Easy Riding: Five Gentle Classics | Travel + Leisure
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Easy Riding: Five Gentle Classics

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When you are just three feet tall, as my son is, Disneyland is a very different place. You're too short to be allowed on most of the spectacular rides (as if you would want to hurtle down the side of an Alp), and your view of the festivities begins and ends with a lot of tourists' knees. If your parents take advantage of the pass-off system on the wilder attractions—the whole family stands in line, but one parent stays behind with the child and then gets to ride when the other parent returns—you experience the latest in queue technology without much to show for it. Still, there's plenty of G-rated excitement:

1. It's a Small World
Don't think of it as 11 minutes of the most cloying song ever written. Think of the ride, designed by Disney's Imagineers for the 1964 New York World's Fair, as a masterpiece of early-sixties graphic design and utopian one-worldism.

2. Enchanted Tiki Room
The ethnic-dialect banter between the parrots may have been dated even in 1963, but this first Disney essay in Audio-Animatronics is the only show with singing birds, angry tiki gods, and a faux rainstorm.

3. Jungle Cruise
If you get the right skipper, the journey can take on a warped, Dave ChappelleĀ–like dimension. Plus, the new piranha-churn at the end is proof that a simple idea can sometimes trump $10 million worth of engineering.

4. Dumbo the Flying Elephant
The elephants go up. The elephants come down. Your toddler is at the controls. Somehow, this is soothing.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean
Freshly tweaked from a ride based on every Errol Flynn movie ever made to a ride based on a movie based on a ride based on every Errol Flynn movie ever made, the new Pirates is a triumph of postmodernism with a cool theme song. Yo ho, yo ho, indeed.

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