Stitchfarm
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2022
Hey everyone- thought I would write a bit about my thoughts on our trip to Disneyland as I have a 4 hour delay at the airport and time on my hands lol. I appreciated the wealth of info on this site and learned so much before we left. This won’t be super detailed, but just my thoughts on hotel and genie plus!
We stayed from April 8-12 in a Woods view room at Grand Californian. People had mentioned these rooms were small, but I thought they made great use of space for our family of 4 (kids 8y, 9y), and loved having a balcony for morning coffees. We even had decent firework views! As mentioned in other threads I read, the biggest downfall of the rooms is probably lack of side tables for the person sleeping closest to the walls in the 2 queen rooms. We loved the atmosphere of the hotel, the staff was all lovely, and while we only got housekeeping once, that didn’t bother us much. We used the pool area which is amazing, and the exclusive entrance to CA is so handy. This was a splurge trip that we have saved up for a few years, so I have no idea how we would go back and not stay at the Grand again .. we just truly enjoyed it.
We did not specifically rope drop any of the 3 full days we were there (the 4th was an arrival half day), but got to the parks around 830am. We found this to be fine as I didn’t want to mad dash to any rides, and we had budgeted for genie plus and paid LLs for this holiday. If you can afford/ budget for these, it was really worth it for us, and I would do it again. We only did the paid LL rides once each- webslingers and RS were ok, we wouldn’t have paid or stood in line again for those ones. If we had had the time, we would probably have caught Rise again in the evening standby as we all loved it that much. I obsessed about being at DL at a non busy time, however covid got our household and we had to push our trip back a bit- so we caught the beginning of the areas spring break. Monday April 11 was specifically very busy. However, my kids and I did so much in the morning we didn’t feel we missed out on anything. Combining genie plus, one paid LL, and short standby lines with a few shows thrown in- by the time 1pm came and California Adventure was packed and genie plus times pushing out 2 hours, we were ready to head back to the hotel for pool time. We did Incredicoaster, Guardians, Monsters inc, Goofy sky school, Talks with Crush, Webslingers, TSM, Soarin, watched the Jammin Chef show, ate lunch, had churros, and explored a few shops in under 5 hours. So a 10 crowd day can easily feel successful. But lines were crazy long when we left. 2 hours for Soarin. 80 min Webslingers. 50 min little mermaid! I would love to come back during a lower crowd time.
All in all, we had a lovely trip. We used mobile ordering for quick service as well and had no issues. Yes, I was on my phone more often, but I feel in the end it helped keep our wait times down and kept us more efficient. I loved the location service on the app map.
Anyways, thanks again to everyone on this site for all the questions you ask and answers you give, research pays off and helped me pull off a core memory holiday for my kiddos
We stayed from April 8-12 in a Woods view room at Grand Californian. People had mentioned these rooms were small, but I thought they made great use of space for our family of 4 (kids 8y, 9y), and loved having a balcony for morning coffees. We even had decent firework views! As mentioned in other threads I read, the biggest downfall of the rooms is probably lack of side tables for the person sleeping closest to the walls in the 2 queen rooms. We loved the atmosphere of the hotel, the staff was all lovely, and while we only got housekeeping once, that didn’t bother us much. We used the pool area which is amazing, and the exclusive entrance to CA is so handy. This was a splurge trip that we have saved up for a few years, so I have no idea how we would go back and not stay at the Grand again .. we just truly enjoyed it.
We did not specifically rope drop any of the 3 full days we were there (the 4th was an arrival half day), but got to the parks around 830am. We found this to be fine as I didn’t want to mad dash to any rides, and we had budgeted for genie plus and paid LLs for this holiday. If you can afford/ budget for these, it was really worth it for us, and I would do it again. We only did the paid LL rides once each- webslingers and RS were ok, we wouldn’t have paid or stood in line again for those ones. If we had had the time, we would probably have caught Rise again in the evening standby as we all loved it that much. I obsessed about being at DL at a non busy time, however covid got our household and we had to push our trip back a bit- so we caught the beginning of the areas spring break. Monday April 11 was specifically very busy. However, my kids and I did so much in the morning we didn’t feel we missed out on anything. Combining genie plus, one paid LL, and short standby lines with a few shows thrown in- by the time 1pm came and California Adventure was packed and genie plus times pushing out 2 hours, we were ready to head back to the hotel for pool time. We did Incredicoaster, Guardians, Monsters inc, Goofy sky school, Talks with Crush, Webslingers, TSM, Soarin, watched the Jammin Chef show, ate lunch, had churros, and explored a few shops in under 5 hours. So a 10 crowd day can easily feel successful. But lines were crazy long when we left. 2 hours for Soarin. 80 min Webslingers. 50 min little mermaid! I would love to come back during a lower crowd time.
All in all, we had a lovely trip. We used mobile ordering for quick service as well and had no issues. Yes, I was on my phone more often, but I feel in the end it helped keep our wait times down and kept us more efficient. I loved the location service on the app map.
Anyways, thanks again to everyone on this site for all the questions you ask and answers you give, research pays off and helped me pull off a core memory holiday for my kiddos
Definitely the Spring Break crowds affected us but we still had fun. We did the Mobile order thing and that really worked well for us. We also did the paid LL's for 2 of them (Rise LL was sold out by 11am the day we tried that and we actually had gotten a little late start that day)
