dimensionz

So, here is the promised Disneyland trip report.

Chantal and I went to Disneyland October 10th to the 14th. I found an unbelievably cheap flight and hotel combo through expedia.ca and the holiday weekend was the perfect time to go. We did have to fly out of Seattle again to get the super-cheap price, but it was worth a two hour drive.

So Saturday morning we get up bright and early to make it to Seattle for our flight, a slight detour at the border later we make it to the airport. Now comes that catch to our super-cheap trip, our first flight is not to Anaheim and the home of Disneyland, it is to Salt Lake City and the home of the Tabernacle Choir. So we had a couple of hours to kill in Utah before we could continue on our way to the mecca that is Disneyland.

We finally get to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA. We say hello to the statue of the Duke, collect our bag (yes singular, if you have to pay to check your bags we are only checking one) catch the SuperShuttle and get to our hotel.

The Quality Inn & Suites on S. Manchester is sort of across the street and around the corner from Disneyland, about a 7 to 10 minute walk from the door of our room to the entrance of Disneyland proper. The room is small, but clean and relatively close to DL. Oh, and did I mention the only thing that mattered? Cheap.

Anxiously clutching our annual passports we make our way to Disneyland!

Hungry after a day of traveling the first thing on our minds is food. We decide to get some sandwichs from the River Belle Terrace. Tal had a tasty looking Roast Beef, and I had a tasty tasting Turkey. We rode some rides and when we got tired were about to head back to the hotel when someone offered us some FastPasses to Space Mountain. Now FastPasses are passes that let you skip a big chunk of the line on rides that offer them. Space Mountain is by far the most popular ride at DL right now. While we were there the lines regularly exceeded an hour in wait time. To increase the popularity even more this year is the first time they added a special Halloween modification. For the month of October it is called Space Mountain’s Ghost Galaxy, and there is a scary space ghost that chases you through the ride. To tell you how packed Space Mountain is, we only got to ride it about 4 times during our whole trip.

 

Sunday we went to Downtown Disney prior to our 6:30 reservation for Goofy’s Kitchen. I drove the miniature Jungle Cruise boats out by the Lost Bar at the Disneyland Hotel. Tal got a little tipsy on a Long Island Iced Tea at the Lost Bar, and then we went to eat. Goofy’s Kitchen is a buffet style restaurant where you pay before you eat. As we were about to pay this strange woman asked if we had paid yet, when I told her we hadn’t she gave us a voucher for a free meal saying “Grandma was a no-show”. So we got a voucher worth $40 free, essentially Goofy’s Kitchen was 2-for-1 for us that night. We ate a Goofy’s Kitchen in June and saw a bunch of characters, this time we didn’t see that many. We saw Jasmine, Goofy, Aladdin, and Chip or Dale (I can’t remember which). Only Jasmine and Goofy really visited our table for photo opportunities.

 

Monday morning we eat at the Carnation Cafe, my favorite restaurant in the parks. We both had Croissant Eggs Benedicts. In fact we like the Carnation Cafe so much we ate there again on Wednesday morning before we left. Monday night we sat on the cold hard pavement for almost two hours in order to see the special Halloween fireworks show, Halloween Screams! It was pretty cool, with lots of Nightmare Before Christmas stuff in it.

 

Tuesday night we ate at the Cafe Orleans. I had the gloriously deep-fried Monte Cristo sandwich, and for desert we shared some Mickey Mouse shaped beignets:

And speaking of Mouse shaped food, for breakfast on tuesday morning we split a Mickey Mouse pancake.

Sometime during all the madness that is Disneyland we managed to watch Fantasmic! Which is an awesome show put on in the Rivers of America and feature of a climax of a giant dragon setting the river on fire. A must see at DL.

 

Tuesday night it started to rain so hard that at some point it knocked the power out at our hotel. We woke up to a lot of water outside. After checking out and leaving our bags at the front desk we made our final journey back to the park. We had made plans to eat at the Carnation Cafe again, and rain be damned we were going to eat there. I being unadventurous had the croissant eggs benedict again, while Tal had:

Mickey Mouse Waffle

More Mickey shaped food! That’s a plan for future trip, eat nothing but mouse shaped food while at Disneyland. Considering the large number of options available, the plan is entirely possible.

We also got some cool souvenirs:

 

Overall, it was a lot of fun. I still want to go back again, we shall see.

Oh, and I almost forgot the cats we saw in Disneyland:

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.