For those of you that know me you know that I love Disney. I have grown up going to Disney Parks and watching all the movies. I have lived in many different areas of the country, including Phoenix, AZ which was only a 5-hour drive to Anaheim which is where Disneyland is located.

On my 2nd Birthday my parents decided to take me to Disneyland and after seeing how much I loved it, they bought season passes.

My family continued to renew our season passes as I got older and kept them up when we moved to Northern California because that was only an 8-hour drive from the park. We grew up in those parks and I have some of my best childhood memories of the holidays at the parks.

When I was 6, we ended up being relocated to Texas which was not drivable to Disneyland, so we canceled our season passes and we began to live life without our Disney trips every other month. Our love for Disney was still there, we would still go see Disney movies and grew up watching all the Disney Channel Originals, but our time at the parks decreased drastically.

After living in Dallas for about a year and a half, my father was diagnosed with Progressive Stage 3 Prostate Cancer, he was told he had about 15% of survival. With the prognosis being so poor, he decided that in case something did happen he wanted to have on final family vacation at our happy place, Disneyland. So we packed up one week in January and went to Disney for the trip we believed was going to be our last as a whole family.

My dad ended up surviving the surgeries and they believed they had gotten all the cancer out, but the doctors still warned that there was a high percentage it could come back and there was likely nothing they would be able to do. So we began to go back to Disney yearly to make family memories in case anything were to happen and the cancer came back. We all loved the yearly trips and we made so many memories.

The yearly trip soon turned into a bi-yearly trip and when I hit 7th grade my dad and I had found a new love at Disney which was their Run Disney races. We started off with a 5k in 2012 and since then we have completed two 5ks, one 10 mile run, and three Half Marathons.

Back in 2016, we decided to do the Coast to Coast Challenge which is where you run a half marathon at Disneyland and Disneyworld within a calendar year. We wanted to celebrate my high school graduation, and my dads 10th year of being cancer free. and believed this was the perfect opportunity to do so.

My dad and I signed up for the Star Wars Half Marathon in January 2016 and planned a trip out there with his side of the family. We planned out our costumes and prepared to go when we realized something very special about the date we were running on. Exactly 10 years earlier to that same week we had taken what we thought was going to be our last family vacation.

That run was the most magical run we have done yet. If you had told us 10 years before that we would be there running together I would not have believed you. In those 10 years we have made so many memories together and so many of those memories at Disney. We ended up finishing the challenge last November and celebrated together the whole 13.1 miles.

The thing about Disney is that it has provided so many memories with my family I would not have. Yes, people can tell me as much as they want about how childish Disney is and how I go too much, but the memories I have of my family are priceless.

So Disney is so much more than the movies to me. Disney is celebrations with my family. Disney is countless memories of joyful moments. Disney really is the happiest place on earth.