Sept 2012 - Disneyland California (Part 1)

Here we go again....off to the USA :)

Sept 22nd - Day 1 - Travelling

This year we thought we would try a trip to the West Coast...and Walt's original park....Disneyland!

We were flying this year with Air New Zealand as I got a great bargain on flights....£480 return :)

So, we headed to heathrow and arrived around lunchtime. We quickly checked in and went through security...this went quickly as we had some fast track vouchers :)

The flight took off on time, and the legroom was quite generous for economy.

Luckily the flight was a little faster than expected and we landed in LAX at around 7pm.

The immigration queue was unfortunately really long and it took us about an hour to get through and collect baggage and then clear customs.

We quickly got the shuttle bus to the hire car pick up and managed to get off the bus quickly and so were quickly able to collect the car.

After last year's Lincoln Towncar disaster (Rob did not like that car!) I booked him a standard suv with Alamo - which meant he could pick the car from a row! He chose a GMC Terrain which was apparently a big improvement on last year!

So, car collected and off we went to find the hotel. We were staying one night at the Doubletree Anaheim.

We checked in and went to bed as we were really tired....and we needed to get up fairly early the next day to head to DISNEYLAND!!!!

Sept 23rd - Day 2 - Disneyland

So, we got up and headed down to try and find breakfast. We met a guy in the lobby who had some spare buffet vouchers and he gave us two....so free breakfast :)

The buffet was just ok...but it was free so we were happy :)

After breakfast we checked out of the hotel and drove to the Grand Californian - which is where we were staying for the rest of the California trip.

We knew we would be too early to get our room so we parked the car and dropped off our bags and got our room key for later and then headed over to Walt's park :)

It was a weekend day so I was expecting the park to be quite busy. It actually wasn't too bad but a few of the lines were long.

Once we got in the park we picked up a fast pass for Space Mountain and went to ride Buzz Lightyear as it only had a 10 minute wait.

This is a fun ride but Rob beat me in the scores :(

Afterward we popped over to Innoventions...this has some similar attractions to Epcot in WDW but isn't as much fun without spaceship earth. I actually think I would have preferred the Carousel of Progress!

Back over to Space Mountain and with our fast pass we only waited a few minutes (standby was 45). This is a great ride and I think I prefer it to the WDW version - it seemed to be less bumpy :)

We then popped to get a fast pass for Star Tours before having a wander around the park.

Nemo Submarines :)

We took a quick walk past the Matterhorn - which had a long line and no fast pass so we decided to try that another time.

We went to Toon Town and the Roger Rabbit ride only had a 10 minute line so we had a quick ride :)

We then went across to the Big Thunder Ranch to see if there were any halloween characters out.

Guess who I met?!

Halloween Goofy!

Yay! I was very excited to meet a halloween character as we were unfortunately not able to go to any of the parties due to the date of our trip :(

We then went and had a ride on the Mark Twain riverboat - this seemed to be a much shorter trip than at WDW.

Boat ride over and we headed over to Splash Mountain...it had a 50 minute wait but we decided to ride anyway as it was most definitely Splash weather :)

We met some locals in the queue and had a nice chat with them while we waited.

We eventually all got to ride in the same log :)

We all got pretty much soaked...but it was really warm so this was quite refreshing :)

We headed back across to ride Star Tours which was really fun. And then I think we rode It's a small world.....but I'm not entirely sure!

It was now about 4pm so we headed back to the hotel to see if our room was ready. It was and we got ourselves an amazing view:

We did ask at check-in whether there were any theme park views available but we don't know if that had anything to do with our room allocation or not!

We got our bags brought up and unpacked so that everything was organised. Then we had a little rest before heading back to the park.

I really wanted to see Fantasmic and the fireworks and they were only showing on the weekend due to it being off-peak.

We got back the park and went to get some food. We ate at the Hungry Bear restaurant. We probably should have eaten earlier but had not really felt hungry until now.

After dinner we decided to find a spot to watch Fantasmic. I had originally planned to watch the second show but we were getting tired and so decided to watch earlier so we could go to bed after the fireworks.

I much preferred to WDW version of the show...and mostly because they have seats there.

We had the most incredibly rude man and his family push in front of us and a family with small children. He then proceeded to block the view by moving about and he was so horrible to his wife that I decided not to ask him to stop!

To top things off - he then put his child on his shoulders halfway through the show to block the view for even more people :(

Once the show was over we headed back to Main Street to watch the fireworks.

We managed to get a reasonable spot just at the top of Main Street with a great view of the castle. The fireworks were much better than I expected...and the Walt references were brilliant :)

So, fireworks over we headed back to the hotel.

I was getting ready for bed and suddenly I heard music from outside.......then I realised it was World of Color (spelt the American way just for Jennifer!)

So, day 2 over......what a great start to our Disneyland trip!