Let the Magic Be Your Guide
Table of Contents
There is a certain magic that happens the moment you step into a Disney theme park. The music swells, the details astound, and before long you find yourself completely transported, not just to another world, but to another feeling entirely. Whether you are hurtling through a pitch-black galaxy, drifting down a bayou at dusk, or peering out over an endless savanna, Disney has an extraordinary gift for making you feel as though you have truly been somewhere. And that feeling? It does not have to end when the ride does. For the traveler who has ever stepped off an attraction and thought, “I want more of that,” the world is waiting, and it looks a lot like the rides you already love.
From the rust-red canyons of the American Southwest to the lamplit streets of Paris; from the misty Norwegian fjords to the sun-scorched plains of sub-Saharan Africa, the inspiration for Disney’s most beloved attractions was drawn directly from real places that are every bit as breathtaking, thrilling, and awe-inspiring as the Magic Kingdom itself. So the next time you are planning a trip and you are not quite sure where to begin, start with the ride that made your heart race, or the one that made your eyes fill with tears, or the one that took your breath away with exhilaration, and let that feeling be your compass.
Here is Where to Go Next, based on your Favorite Disney Ride:
1. If you love Big Thunder Mountain, go to Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
If Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is your go-to attraction because you love the way it flings you around hairpin turns, past hoodoos and rickety mine shafts, while the red rock walls blur at the edges of your vision, then Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah is calling your name. Disney’s Imagineers drew direct inspiration from the American Southwest when designing the “wildest ride in the wilderness,” and nowhere is that influence more apparent than in Bryce Canyon, where thousands of flame-colored spires called hoodoos rise from the earth in formations so surreal they seem almost digitally rendered.
Geologically speaking, Bryce Canyon is not actually a canyon at all, but a series of giant natural amphitheaters carved by millions of years of frost and erosion into the Paunsaugunt Plateau. The result is a landscape that looks as though the earth itself was caught mid-explosion and frozen in place. The most popular viewpoint, Sunrise Point, earns its name, so be sure to arrive early if you want to watch the first light of morning paint the hoodoos in shades of tangerine and amber that no camera filter could improve upon. Avid hikers should not miss the Navajo Loop Trail, a thrilling descent into the canyon floor that winds between towering rock walls so narrow you can nearly touch both sides at once. For those who want to take the adventure even further, horseback riding tours thread through the canyon’s interior the way those old mine carts used to thread through Thunder Mountain: with purpose, with speed, and with the constant, delightful sense that the ground beneath you might just give way to something spectacular.
The broader region of southern Utah’s canyon country, which includes Zion, Capitol Reef, Arches, and Canyonlands, means you could spend a week in this corner of the world and still feel like you have only scratched the surface. Much like Big Thunder Mountain itself, the Southwest has a way of leaving you wanting one more lap.
2. If you love Space Mountain and/or Guardians of the Galaxy, go to Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida
For those who feel the pull of the stars, who love the breathless launch sequence of Space Mountain or the era-hopping, mixtape-fueled thrill of Guardians of the Galaxy, there is no more fitting real-world destination than Kennedy Space Center on the Space Coast of Florida. Located just about an hour east of Walt Disney World on the shores of Cape Canaveral, Kennedy Space Center is where the story of human spaceflight was written, and where it continues to be written today.
This is the very ground from which Apollo 11 lifted off in July 1969, carrying three astronauts toward the moon and an entire civilization’s worth of dreams along with them. Visitors can stand inside the jaw-dropping Apollo/Saturn V Center, which houses an actual 363-foot Saturn V rocket, the most powerful ever flown, suspended horizontally overhead in a display that reduces grown adults to reverent silence. The center’s Heroes and Legends exhibit tells the stories of the astronauts themselves with the kind of intimate, human detail that makes the cosmic feel personal.
But Kennedy Space Center is not merely a museum of what was; it is a living, breathing hub of what is and what is coming. On any given visit, you might witness a rocket launch from SpaceX, Boeing, or NASA itself, which remains one of the most viscerally thrilling experiences available to any human being who has not yet left the atmosphere. The rumble is felt before it is heard, and the sight of a rocket climbing through a clear Florida sky, orange and white and impossibly fast, is the kind of thing that recalibrates your sense of what is possible. For the traveler whose imagination has always been drawn upward, this is not just a day trip. It is a pilgrimage.
3. If you love Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, go to New Orleans, Louisiana
If Tiana’s Bayou Adventure stirs something in you, whether from the warmth of the music, the lush humidity of the bayou, the sense that around every bend there is a celebration about to begin, then New Orleans, Louisiana is your city. Disney’s reimagined log flume attraction draws its soul from one of America’s most singular places, a city that has long existed at the intersection of joy and sorrow, of French elegance and Caribbean vibrancy, of sacred tradition and irrepressible improvisation.
New Orleans is, in many ways, a place that cannot be described so much as absorbed. Begin in the French Quarter, where iron-laced balconies drip with bougainvillea and the smell of chicory coffee and beignets drifts out of the Café Du Monde at all hours. Bourbon Street gets the attention, but it is the quieter blocks of Royal Street, with its antique shops, jazz drifting from open doorways, and the particular slant of late afternoon light, that tend to steal the heart. The Garden District offers another New Orleans entirely: a neighborhood of grand antebellum mansions shaded by ancient live oaks draped in Spanish moss, where the pace slows and the beauty is almost unbearably lush.
For the food alone, New Orleans justifies the trip. A bowl of gumbo at Dooky Chase’s, a muffuletta from Central Grocery, a plate of red beans and rice on a Monday; these are not merely meals but cultural experiences, each one carrying the weight of generations. And then there is the music. New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz, and live music pours from the city’s venues and street corners with an authenticity and generosity that no playlist can replicate. Visit during Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest if you want the full spectacle, but know that any time of year, this city is already in the middle of a party, and you are always invited.
4. If you love Radiator Springs Racers, go on a Road Trip to Monument Valley and Route 66
Radiator Springs Racers at Disney California Adventure is the rare attraction that makes you want to pull over, get out, and just look. Based on the world of Pixar’s Cars, the ride captures something true about the American road trip: the vastness of the landscape, the romance of the open highway, the way the desert West makes you feel simultaneously small and completely free. The real-world equivalent is a road trip through Monument Valley and along the storied miles of old Route 66, and it may be the single most cinematic journey available within the borders of the United States.
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, straddling the Utah-Arizona border, is the landscape that defined the American West in the popular imagination; its towering sandstone buttes, the Mittens and Merrick Butte, have appeared in countless films and photographs, yet nothing prepares you for the scale of them in person. The valley floor stretches in every direction, red and silent and ancient, and the sky above it is the kind of blue that does not seem real until you are standing under it. Guided tours led by Navajo Nation members offer access to areas of the park otherwise closed to visitors, and even more importantly, an understanding of the land’s living cultural and spiritual significance that transforms the experience entirely.
From there, stretch westward along fragments of old Route 66, what used to be known as America’s Mother Road, through Kingman and Oatman, Arizona, where wild burros still wander the main street of a former gold mining town. Stop at the Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, a perfectly preserved neon-lit relic of mid-century Americana. Eat a slice of pie at a diner with a hand-lettered sign. Fill up the tank at a station that seems to have materialized from 1962. This is exactly the world that inspired Cars, and driving it feels less like a vacation than a homecoming to a place you have never actually been, but has always been calling to you.
5. If you love Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, go to Paris, France
Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure at EPCOT does something deceptively simple: it makes you fall in love with Paris before you have ever been there. Or, if you have been, it makes you desperate to return. The ride whisks guests through the kitchens and dining rooms of a grand Parisian restaurant at mouse-level, and the world it creates, with the gleaming copper pots, the herringbone floors, the unmistakable romance of French culinary life, is a love letter to the city that has inspired more writers, artists, and dreamers than perhaps any other place on earth.
The real Paris, of course, surpasses even Disney’s rendering of it. The city rewards the slow traveler, the one willing to linger over a café crème at a sidewalk table, to wander without agenda through the covered passages of the 2nd arrondissement, to spend an entire afternoon in the Musée d’Orsay simply sitting in front of a single painting. The food, naturally, is non-negotiable. A perfect croissant from a neighborhood boulangerie, still warm and shattering at the first bite, is one of the great simple pleasures of human life. The markets, such as Marché d’Aligre and Marché des Enfants Rouges, overflow with produce, cheese, charcuterie, and flowers in quantities that feel almost theatrical. For the food-motivated traveler, a cooking class in a Parisian kitchen is worth every euro.
As for the classic landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame (resplendently restored), and the Seine at sunset, they are classics for excellent reasons, and seeing them in person reminds you that some places really do live up to the idea of them. Paris is one of those places. Remy knew it. Now you do too.
6. If you love Frozen Ever After, go on a Norwegian Fjords Cruise
Frozen Ever After at EPCOT’s Norway Pavilion glides you through an Arendelle of glittering ice palaces and snow-dusted mountains, and while the kingdom of Arendelle is fictional, the landscape that inspired it absolutely is not. Norway’s fjords, those ancient, glacier-carved inlets where sheer cliff faces plunge directly into mirror-still water of impossible blue-green, are among the most dramatic natural environments on the planet, and a cruise through them is the closest thing to sailing through an animated film that the real world offers.
The most celebrated of the fjords, the Sognefjord, stretches nearly 130 miles inland and reaches depths of over 4,000 feet, numbers that are difficult to process until you are floating on that water, looking up at walls of rock and ice that rise hundreds of meters above you on both sides. The Geirangerfjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is arguably the most photographed, with its cascade of waterfalls, like the Seven Sisters and the Suitor, tumbling down moss-green cliffs in silver threads.
Small cruise ships and coastal ferries offer itineraries that stop in charming villages like Flåm, where a legendary mountain railway climbs through some of the steepest terrain in the world, and Balestrand, where wooden stave-church architecture and waterside hotels seem to belong to another, quieter century. Bergen, Norway’s second city, is a lovely base for fjord exploration, with its colorful wooden Bryggen wharf district (another UNESCO site), its excellent fish market, and its surrounding ring of mountains accessible by funicular. If you travel in winter, the aurora borealis dances overhead. If you travel in summer, the midnight sun means the fjords are lit with a golden glow at hours when the rest of the world is asleep. Either way, you will feel, unmistakably, like you have found Arendelle.
7. If you love Kilimanjaro Safaris, go on an African Safari
There is no attraction in any Disney theme park quite like Kilimanjaro Safaris at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It is the one ride where the animals are real, where the landscape is genuinely wild, and where something unscripted and unpredictable happens every single time. A giraffe crosses the road in front of your vehicle. A pride of lions sprawls in the morning sun. A family of elephants moves through the acacia trees in the middle distance with a slow, ceremonial dignity that makes your throat tighten. If Kilimanjaro Safaris fills you with something that ordinary theme park attractions do not, a kind of reverence, a sudden awareness of the natural world’s staggering scale and beauty, then an African safari is not a bucket-list fantasy. It is a necessity.
East and Southern Africa offer a range of safari experiences to suit different travel styles and budgets. Kenya’s Maasai Mara, particularly during the Great Migration between July and October when millions of wildebeest and zebra cross the Mara River in thundering columns, is widely considered one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth. Tanzania’s Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater offer similarly extraordinary game viewing, with the crater’s enclosed ecosystem producing an almost unreal concentration of wildlife including lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, rhino, and hippo. Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where the Kalahari’s floodwaters create an inland sea teeming with life, is the choice for travelers who want exclusivity, intimacy, and the kind of profound quiet that recalibrates the nervous system.
Whatever destination you choose, a skilled local guide transforms the experience from sightseeing into storytelling, one in which you begin to understand not just what you are seeing, but why it matters, and why preserving it is among the most urgent imperatives of our time.
8. If you love Flight of Passage, go Hang Gliding or Hot Air Ballooning on your next Trip
Flight of Passage at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, where riders soar on the back of a banshee over the bioluminescent landscape of Pandora, is perhaps the most purely exhilarating ride in the Disney canon. The sensation of open-air flight, of wind and altitude and the earth falling away beneath you, is unlike anything else the parks offer. And while no real-world experience can replicate the specific magic of riding a banshee, hang gliding and hot air ballooning can actually come closer than you might think, and there are options for doing so in multiple locations.
On the West Coast, the coastal cliffs of Torrey Pines in La Jolla, California are one of the premier hang gliding destinations in the world, with instructors offering tandem flights for first-timers that launch directly from a bluff above the Pacific. The views, consisting of ocean on one side, canyon on the other, and the San Diego skyline in the distance, are extraordinary. In New England, the rolling hills of Vermont and the Connecticut River Valley offer some of the most beautiful hot air ballooning scenery in North America, particularly in autumn when the foliage ignites in a riot of red, orange, and gold that seems almost unreasonably beautiful from 2,000 feet up. The Napa Valley and Temecula wine regions of California are also beloved ballooning destinations, with early-morning flights that drift above vineyards while the valleys below fill with light.
The experience of ballooning, with its surprising silence, and the strange stillness of floating with the wind rather than against it, as well as the way the world below becomes a quilt of color and geometry, has a way of producing the same wordless wonder that Flight of Passage manufactures so skillfully. It is flight stripped to its essence, and it is, in the best possible way, enough.
9. If you love Jungle Cruise, go on a Nile River Cruise in Egypt
The Jungle Cruise is one of Disney’s oldest and most beloved attractions, even though it’s a fairly simple ride, consisting of a gentle float past animatronic hippos, elephants, and other jungle animals, and of course, a skipper’s worth of terrible puns that have become, over the decades, as much a part of the experience as the scenery itself. But beneath the comedy is a genuine premise: the adventure of moving through wild, unknown waterways where the jungle presses close and the exotic world reveals itself around every bend.
For that experience in its truest, most magnificent form, nothing rivals a cruise along the Nile River in Egypt. The Nile hails as the longest river in the world, but also, it is the spine of one of history’s greatest civilizations, and cruising it between Luxor and Aswan is an immersion in antiquity so complete it renders the modern world temporarily irrelevant. From the deck of a traditional felucca or a small river cruiser, the banks of the Nile unspool in a continuous panorama: palm trees and sugarcane fields, water buffalo standing in the shallows, villages whose rhythms have changed little over centuries.
But it is the temples that truly stop the breath. Karnak, near Luxor, is so vast that the Cathedral of Notre-Dame could fit inside its hypostyle hall with room to spare. The Valley of the Kings, a short drive from the river’s edge, holds the tombs of pharaohs, including Tutankhamun, in their original, painted splendor. Further south, the temples of Abu Simbel (relocated in their entirety in one of history’s great feats of engineering to save them from the rising waters of Lake Nasser) greet the rising sun twice a year with a precision that speaks to the astonishing sophistication of ancient Egyptian astronomy. The Jungle Cruise’s skippers may joke that they are headed into the heart of darkness, but the Nile offers something far more interesting: the heart of human civilization itself.
10. If you love Haunted Mansion, go to Salem, Massachusetts
The Haunted Mansion is a masterpiece of atmosphere, a place where the cobwebs are perfect, the candlelight is precisely sinister, and the ghosts are having an altogether better time than most of the living. If you love the Haunted Mansion, you probably also love the gothic, the theatrical, the deliciously macabre, and the way a good ghost story makes the world feel both more mysterious and more alive. Salem, Massachusetts, is your town.
Salem’s history is, of course, inseparable from the events of 1692, when the hysteria of the witch trials resulted in the execution of twenty people and the imprisonment of many more; it was a dark chapter that the city now addresses with a seriousness and educational rigor that honors its victims without sensationalizing their suffering. The Peabody Essex Museum, one of the finest art museums in New England, houses an extraordinary collection alongside exhibits on Salem’s maritime history. The Salem Witch Museum and the Witch Trials Memorial offer thoughtful, sobering reckonings with what happened here and why. But Salem is also, particularly in October, an irresistible celebration of everything spooky and atmospheric.
The city’s historic center, including Chestnut Street, the Charter Street Cemetery, the McIntire District’s Federal-era architecture, provides the kind of genuinely evocative setting that Halloween decorations elsewhere can only approximate. Haunted walking tours, theatrical performances, and a month-long festival called Haunted Happenings draw visitors from around the world. Beyond October, Salem is a charming, walkable New England city with excellent restaurants, independent shops, and a waterfront that recalls its days as one of colonial America’s great trading ports. The Haunted Mansion asks you to believe in 999 happy haunts, while Salem asks something perhaps more interesting: to sit with the complexity of history and find, within it, both warning and wonder.
11. If you love Test Track, go to Indianapolis, Indiana
Test Track at EPCOT is a love letter to automotive engineering, a ride that puts guests inside the process of designing, testing, and ultimately unleashing a concept car on a high-speed circuit. For the traveler who loves that premise, who is energized by speed, design, and the marriage of technology and performance, Indianapolis, Indiana offers a real-world counterpart that is deeply satisfying.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is one of the most storied venues in motorsport; it’s a 2.5-mile oval that has hosted the Indianapolis 500, the world’s largest single-day sporting event, every year since 1911 (with very few exceptions). The track seats more than 250,000 people at capacity, and even on a quiet non-race day, walking the grounds produces a specific awe: the vast sweep of the front straight, the worn brickyard finish line, the sense of accumulated history pressing in from every corner of the infield. The IMS Museum, located within the speedway grounds, houses a stunning collection of historic Indy cars spanning over a century of racing, including championship-winning machines whose engineering tells the story of automotive development as vividly as any textbook.
For those who want to get closer still, several programs offer the chance to experience the speedway from the car itself, whether as a passenger in a two-seat racing car or, for the truly committed, behind the wheel during a driving experience. Beyond the speedway, Indianapolis has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent decades into a genuinely vibrant city, with a thriving dining scene, the outstanding Indianapolis Museum of Art, the NCAA Hall of Champions, and the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, a beautiful urban bike and pedestrian path threading through the city’s distinct neighborhoods. Test Track puts you in the driver’s seat. Indianapolis hands you the keys to the whole garage.
12. If you love Soarin’, you’ll be happy going Anywhere and Everywhere, and Back to Disney
And then there is Soarin’. Of all the attractions in the Disney canon, Soarin’ Around the World at EPCOT is perhaps the most openly, unabashedly in love with the planet itself. It lifts you into a hang glider, sends you swooping over the Great Wall of China, the Serengeti, the Eiffel Tower, the Matterhorn, Iguazu Falls, Sydney Harbor, and the fields of Neuschwanstein, all while the scent of pine forests and ocean air drifts up from below. It is, in the most literal sense, an advertisement for everywhere.
If Soarin’ is your favorite ride, the honest truth is that you do not have a favorite destination, you have a love of travel itself. You are the person who feels the pull of the globe in all directions simultaneously, who can never quite decide between the mountains and the sea, the ancient and the modern, the familiar and the foreign. For you, the answer is all of it, eventually, in whatever order life allows. But here is what Soarin’ ultimately reveals: that the world EPCOT is selling is, in large part, the world Disney has already built. EPCOT’s World Showcase is a genuinely remarkable place, with its eleven countries represented by architecture, food, entertainment, and, crucially, cast members from those very nations who bring an authentic human presence to what is already a quintessentially Magical display of cultures.
It is possible to eat your way around the world in an afternoon, to speak to someone from Morocco about Morocco, and someone from Japan about Japan, to hear a live performance of Mexican folk music and then stroll five minutes to a candlelit Italian trattoria. For travelers of every age and budget, it is an extraordinary thing. So go everywhere, and then come back to Disney, because EPCOT has it all, and the Magic of wanting to see the world is, itself, one of the greatest gifts the parks have ever given us.
Can You Choose a Favorite?
The best travel begins with a feeling. Not an itinerary, not a deal on flights, not a list of must-sees aggregated from a website, but a feeling. The feeling of soaring; of being small against something ancient and vast; of wanting to be somewhere that smells different, sounds different, and asks something different of you than your ordinary life does. Disney’s great rides are, at their core, feeling-delivery machines, and the feelings they deliver are ones that the real world is waiting to fulfill in ways no attraction ever fully can. The Nile is more magnificent than any animatronic jungle. The Norwegian fjords are colder and more silent and more breathtaking than any screen can render. A giraffe crossing a dusty road in the Maasai Mara looks at you with eyes that contain a depth no Imagineering team has yet replicated.
Part of Disney’s greatest Magic is that it plants the seed of wanderlust, of finding our own real life fairytales. It gives wanderers a first vision of a world they had not yet thought to seek, so run with it. Use the ride that made your pulse quicken as your compass. Let the memory of Tiana’s Bayou lead you to a bowl of gumbo on Magazine Street. Let the darkness of Space Mountain lead you to a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Let the red rocks of Big Thunder Mountain lead you to a trail at Bryce Canyon where the hoodoos glow at golden hour and nobody, for a few perfect minutes, is in any hurry to go anywhere at all. Let Magic Kingdom be the beginning, and invite the world to become the rest of the story.
Ready to Plan?
Now that you have a dozen destinations based on a dozen of Disney’s top favorite rides, does one of them speak to you for your next trip? Have a favorite ride that’s not listed? There are a lot missing, I know; maybe we should do a Part 2, perhaps! Comment below or email me at gina@lotmv.com with your favorite ride, and we’ll figure out the perfect place for you to travel next! Email me or your favorite Love of the Magic Vacations Travel Advisor to get started planning!