This paper examines the family vacation as a common leisure experience, with emphasis on the rise of the theme park. Theme parks, designed to enable parents to entertain everyone in the family with minimal frustration in organization and application, provide a single-price, inside-the-gate, complete experience. In 1955, Disneyland opened in southern California; due to technological advances, today it represents the past. Disney World (in Florida), which represents the present, recognizing that children are well served in all theme parks, pioneered in dults as well. Jurassic Park represents the fictitious future, the major change being in entertainment (live dinosaurs). Biological and electronic technologies have combined to produce live dinosaur clones. What is absent, however, is hands-on excitement. The leisure challenge presents the following problems: (l) people have very little time to play; people forget how to play; and they even forget what play is; and (2) play has become too structured; it is completely rule-bound and calls for little imagination. Visitors to theme parks tend to conform to the technology with unquestioned acceptance. The leisure-oriented solution would be to: learn to use technology, rather than just react to it; be innovative and creative in approaching leisure options; and use technology as an asset. (LL)