Last weekend, Berta and I went to Disneyland for our 8th anniversary.
It was just a weekend trip. We dropped the kids off with Mom on Friday night (after yet another late showing of the house), packed, then left for the airport around 6am on Saturday morning. We arrived in Los Angeles in the morning, and took an hour-long ride in a shuttle van to the Desert Palms hotel, which is on the same block as Disneyland.
Disneyland is weird. In our area, amusement parks are not inside cities. For example, Hersheypark is kind of out in the middle of farm country. Dorney Park is near Allentown, but not among the city buildings. Likewise with Busch Gardens in Williamsburg. King’s Dominion is nowhere near anything, and neither is Great Adventure. Disney World is it’s own gigantic place, but it’s away from everything. So it seems weird that Disneyland is tucked between some buildings in the middle of Anaheim. Anyway, that’s just an observation.
When we arrived, we were too early to check into our hotel. Thankfully, they were able to keep our bag for us, otherwise we’d have been lugging it around for the afternoon. They directed us toward Downtown Disney for someplace for lunch, so that’s where we headed.
Finding Downtown Disney was a bit more of a challenge than it needed to be. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, Downtown Disney is essentially bunch of high-profile restaurants and stores all packed onto a single walking-only road. There are places to eat like the House of Blues, the Rainforest Cafe, and the ESPN Zone. They have quite a few unique-ish stores, like Sephora (cosmetics), Lego (uh, Lego), Illuminations (candles), and of course, a really big Disney store.
In order to get to Downtown Disney, we had to walk around the block from the hotel and through the Grand Californian hotel (this is the part that wasn’t made clear in our instructions). The road sign for Downtown Disney is for cars, and doesn’t help people find it at all. But we finally did make it through onto the bustling Downtown avenue.
We ended up eating at this place called Catal, which was very near to where we entered Downtown. We sat upstairs in a round room with glass windows that looked out over the whole Downtown Disney street. It was pretty cool. Both Berta and I had steak salads, which were enormous and oh-so-good. We agreed afterward that this was our best meal on the trip. We also got these french fries that were really good. I haven’t had such good french fries in a long time.
After lunch, we walked around Downtown Disney a bit. There was some live music playing in the street, some dude with an electric guitar. After poking into a few shops, we decided to see a movie. Yes, yes, I know that you usually don’t go to the movies while on vacation, but Berta and I haven’t been to a movie together in a very long time. Plus, we wanted to see the new Pirates of the Carribean
before we were on the ride, so this was our last opportunity.
By the time the movie was over it was around 6pm, but we felt more like we were back home (9pm) and had been up since 4am, which we had. We headed back to the hotel to finally check in and see about our dinner options.
We ordered in pizza from the hotel bar, which turned out to be pretty tasty, and decided to rest up for a full Sunday at the park.
In the morning, we headed to the hotel desk to inquire about discount tickets. We had decided that a 2-day parkhopper pass would allow us to see both parks for cheaper than buying separate single-day admission to both parks. We took our 2-day parkhopper tickets off to Downtown Disney to await the park openings.
We wanted to visit California Adventure first in the day, but it didn’t open until 10am, and we had arrived at 9am. We decided to get some breakfast at a nearby Downtown restaurant. While heading that direction, I noticed a sign on one of the ticket booths advertising single-day parkhopper passes. Gah!
Just because we had time, we went to the Guest Services building and explained what had happened and that we wanted to trade the 2-day tickets for single day tickets. (Why do Disneyland parkhopper tickets only last for so many days after first use? Disney World tickets don’t do that.) Thankfully, the attendant was able to refund our money and change our tickets. This is just one reason why Disney parks are so awesome.
After a quick and yummy breakfast in Downtown (the scavenger cannibal birds ate my dropped scrambled eggs!), we headed off to the California Adventure. Our first ride was Soarin’ Over California, where you get in these weird glider things, and it uses a big 360-degree screen to simulate flying over California. It was pretty nifty, certainly a good start.
California Adventure has a bunch of interesting rides. It’s a strange thing, though - it’s a theme park whose theme is at least partially an amusement park. A bit odd.
I’ll recap a few of the rides we went on. Mulholland Madness is a little mousetrap-style coaster that made us want to vomit. The Maliboomer launches you into the air and drops you in a psychotic vomit-inducing elevator action. We didn’t ride the Sun Wheel, because I really don’t like Ferris Wheels.
California Screamin’ is the only real coaster in the park, which looks wooden, but isn’t. This coaster has two electromagnetic lifts, which is yet another indicator that this is a Disney experience, and not some random park with a single lift and a need for a swiftly moving queue.
We did the Tower of Terror, which was somewhat different from the Florida attraction. Berta and I both remembered that the one in Disney World moves forward before it drops you. Weird. We also rode the Monsters Inc. ride, which was kind of cute, if not the best it could possibly have been.
We also took a brief tour of Redwood Creek Challenge Trail, which is kind of like an outdoor climbing/camping adventure park. It’s mostly for kids, but Berta and I climbed around on the rope nets a little. They had this cool thing where kids could slide down this zip line. Abby would have enjoyed it.
We spent a while trying to figure out whether we wanted a quick or nice lunch, or to get in the long line for the water rapid ride, or to even spend any more time at California Adventure. In the end, we had a quick bite to eat at a fast place (Berta got a burger and I got ribs) and ended up eating outsie in the heat. Did I mention that it was 90-some degrees?
After lunch, we stopped to pick up a photo that they took of us as we entered the park, and then headed over to Disneyland to spend the rest of the day.
To be continued…
