Disneyland

Today was our first full day in the States and luckily California turned it on for a day in Disneyland.

We started off early, with breakfast at Mimi’s café at 7.30. This highlighted the massive size of meals in America, I couldn’t finish my cinnamon pancakes with bacon and eggs and Kathryn didn’t get through her egg white frittata. Very full, we wandered the short distance back down the road to the park entrance just after it opened at 8am. We’d already experienced the considered perfection of a Disney park from the previous evening in CAP but this was even more obvious under the light of day. Everything is manicured and I’m sure it’s pretty every day but with the Christmas season the whole park was dressed to the nines.

Having picked up a few tips on the FastPass system over the past few months we headed straight to the FastPass collection point for the Indiana Jones ride. This gave us tickets allowing us to come back in just over an hour later and ride without a queue. This was a good start indeed.

With a little bit of time to kill we went for some of the other rides and struck gold with seemingly low opening numbers in the park. We got through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride (a fairly tame but visually fantastic log flume), the Haunted Mansion (similar to the Pirates ride) and then the Splash Mountain log flume within about forty minutes. As you may have guessed the Splash Mountain was empty for a good reason, as we were in the front and Kathryn’s jeans got drenched! Nevertheless, these dried eventually in the sun and we were saved from 1 hour + wait times later in the day.

We wandered around the main lake just taking in the sights, before making our way to the Thunder Mountain FastPass collection point. The beauty of the FastPass system is that you get given an hour to ride the ride, but you can get your next FastPass before this time. This meant we could grab our FastPasses for Thunder Mountain before heading back to Indiana Jones.

The 4WD adventure of Indiana Jones was very good, as shown by the significant queues already (which we skipped with our FastPass).  We then headed over to the other side of the park to pick up our next FastPass, for the indoor roller coaster Space Mountain. The ruthlessness of the FastPass system was clearly shown here, in that by the time we were able to get our FastPass the booking window was out to 4pm, despite us picking up the pass around 10am.

We checked out Innoventions, which is basically a walkthrough advertisement for Microsoft and Honda so not that interesting. With a brief look at a bunch of little kids getting their Jedi training and then battling Darth Vader we made our way back to Thunder Mountain (why is everything called mountain?) and jumped straight on through. Thunder Mountain is your classic gold mine coaster and was a fantastically entertaining ride.

The exit from Thunder Mountain pushed us out and around into Fantasyland, just in behind the Disneyland Castle. There were some fairly significant lines for the kid’s rides but luckily for us the line for the Mad Hatter Teacups moves pretty quick and next thing you know we found ourselves twirling away like a travel ad.

After a brief look into the hyper-coloured Toontown we jumped on the train and rode around the edge of the park (via a dinosaur infested Grand Canyon display) and headed on out of the park. We’d seen quite a bit of information suggesting taking a break during the peak midday point and this fitted in really well with us given the late night in CAP the previous day. We headed back up the road for a couple of hours sleep and a refresh.

Ready to go again, we headed back to the park in time for our Space Mountain FastPass. With a little bit of time to spare before we had to be there, we headed over to the Matterhorn and used the ever-awesome single rider pass to get right up into the front for the Matterhorn Bobsleigh. Having rattled our way down the mountain we headed back into Tomorrowland and over to Space Mountain. Which was amazing. The hill led up through the rotating tunnel visual illusion so that it felt like you were spinning, before dropping you into a high speed rollercoaster in a giant black room where the only thing you can see are the pinpricks of light for the stars. It was an great experience and made much nicer having skipped the 140 minute queue.

After a pizza dinner (having not eaten since breakfast), we started to look around a bit more, having covered most of what we were hoping to achieve by 5pm. We picked up a FastPass for Autopia (being the only FastPass still available) and then did the Astro Orbiter, a carnivalesque rotating rocket ride. After three goes we finally managed to fit both of us in (I think it’s made for kids). 

It was while in the queue for the Astro that we decided to make a play for the Hollywood Hotel Tower of Terror in CAP, which we hadn’t managed to get the previous evening. While I love roller coasters I wasn’t totally convinced about the drop concept, but Kathryn was dead keen so we were definitely going. This was out longest queue of the day, approximately 60 minutes but I was very much wrong, as this ride was a huge rush and easily the most thrilling of both parks. If you’re not familiar with it, rather than being a straight drop the Tower of Terror takes you up and drops you down multiple times, all from different heights and with no warning. There are many different drop profiles so even if you ride it five times it’s likely to be different each time.

We headed back to Autopia, which turned out to a rather disappointing track based driving experience (especially given what is coming up tomorrow!). By this stage it was very much night-time and the cold and tiredness was starting to kick in. We got lucky with a great little spot to watch the fireworks over the castle before joining the masses in heading out of the park.

So a big thanks to Disneyland; it’s been a great experience and I’m really glad that we got it into our trip. And now it’s time for bed as we have a fairly early start tomorrow.