DL trip report 1/21-1/24

[Zoly]

This probably won't be broken out by days, just because some of them blend together. But I thought I'd share what we did and some observations/lessons learned.

We originally were supposed to be there Mon-Wed, but we ended up flying in on Saturday and didn't want to switch hotels. It ended up only be $15 pp for an extra day in the park, so we just decided to go for it. We stayed at the Disneyland Hotel and did not have a rental car until our last day there. We only have one child (4) with us and he is at least 40" so we were able to ride most rides. Pretty much every day, we went back and forth between the two parks since it's so convenient.

We also did the Max Pass 3 out of the 4 days for all of us - so $90 total. I'm not sure we used the FP as much as we could/should have, but I figured it was worth it for the pictures. I'm pretty sure we paid more that than for the Memory Maker when we went to DW last year - and it's so rare to have a picture of all three of us that it was worth it to me.

EMH - Sunday's EMH was 7-8 in CA. Since we were used to Indiana time, we knew this wouldn't be an issue and in fact woke up at 3:30 that morning. The lines that morning were actually amazing. We went straight back to Cars Land and rode RSR twice. However, the EMH the rest of the week was not as good. EMH started at 9:00 and one day we didn't end up getting in until 9:15 despite being there at least 15 minutes before they opened.

Meals - Sunday we ate at the Rainforest Cafe because I thought my son would love it, and I ended up getting a gift card as a reward from one of my credit cards. However, he wasn't as excited as we thought he would be and we probably would have been fine to just take him into the gift shop. Monday we ate at Cafe Orleans because their menu looked really good. We each ended up getting a meal and two desserts - Mickey-shaped Beignets and bread pudding. The portions were not big, which is actually good since I didn't want to have leftovers anyway. Overall, it wasn't too bad, but I'm not sure I'd go there again. Tuesday we went to Goofy's Kitchen at the DL hotel since we had a voucher for a character meal thanks to booking our vacation through Costco. It was pretty good and they had a LOT of food options, including lunch/dinner food. They took a picture of us with Goofy when we first got there and said they would bring it out to us, and at first I thought it was included with the meal ($50/adult and $30/child), but realized that wasn't the case when they brought a whole folder to us. It was $37 for a 5x7 and 4 4x6 plus a recipe book. We ended up doing it since we didn't pay for the meal.

I also discovered a quick service place that I really liked in CA called Award Wieners. I love chili dogs and thought theirs were pretty good. It was definitely different from the usual quick service options and I liked it so much I went back a second time later in the week.

Characters - we only ended up meeting Star Wars and Marvel characters. It was nice to get to see Darth Vader and Boba Fett, who aren't in DW. Thor and Loki were both pretty amazing as well. They do a short performance before they meet people, which was cute. We also had just gotten my son a Thor hammer, so "Thor" had fun with that. Oh and my son ended up doing the Jedi training, which was adorable. He "fought" Klyo Ren and still talks about how he beat him.

If i had to do it over again, I'd probably stay at the Grand Californian though. DL Hotel was not that far away, but when you're tired at the end of the day and just want to be to your room I think it might have been worth it. It's also interesting that I compared my step count with our trip to DW last year and we pretty much walked the same amount - in fact most days we walked more. Part of that is the parks being so close together that it was easy to park hop, plus we walked back to our room all but 1 day. We even really tried not to bounce all over the park since that made my H crazy when we did it at DW.

All in all, it was a good trip. One of the nice things about DL is that it isn't as spread out, but that can also cause an issue with where people end up clustering together so that it's hard to get through. But the waits weren't too bad for many of the rides. One of the interesting things was that certain rides that typically have longer lines at DW (Little Mermaid and Winnie the Pooh), we ended up just walking on even in the middle of the day. Even the Buzz Lightyear ride had pretty reasonable wait times. Of course rides like RSR, SW, etc still had longer lines and I'm sure if we had been there during a "peak" time we wouldn't have been as lucky. We did everything we definitely wanted to do, but there were still things we didn't get to do/see. Maybe next time.

[alleinesein]

Boba Fett was out?!?!? I always seem to miss him!

Thor and Loki are so much fun although Thor wouldn't talk to me the last time I was up there. He did not approve of my plan with Loki to cause some chaos and destruction in the park.

Rooms in the Grand aren't any closer than staying in the Adventure or Fantasy tower at the DLH. I was just up there a few weeks ago and we were in the DVC wing at the end of the hallway. The hotel doesn't look that big but because of how it is laid out you could have a hike to your room. There is a lot of backtracking through the hotel if you enter via the DD entrance because the elevators are in the lobby. Besides if you stay at the DLH hotel you can hop on the monorail to leave the park and then it is just a quick 1 minute walk to your room. I am not looking forward to them building the new hotel in DD; it is going to impact all of the hotels and cut off monorail access for quite awhile.

Pooh never has a line. We complain if it is a 5 minute wait. I think that people forget about it because it is over in Critter Country instead of Fantasyland.

Was your EMH morning with the delay at Disneyland? They have been horrible about opening the main gates and getting people into the park for EMH the past few times I have been up there. For some reason they are doing the "first family in the park" thing during EMH and they wont even open the gates until they do their little photo op. It is very annoying. DCA has been super awesome about letting people into the park (via the main gate) 10-15 minutes before EMH starts. We had one morning where they let us in 15 minutes early and then they did rope drop 5 minutes before opening. We were walking onto TSM before EMH even started. It was great!

[Zoly]

Jan 30, 2018 19:44:49 GMT -5 alleinesein said:

Boba Fett was out?!?!? I always seem to miss him!

Thor and Loki are so much fun although Thor wouldn't talk to me the last time I was up there. He did not approve of my plan with Loki to cause some chaos and destruction in the park.

Rooms in the Grand aren't any closer than staying in the Adventure or Fantasy tower at the DLH. I was just up there a few weeks ago and we were in the DVC wing at the end of the hallway. The hotel doesn't look that big but because of how it is laid out you could have a hike to your room. There is a lot of backtracking through the hotel if you enter via the DD entrance because the elevators are in the lobby. Besides if you stay at the DLH hotel you can hop on the monorail to leave the park and then it is just a quick 1 minute walk to your room. I am not looking forward to them building the new hotel in DD; it is going to impact all of the hotels and cut off monorail access for quite awhile.

Pooh never has a line. We complain if it is a 5 minute wait. I think that people forget about it because it is over in Critter Country instead of Fantasyland.

Was your EMH morning with the delay at Disneyland? They have been horrible about opening the main gates and getting people into the park for EMH the past few times I have been up there. For some reason they are doing the "first family in the park" thing during EMH and they wont even open the gates until they do their little photo op. It is very annoying. DCA has been super awesome about letting people into the park (via the main gate) 10-15 minutes before EMH starts. We had one morning where they let us in 15 minutes early and then they did rope drop 5 minutes before opening. We were walking onto TSM before EMH even started. It was great!

Boba Fett was out for about 20 minutes inside the launch bay. We ended up getting there early and since he was there, they let us meet him. No photographer though.

We tried to meet Thor and Loki earlier in the day, but Thor wasn’t able to be there at the first meeting so we only met Loki. My son promised to join him, so I was sure to let Thor know that when we saw him. :-)

That’s probably true about the hotels. We were in the frontier tower so it just felt long.

I think it was DL that had the delay. Although all the lines were much longer for EMH during the week.