Our Spring Break Disney-cation, Part 2

After a sound night's sleep, all of us rose refreshed and ready to party at Disneyland! Besides getting a hotel further away from the theme park, there were other differences in this Disneyland trip from our last visit. For one thing, we had to pay for tickets for all family members this time...ugh! Since this made for a slightly (aka "a lot") more expensive trip than last time, we decided to save money by passing on the Park Hopper passes. The Park Hopper pass allows Disneyland guests to freely move between the Disneyland and California Adventure parks for the duration of the trip. Instead, we bought the slightly cheaper "one park per day" passes, which would require us to choose only one park (of the two) to visit each day.

Aurora WAS excited, I promise!

And our last big change...we left our big tandem stroller at home! With an eight-year-old and a six-year-old and a four-year-old, we decided a smaller umbrella stroller would be sufficient to give our younger girls periodic rests. We felt almost "naked," pushing around just a single tiny stroller. We also brought in a fairly large bag filled with treats & other essentials, but other than that, we felt very unencumbered, compared to our last trip to the "Happiest Place On Earth."

The girls were way too excited to be riding in public transportation. I don't know why they love buses so much, but they do. It's a good thing the bus wasn't too crowded on our way in, because they were crawling over every available inch of the place. That excitement, of course, paled in comparison to entering Disneyland!

After our trip, Nathan managed to compile a pretty accurate spreadsheet of everything we did on each day of the trip. I won't bore you with all the nitty-gritty, but here are some of the highlights of our first day in Disneyland:

That Peter Pan ride in Fantasyland was our first stop. I am actually the only member of our family who rode the Peter Pan ride at our last Disneyland trip. Every other time we've been near it, we've taken one look at the long line (and the line for this ride is always long, no matter what time of day it is!), and quickly given up hope. But now that our girls are big fans of Jake and the Never Land Pirates, not to mention the original Peter Pan movie, I knew that skipping this ride was no longer an option. So we decided to get it out of the way first thing! We got in line at 8:30 in the morning or so, and we still waited 45 minutes. UGH!

But I guess it was worth it, because the kids loved it. I do have to say, it's a really beautiful ride, which simulates Peter Pan's flight over the nighttime London streets, as well as Never Land. It's the most interesting of all the Fantasyland rides (admittedly, this is kind of a low bar). I eventually took Celeste and Aurora on the ride a second time on our third day at the park, but we went as a family this time, and seeing Aurora's awestruck face as we took flight was a good reminder of why we came to Disneyland in the first place.

We managed to scare Aurora pretty early on. Our poor youngest daughter was not a big fan of the next few rides we visited...namely, the Haunted Mansion and Splash Mountain. The rest of the family was in seventh heaven because neither of these rides had a line when we got there! Yay! And this was Nathan's first ride on Splash Mountain (since he doesn't always like water rides), and he loved it too! Yay! Unfortunately, the one-two punch of Haunted Mansion and Splash Mountain proved too intense for our four-year-old, who was crying after exiting each ride.

However, our Splash Mountain "reaction shot" photo was priceless, and with any luck will go on our wall someday...as long as I remember to Photoshop that single rider dude out of the top of our "family picture"...

It was really interesting for me to see the girls' reactions to all the rides. Lorelai, for instance, loved the Haunted Mansion...it may have been her favorite ride of the whole trip. She enjoys ghosts, goblins, and spooks, and she has never really been scared by movies featuring any of those things. Celeste, on the other hand, was bothered by the Haunted Mansion because of the spooks & creepy crawlies...yet she loved Splash Mountain because of all the big drops, while Lorelai didn't like those as well.

It seems Lorelai was a bigger fan of the "imagination-fueled" rides, regardless of how scary they were supposed to be. For example, Lorelai also loved Pirates of the Caribbean, which is thematically very similar to Haunted Mansion. Celeste, on the other hand, preferred the pure adrenaline rush of the more intense rides. She loved all the rides that were coasters, that featured drops, spins, and other death-defying motion.

Speaking of coasters...

I was beyond thrilled to revisit Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, probably my favorite ride in Disneyland. It had been closed for over a year for refurbishment, but as luck would have it, it reopened the week we arrived in town! Hooray! Luckily, the whole family loved this one...except for poor Aurora, who thought the ride was going to be a "cute choo-choo ride," and ended up being rudely surprised when it turned out otherwise.

Thank goodness for Disneyland's many milder rides, such as the Winnie the Pooh ride and the Carousel in Fantasyland; those managed to cheer up our shell-shocked youngest child.

Celeste will not be the next King of England

And Aurora did enjoy some of the more exciting rides, such as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride...

Of course, I really don't know what the girls are doing to poor Mr. Toad here. Looks disgusting.

...and of course, the Mad Hatter's Teacups. Really, who doesn't like that ride?

Longest line of the day? Definitely the Matterhorn. Ugh. We waited for over an hour. And there were no FastPasses for the ride. Boo! Worst of all, the sled car design had been changed, so the ride had newer, more stringent height requirements, so Aurora couldn't ride it at all (not that she really wanted to). For this trip, once down the Matterhorn was plenty.

Most pleasant surprise? I'm sure the answer is different for each member of our family, but since I'm writing this blog, I'm going to say Star Tours. Nathan and I went on Star Tours when we visited Disneyland before our children were born; I remember it being a little outdated and hokey. It was under renovation last time we brought the family, so this was our first time visiting the newly updated version. It was much improved. Apparently, there are dozens of mission combos you can experience on the ride, so we went twice and got a completely different mission each time. It was a lot of fun, and the motion simulation technology was much better than it used to be. I'm no engineer, but I would love an explanation sometime of how it simulated extreme acceleration, when we were clearly still sitting in a little box that was shaking around.

Part of the reason this was a "pleasant" surprise was because our family essentially got free FastPasses for the ride, thanks to a nice Disneyland employee who noticed us planning out the rest of our afternoon. He handed us the extra FastPasses and sent us to the front of the line with a smile, telling us that "Magic Moments" like this were handed out at Disneyland all the time every day. Well, we were grateful to have it!

Aurora likes shooting at aliens. Our youngest may not have been the biggest fan of the thrill rides, but she got a huge kick out of the Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride, in which the riders get to use their little "ray guns" to shoot at targets throughout the ride. She really loved all the rides with that kind of interactivity, and I believe she went on the Buzz Lightyear ride several times during our stay, each time getting more and more proud of all the aliens she killed.

We didn't see any princesses, but we did get to see Iron Man! I am soooo glad my girls are not so "girly" that they have to wait in line for hours just for the chance to say hello to an actress dressed up as a princess. They were (thankfully!) much more interested in going on lots of rides. Ironically, though, I was tempted to wait in a character line in a very different setting.

Innoventions is a large discovery/science interactive center in the middle of Tomorrowland. If it was anywhere but Disneyland, it would probably be packed with kids every day, but since there's so much other stuff to do at Disneyland, Innoventions is relatively free of crowds. As luck would have it, a bunch of Marvel Comics superheroes have also decided to squat there:

Those little boys (or girls...or their fangirl moms) who don't want to wait in a line to see Tinkerbell or Princess Jasmine now have another option! Thor was available to meet inside Innoventions, and so was Captain America (mainly due to the imminent release of his newest film). I have to admit, as a Marvel movies fan (and as a lady who has a bit of a crush on Cap), I was tempted to get in one of those lines. But Lorelai had other ideas...

...like meeting Jarvis, Tony Stark's superintelligent AI, and virtually "trying on" one of Iron Man's suits. She stood in place while the program was keyed to her movements, then she was able to "fly" the Iron Man suit around Tony's lab, and practice her target shooting as well. She loved it, and it was fun to watch her goof off with a multimillion-dollar piece of superhero hardware...virtually, of course.

 

I'm not sure which part of Disneyland the girls liked best. We did get to spend a lot of time in Tomorrowland (although Celeste was the only one who accompanied Daddy to Space Mountain, the centerpiece of that area). However, the girls also enjoyed stretching their legs at Tarzan's Tree House in Adventureland, and they all loved the Jungle Cruise (even though the line to get into it was crazy long):

Poor Nathan followed the girls up and down in the tree house, and his calves were screaming in protest for the rest of the day. Both Nathan and I wore tennis shoes ("good for walking," we assumed), but our feet were still killing us by the end of the day. We are just too old to have fun anymore, I guess.

We traveled back to the hotel briefly to have dinner (Crock Pot dinner in the hotel room for the win!!), but we managed to get back to the park in time to catch something we hadn't seen before...

The "princess" float, which featured Rapunzel's tower as the dominant feature.

...the parade! Usually we are off riding rides by this point, but the girls were happy to sit still for a while and watch all the big, expensive, carefully crafted whimsy on display. The music was really loud, but other than that it was pretty cool to watch. Simba the Lion King was on one of the floats, and I was pretty impressed at how articulated and animated he was...at least, for a fake lion perched high up on a float.

Tiana (from The Princess and the Frog) got her own float, though! She and Merida were the only two princesses we saw wandering randomly around the park for the whole trip.

We squeezed in a few more rides after the parade, then headed to our beds for the night, tired but excited about the day to come in Disney's California Adventure.