The Park Side

Hello there 😉 my name is Nick and welcome to my new personal blog. This whole writing and publicly sharing it thing is daunting and a little extremely scary to me, but here goes it.

This idea isn’t entirely new to me, I have honestly wanted to do this for a long time, I am just not one to ever enjoy a spotlight or an audience. It was probably around December 2019, when I happened to be visiting Walt Disney World during Riviera Resort’s grand opening, that I had a real notion to start sharing my experiences or thoughts. The buzz and excitement filling the air around Riviera was special, it’s all I wanted to talk about, I could’ve spent all day there, and I was eager to dive into every little detail. I wanted to start sharing personal anecdotes from my time at the resort and my other theme park and random travels. I sat right there in the lobby and created a haphazard Instagram account with a stock profile photo and just started posting Riviera pictures and highlighting some of my favorite experiences from the day. That account didn’t even make it 4 months, I posted about my March 2020 trip that was my first ever visit to the Disneyland parks, but then came a pandemic and posting about the parks and travel kind of fell to the back of my mind. I’m hoping this new venture for me lasts more than a while longer, and I plan on committing to it so that it can do so.

One major goal for me is being able to look back and better remember everything I’ve been fortunate enough to experience. The recent grand opening of Universal Epic Universe certainly reinvigorated that desire to document my adventures. I feel extremely lucky to live nearby and have gotten a few opportunities to explore this brand new park already. It is something I am already looking back on and often thinking ‘I can’t believe I got to do that’. Those are the types of moments I hope this site can display and keep a memory vault of.

I’ve been enthralled by the theme park and attractions industry since childhood. My parents met when they worked on the opening team for Disney’s Grand Floridian Beach Resort, and they would take my sister and I to WDW at least once if not multiple times a year, driving all the way from Chicago or Charlotte each time. I was the kid who, no matter how old, was always looking for information on new attractions and lands, printing out maps and helping my family ‘plan’ our perfect vacation. I still am that kid at heart, just at 28 years old now, and a Florida resident lucky enough to visit these parks weekly if I want. As I’ve grown up my thirst for details has only grown, and I’ve gained fixated interests in haunts and coasters to go along with my general theme park fandom.

I am hoping this blog (maybe I’ll muster up a vlog at some point too) gives me a creative outlet to express these ‘quirks’ in my life. I hope you find something interesting, or maybe even useful, while you’re here. If nothing else, I want to say thank you for reading and allowing me to share this with you. I wish you safe travels and I hope your next park visit is always better than the last. Oh, and welcome to The Park Side!