US-101 Vacation – Part IV

Alright, the moment you all have been waiting for: Disney.

Brooke picked up a book and used it to come up with a bunch of good ideas, the first of which was that we should stay at a hotel directly across the street from Disneyland. Unlike Disney World, where the only hotels nearby are part of the resort (and are, therefore, crazy expensive), Disneyland is in the middle of Anaheim, so while you could stay at one of their hotels on the Disney campus, you certainly don’t have to. And indeed, the hotel we stayed at was such that we could literally walk across the street and we’d be there, allowing us to come and go as we wanted, and leave our car parked at the hotel, only moving it to go wash the laundry before we left. We also ate dinner at a Denny’s the night we got there, for a reasonable price. We grabbed coffee from Panera or McDonald’s, both of which were only a few doors down. There were a lot of good options if you didn’t want to eat at the park.

The other thing we did was pay extra for “Lightning Lane” access, which was something like $20 extra per ticket, but it provided multiple benefits. Brooke and I both downloaded an app that stored our tickets on it (that way, we didn’t both have to be there at any given point). That app also came with a map of the park that could be zoomed into where you could see what the approximate wait time was at a given ride. Sometimes, the wait was only 10 minutes, but for some rides, it was as long as 70 to 90 minutes.

Some rides, though, have Lightning Lane as an option, which allows you to bypass that main line and get in a shorter one. Newer rides were designed with this in mind, whereas older ones like Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room weren’t. Also, importantly, you could only do this once per day per ride, so if you wanted to right Hyperspace Mountain (which, duh), then you can only “Lightning Lane it” once, and you have to wait through the regular line for the next time. So yeah, we did our best to “game the system a bit,” getting there right when the park opened, and trying to target the big rides early.

I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, though. We got there on Monday, June 13th and had tickets to the park for 3 days. The plan was to arrive at the hotel late that morning, grab a quick bite to eat, then go to the park and see what we could see, that way we’d have a full day there on the 14th (Flag Day!) where we could target the rides we really wanted to hit. Then, June 15th would be spent at California Adventure, before leaving that afternoon and heading toward San Diego to finish out the trip.

The first thing we did was hit up Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island (because, duh), and then we “Lightning Laned” Haunted Mansion (which freaked Calvin out tremendously). During the time we had the “LL” on, we couldn’t “LL” anything else: once we redeemed it, then we could apply it to another ride. (Also, side-note, you can split the tickets up, so if Brooke and Meg wanted to ride one thing, and Calvin and I wanted to ride another, we could do that).

Generally, we stuck together to hit most of the rides, sometimes twice. The morning of the 14th, for example, we saw Hyperspace Mountain had practically zero line, so we tried heading there first, but then we noticed that Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters had literally “zero line,” and it was right next door, so we hit up Buzz Lightyear first. By the time we were done, Hyperspace Mountain only had a 20 minute wait, so we canceled the LL we’d applied to it and instead applied it to Matterhorn Bobsleds, that way we could still LL Hyperspace Mountain again later in the day if we wanted to (read: we totally did).

A brief side-bar on Hyperspace Mountain. The day before, when we did Haunted Mansion, Calvin got scared. Dark spaces like that caused him to, oh, freak out a bit. So when we were waiting for Hyperspace Mountain, he worked himself up into a frenzy because a). it’s dark in there, and b). it’s a rollercoaster, and every Disney ride would say “dark spaces with sudden drops,” or something to that effect. We did everything we could to calm him down, but ultimately he started to refuse to get onto the coaster, so the attendant (who’d surely seen this 1000 times…) offered he could cross over to the other side and not actually ride it, waiting for us. He jumped at that chance immediately, so the three of us went on it (and it was awesome), and Calvin waited for us. Later in the day, though, after having ridden other, similar rides, he’d gotten more comfortable with the idea, so he did ultimately ride Hyperspace Mountain, and I think he wished he’d ridden it earlier so he got to ride it twice.

So yeah, the Lightning Lane thing was totally worth it. We got to ride everything we wanted to, and it was relatively seamless. They even canceled our LL for Splash Mountain because they had to shut the ride down, so it gave us a free LL that we could reapply, giving us an extra that we could apply without having it affect the total tally. Score!

By the time we were done with June 14th, we’d done just about everything at Disneyland that we’d wanted to. Honestly, for June 15th, we weren’t expecting much out of California Adventure, but there were a few things we were curious about. All of the Star Wars stuff is over in Disneyland, as well as the more traditional “Disney things” like Peter Pan, Pinocchio, etc. Pixar stuff (aside from Buzz Lightyear) and Marvel stuff are over in California Adventure.

Similarly to over in Disneyland, we tried to “game” the Lightning Lane system, zipping directly to the Incredicoaster as the first ride, while applying the LL to something else we’d want to see afterward, allowing us to LL Incredicoaster again later (narrator: they did). I think most of us decided that Incredicoaster was the best ride we went on between the two parks. There were other good ones, for sure (for example, Hyperspace Mountain was great…the first time….but the second time, some of the “magic” was lost. Incredicoaster was awesome both times). Incredicoaster is a relatively long roller coaster, so it lasts for a bit, but importantly, there’s a loop-de-loop.

Meg noticed this when we were in line for it. We had to “shush” her so she wasn’t too loud, as we didn’t want Calvin to notice…. 😉

Still, both the kids loved it. Calvin was definitely apprehensive, but this roller coaster wasn’t in a dark building, so he could see it from the outside, which helped quite a bit.

Other rides there were cool, like the Guardians of the Galaxy (which is a re-skinned Tower of Terror), and the Pixar Pal-A-Round (which is “just a ferris wheel,” but the gondolas you sit in slide around more, so there’s a lot more movement), but by the time we were through California Adventure, I think we’d seen and done just about everything we’d wanted to. It had gotten hotter as the three day stint went on, so we were pretty tired and drained.

We headed back to the hotel (late….Brooke mis-read the check out time….), packed up the car, and headed back to California Adventure for lunch and a few more rides before leaving for San Diego! Below, I’ve typed in the names of all the rides we went on, mostly for posterity’s sake in case I need to look it up some day to tell somewhat what we did. It’s a pretty solid list – we hit just about everything at least once!!

Disneyland:

Autopia

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (2x)

Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters

Disneyland Monorail

Haunted Mansion

Hyperspace Mountain (2x)

Indiana Jones Adventure

“it’s a small world”

Jungle Cruise

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Matterhorn Bobsleds

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run (2x)

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride

Peter Pan’s Flight

Pinocchio’s Daring Journey

Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island

Splash Mountain

Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room

California Adventure:

Golden Zephyr

Goofy’s Sky School

Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!

Incredicoaster (2x)

Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind

Jessie’s Critter Carousel

The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel’s Undersea Adventure

Pixar Pal-A-Round – Swinging

Soarin’ Around the World

Toy Story Midway Mania!