Happy Saturday! You should know this newsletter was a bit of a treat for me, because when I sat down to write it, I was coming at it from the perspective of a reader, not an editor. Our kids had a fall break this week, and so we took a vacation. 

For a few reasons, that was a crazy idea. The timing, for one. (We do have that election coming up.) So I have to offer many thanks to everyone at The Dispatch who kept things running smoothly while I was out. And, obviously, the pandemic is getting worse, not better. But back in March before things got real, we had booked a trip to Disney World. As April turned to May and May to June and we realized things weren’t going away anytime soon, we considered not going. Then we remembered we booked a nonrefundable room. Oops.

In National Lampoon’s Vacation, Clark W. Griswold piles his family into the station wagon and sets off for Walley World. After a series of mishaps, they arrive to find the park closed. Our case was a bit of a reversal: Wally World was open, so we loaded up the family truckster and headed south. We could have flown: It would have been faster and—based solely on what the kids spent on car snacks every time we stopped for gas—probably cheaper. But for all the reports about how flying has been safer than expected, I can never get that Washington Post graphic from back in April of droplets spreading on a plane out of my mind. 

I won’t bore you with a slide show of family photos. I won’t give a review of our favorite rides, or complain about overpriced gelato. I will say that, while it was a different trip than we envisioned, Disney is doing the utmost to keep its guests safe. We had the best time that we could have. And driving through the Smoky Mountains while they were full of fall color was a nice bonus.