Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Disneyland ~ Anaheim, California

It's a small world after all.............it's a small world after all...........

We enjoyed our very long day at Disneyland today, arrived at the park's open at 10am and left at the close, 8pm. Since Disneyland is only a 15 minute walk from our campground (Anaheim RV Village), we walked both ways. (If you want to bike it, which we will probably do for our next visit, there are bike racks at the front gates, and of course, parking lots for cars.)

So what can we say about Disneyland?

First, go off-season and on a week with no school holidays - we waited no more than 20 minutes for the Indiana Jones Adventure, and the rest of the rides were either walk-right-on or a 5 minute wait. We rode Space Mountain and Splash Mountain twice without any wait, and we both agree that they tie for our favorite rides so far.

At first we tried to find the "Adult" rides, but found that even the non-thriller rides were fun for adults, such as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan’s Flight. I don’t think we’ll be going on any of the “kiddie” rides again, but were glad to do it all once. It’s a Small World reopened after being closed since January for repair, and it was decked in a holiday theme. It was amazing – over-and-over again throughout the park, we were amazed at the attention to detail in the rides, the staff, and the park grounds themselves.

Food – there is a lot to choose from, and you can bring your own food, store in a locker (which rent from a low of $7 and have in/out privileges all day), but we decided to try the various restaurant at Disneyland – pasta for lunch at the Pizza Port and fajita tacos for dinner at Rancho del Zocalo. Both meals were surprisingly good, well-portioned, and reasonable priced for the portion sizes. Where Disneyland really earns it’s profit, food-wise, is the little carts and shops all over the place where you can get a soft pretzel for $2.75, a coke for $2.50, an (incredible) chocolate chip cookie for $2.75, etc…..

To end our day, we saw Fantasmic, which is a nighttime show of Mickey Mouse battling good vs. evil, which of course ended with some fireworks. If you want a front-row seat to this, be sure to get here early – we got here at 7:20 for the 7:30 show and stood in the back, but we could still see since Brad’s tall & Suzanne is squirrelly enough to finagle her way to the front row.

A couple tips:
1. Seeing Disneyland any time of the year is incredible, but seeing it decked out for the winter holidays brings it to an entirely new level.
2. The Citypass we used for Universal Studios also had a Disneyland/California Adventure 3-day park hopper pass – which included a Magic Morning pass, which is a pass to enter Disneyland one hour before opening on one of the two remaining days, so we’ll be setting our alarm clocks early and we’ll be at Disneyland at 7am on Saturday!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

OK, now we're laughing again.... sorry we're reading your blog "backwards" (and are now at "Day 1" of Disneyland), but we're amazed at how much fun you had. I guess it doesn't matter if you're 5 or 45, it works. Glad you made it before you were too old to walk (or dead).

Sean

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