seem to take pictures around Future World, but since it's required by law to take at least one picture of Spaceship Earth whenever you visit Epcot (or EPCOT Center), my father did catch the park's icon from the monorail station