EPIC June birthday trip to DL Trip Report 5/27-6/4

[VandVsmama]

We just returned yesterday evening from a truly wonderful and memorable trip to the Disneyland Resort. I have a lot of photos to share with all of you! YAY! Bear with me, though, because it might take a few days for me to get through the whole trip! But to get your DL juices flowing, here are some highlights:

Miles walked per day:
Tues 5/30 - 8.2 miles
Wed 5/31 - 9.9 miles
Thurs 6/1 - 10.9 miles This was 82% of a half marathon!
Fri 6/2 - 9.2 miles
Sat 6/3 - 7.2 miles
Total for the 5 days = 45.4 MILES! Holy moly!

Hotel highlights:
We stayed from 5/30 - 6/3 at Hojo's. LOVED it there!

• The free parking was REALLY great!
• We stayed in 1 of the 2 double bed rooms. These double beds seemed wider than the double beds at Best Western Stovall's. They really seemed like queens to DH and I.
• The beds were SO COMFORTABLE!
• The room was SO CLEAN!
• The TV remote didn't work, so we called the front desk and they sent somebody up to replace it right away.
• We were in Bldg 6 on the 2nd floor. The room had lots of off-the-floor luggage storage available, which was helpful since we have 4 suitcases.
• Despite the no free breakfast, DH really liked it here and is talking about staying there for our next trip.
• Being able to keep the car in the Hojo's lot until 3pm on check out day was very convenient for us because we stayed at the parks on Sat 6/3 until about 2pm. This meant that we ended up not having to use the DL parking pass that I'd purchased ahead of time.
• The walk to the main gate felt half the distance of the walk from BW Stovalls to the main gate (cutting through the GCH, which now you can't do anymore).
• We used the pool a couple of times. Our kids (age 9 and almost 11) loved the Pirates Cove water play area. Hojo's has Disney music playing in the water play area. That was fun. The garden pool was great, too. Hojo's has towels available at each pool/water play area, which was very convenient.
• I did some laundry on Friday. Laundry facilities are in the basement of Bldg 1. $1.25 to wash, $1.00 to dry. You can buy detergent at the gift shop, but I brought some from home.

 

[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

TIME TO GO TO DISNEYLAND!

Before I dive into the Disneyland portion of our trip complete with details of what we did and when and pictures and all of that, I just wanted to share a few things with y'all.

1. 5 days was NOT ENOUGH!
Really. It wasn't. Here's all the stuff that we had planned on doing, but didn't get around to:

• Princess Fantasy Faire
• Mickey & the Magical Map
• Storytelling at the Royal Theater in Fantasyland
• Jedi Training Academy - better do this in March while YDD is still 11!
• World of Color - we have yet to see this!
• Pixar Play Parade
• Soundsational Parade
• musical chairs with Alice & the Mad Hatter at Coke Corner
• Flag Retreat Ceremony at Town Square
• Great Moments with Mr Lincoln
• getting silhouettes made of the kids
• seeing the cartoons in the Main Street Cinema
• Casey Jr Circus Train
• Storybook Land Canal Boats

2. Two days in a row touring commando style is not a good idea for us! We should have taken afternoon breaks on those days.
This happened on Wed & Thurs, which were the 2 days that our friends Jack & Diane joined us. On Thursday, we were all really worn out and tired!

3. Disneyland is amazing. Even when it's busy. Even with the railroad off line. Even despite no canoes or sailing ship or Mark Twain riverboat to ride around the Rivers of America. Even without any trips to Tom Sawyer's Island.
The atmosphere is just wonderful. There were lots of really great moments on our trip in which we were pretty much forced to stop and rest because of fatigue or weariness or waiting for a FP return time to open up or somebody was hungry and wanted a snack. Moments like....

• sitting on a bench near the Little Red Wagon on Main Street and watching the world go by.
• snacking on beignets at the French Market & talking & hanging out with our friends. Captain Jack Sparrow walked by holding the hand of a little girl who looked to be about 3 or 4. She was wearing a fancy red dress, a red hat, and a red wig and was dressed up as the red head from the POTC ride! It was SO ADORABLE AND SO WONDERFUL!
• sitting in Tomorrowland watching my kids & a ton of other kids move that big stone globe thing in the water feature.
• having breakfast at Rancho del Zocalo & feeding all the birds & ducks who came up to our table begging for hand outs.
• sitting on a bench on Main Street outside the Disneyana store on Friday evening while waiting for some friends & watching everybody come into the park with happy smiles on their faces, ready to enjoy an evening of fun.

4. The customer service and attention to detail is amazing at Disneyland.
On Saturday, at Flo's V-8 Cafe, one of the Cast Members offered to get YDD something else to eat because she noticed that YDD had eaten only half of her ribs. She didn't want YDD to leave hungry.

5. Ridemax
We strayed from our Ridemax itinerary each day. Stuck to it most of the day on Tuesday, but not in the evening. Each evening, we noticed that both POTC and HM had really long wait times. Like 45 min long! Some of the long POTC wait times were probably due to the new POTC movie coming out on Memorial Day weekend. Some of the long wait times were also due to Grad Nights in my opinion. So we changed course and started doing POTC in the mornings instead and that worked out fine.

Despite straying from our Ridemax plans each day, we still went on a TON of attractions each day! On the long boring drive home yesterday, DH remarked about how much better it is now going to DL than when he was a kid. He said that when he was a kid, they wouldn't get to DL until 10 am or 11 am. By that time, it was really crowded. And his family would start in 1 land and go on all of the attractions in that land regardless of how long the wait was.

As a result, they stood in a lot of lines.

DH has often balked at my hyper-mega planning with ride itineraries and all that mumbo jumbo. BUT he said that he has a MUCH better time now at DL than he used to years ago because we don't wait in long lines. The longest line we did was Peter Pan on Saturday morning and that was 30 minutes. All the others were ~ 15 min or less.

6. DAS card
This was a lifesaver for disabled friend Jack. It made Jack & Diane's time w/us at DL & DCA so much more enjoyable than it would have been without it. We were in DL & DCA before them each day. They drove in from Fontana, had to park in a DL parking lot, then went to City Hall or the Chamber of Commerce to get the DAS card set up with their tickets. At first, I thought that we'd all have to go in person to City Hall to do that, but this was not the case. They did it at City Hall with their 2 tickets. Then Diane would take all 6 of our tickets to a kiosk (there's 1 in each land) and tell the plaid vested CM which attraction we wanted. Plaid CM would then give her the DAS return time.

THEN we'd do other stuff while we all waited in the virtual line. This usually involved a combination of:

• using regular FP
• seeing a show
• sitting down and having a snack
• going on an attraction with wait time of 10 min or less & doing that w/o FP or using the DAS card

** That's how we went on Guardians of the Galaxy, for example.

Jack & Diane had such a great time that they are considering getting So Cal AP and going on Sunday mornings once in awhile.

 

[VandVsmama]

OTHER GENERAL OBSERVATIONS:

1. RSR FP
RSR FP at DCA are taking a LOT longer to run out now compared to our trip 2 years ago. On the other hand, GOTG FP run out very quickly. They ran out by about 10 am, I think. On Saturday, we left DCA at 2 pm and RSR was still handing out FP for 8-9 pm.

2. RSR Single Rider
This was a first for our family! Even YDD (who turned 9 on the trip) did this Single Rider. ODD wasn't a fan of Single Rider, but she still enjoyed the ride. We did RSR Single Rider on Saturday. Otherwise, we'd have to wait in line for almost 2 hours and we were not interested in doing that.

3. If you have Magic Morning on your ticket, you should use it!
We tried to do Magic Morning on Thursday, but were too exhausted from the day before. Luckily, we were able to use Magic Morning on Saturday. MM entry started at 7 am! We were not the first people in line by any stretch of the imagination, but I am happy to report that we did go through the turn stiles at 7:01 am! Walked onto Matterhorn. Peter Pan was a 30 min wait at 7:08 am. Still better than waiting an hour later in the day!

Between 7-10:30 am on Saturday morning, Disneyland was so wonderful and magical. The park felt practically empty. Tomorrowland was like a ghost town. It was amazing and so great! We got so much accomplished. DH raved about how great it was.

Then at 10:30 am, it seemed like the whole world showed up. We are so glad that we woke up early on check out day to take advantage of our MM entry!

 

[VandVsmama]

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[RedHotMama]

I'm enjoying your report! Don't forget to add your photos!

 

[VandVsmama]

I took over 700 pictures last week, so it's taking awhile to organize them on Photobucket! Plus, the pics are all too big to upload here, so I have to sort through them on Photobucket, put them in a public folder, tuck away the other photos that I don't want in the public folder, etc., etc.

I am amazed at how much walking we did last week! It's no wonder we were so tired at the end of the day!

Will try to post some pictures this evening!

 

[whoever]

Eagerly awaiting the next installment (and pics). 700 pics sounds daunting, but that's just a good morning shooting at the parks...

 

[VandVsmama]

Ack! Photobucket did not upload all of the Club 33 food pics from my phone. So it's going to take me another day or 2 for all of that. I've got 92 photos alone just for Tuesday and that doesn't even include all of the great Club 33 pics!

 

[VandVsmama]

Can I just mention really quick how GLAD I am that I brought fans with us? Even though it was 25+ degrees cooler in Anaheim compared to Arizona, we were all sweaty the entire time. I'm certain that it was the humidity. On Saturday morning, Weather.com said it was 63 in Anaheim. Yet standing in line at Peter Pan, I was glistening big time!

I'm also glad that I brought Body Glide with us. YDD got a blister on Tuesday and she had problems with some chaffing from her shorts, so we used that on her the rest of the week and that took care of blisters and chaffing.

 

[whoever]

Can I just mention really quick how GLAD I am that I brought fans with us? Even though it was 25+ degrees cooler in Anaheim compared to Arizona, we were all sweaty the entire time. I'm certain that it was the humidity. On Saturday morning, Weather.com said it was 63 in Anaheim. Yet standing in line at Peter Pan, I was glistening big time!

I'm also glad that I brought Body Glide with us. YDD got a blister on Tuesday and she had problems with some chaffing from her shorts, so we used that on her the rest of the week and that took care of blisters and chaffing.

If I'm moving fast, I start sweating. You'll probably see that in my early morning rope-drop pics. Eventually, a few dark rides and being idle in queues, I'll cool back down. The humidity is definitely a killer. I've been in FL all week, and even in AC, I'm sweating. Humidity just sucks when you are used to 3% humidity of AZ.

 

[VandVsmama]

IT'S CLUB 33 TIME, PEOPLE!

To say that we were all excited about this is putting it mildly. I honestly didn't care if we did nothing else at Disneyland on Tuesday just because we were getting to eat lunch at Club 33!! SO EXCITING! We found the door to ring the buzzer and check in promptly at 12:00 pm. DH had to provide his name. The Club 33 folks checked that against the reservation and then let us in!


Inside the Court of Angels, there are these gorgeous doors!

 

[ADLFAN]

You are such a tease!

Can't wait to see the Club!

 

[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

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[VandVsmama]

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