Please bear with me, as I seem to have misplaced the notes I took from our first day at the park. I'm pretty sure I've remembered everything, but the order may be a tad funky.
So we left the Garden Walk around 11:45 or so, intent on making it to Disneyland as soon as possible. I had set our Ridemax arrival time to 12:15, and I was determined to follow that plan as closely as possible, at least the first day, since we really had no clue what to expect or really what we were doing.
I've got a pretty good sense of direction, and was convinced that I could shave off valuable minutes of walking time by leading us through the Garden Walk's parking structure. Unfortunately, though, parking structures are designed to confuse, it seems, and I steered us into an alley. Yeah, not my proudest moment. We somehow made it back up to one of the main mall levels, where I was able to find Disney Way. After a brief adventure, we were on our way toward Harbor Boulevard. Stephanie, upset though she was about me leading us to our sure doom, was eternally grateful that I rescued us just as surely.
As we rounded the corner into the transportation area just before bag check, the smiles on all our faces seemed to triple in size. Steph and I spotted the giant green cones, and had to exclaim "Those could have been guests at our wedding...They were cones!" Which is a quote from a movie, and something we're compelled to say every time we see cones. You'll find we have a lot of these bizarre compulsions.
The timestamp on the first photograph of the day says 12:33 pm, but it appears to be nearly half an hour off. So we were doing great on time.
This seems to be my default pose...seriously, I've got hundreds of pictures of myself in a variety of locales doing this exact thing. I have no idea what it means.
We made it through the bag check and all shouted "We're in Disneyland!" Not particularly caring that the people around us must have assumed we were certifiably insane.
We were in a bit of a hurry to make sure our plan went off without a hitch, but we did slow down a bit as soon as we made it on to Main Street, of course, to check out the sights. I must say, walking in to Disneyland for the first time is surely a sight to behold. All the people bustling about, horses working diligently, music playing...it really is pretty magical. Crowds naturally make us a little nervous, but there's something about Disneyland that makes me not mind them quite as much. That's not to say I was willing to wait in hour long lines for attractions, though.
Our first order of business was to head over to Tomorrowland and get Fast Passes for Autopia. Let me sidebar here for a brief second - DS has had virtually no experience with the types of rides you'll find at Disneyland. He's of course been to carnivals and the like, but had a healthy fear of thrill rides. I didn't want to traumatize him right off the bat and possibly scare him out of going on
any rides for the rest of the trip, I wanted to load the first day up with less intimidating rides (with a couple of exceptions) so as to ease him into the idea of going on some of the more "exciting" rides that he had been saying he wanted to go on before we left (The rides he thought were "must do" were Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Tower of Terror).
Now, unfortunately, no amount of planning before the fact can really prepare you for exactly
where things are. Photographs just don't really do relative positioning justice. So I also got a little lost finding the Autopia fast pass machines. This wouldn't be the last time I got lost today, but overall I was pretty pleased with how intuitive the layout of the park was, and how easily I was able to navigate.
After retrieving our fast passes, the next order of business was to hop over to Fantasyland and take a ride on the carousel. We're suckers for a well constructed carousel, and I think this is the first one we've been on that has four rows of horses. We were on nice and quick - we just had to wait for the current ride to conclude, and made it on the very next trip around. Stephanie was very excited to find out, when we got home, that each horse had a name . I was going to look up which horse she was on, but when I asked what color she responded "Pink. Or orange. Or maybe green." So she just picked the name she liked best and decided that was her horse.
Stephanie grabbed a quick shot of the back side of the castle, and headed over to Frontierland for our next stop. It was definitely some walking, but if it meant fewer lines, we were all for it. Next up was a ride around the Rivers of America on the Mark Twain (or the Columbia, whichever happened to be porting first). We grabbed a Sprite at the stand right outside the loading dock, and experienced our first instance of sticker shock: over $3 for a pop, seemed excessive, but we knew going in that prices would be high.
The Mark Twain was pulling in as we walked onto the dock, and we got right on once again. We were stoked: a total of maybe one minute waiting in lines thus far. Granted, they weren't the superstar attractions that many go to Disneyland specifically for, but we wanted to experience as much as we could, and we had plenty of time. Strategically, it made sense to start off our first afternoon with lower key rides.
I personally loved the Mark Twain! It's so calming, with its leisurely pace and time period details. The narrator of the ride had the perfect late 19th century Southern gentleman voice. It was a lot of fun watching the canoes go round the river as well. Stephanie wondered out loud if the cast members that ran the canoes did it all day, and I responded "just look at that guy's arms." His biceps were as big as my head! Fringe benefits, am I right?
Tom Sawyer Island - I was really hoping to check it out this trip, but we unfortunately never made it over there.
After Mark Twain, we were supposed to head back to Tommorowland to use our Autopia fast passes, but I figured I'd save a bit of time and get the next fast passes on our list - Indiana Jones. I knew Frontierland and Adventureland were right next to each other, but I didn't really know how they connected and we found ourselves lost for the third time in just a couple of hours. We ended up in Critter Country, which as you all know, but I didn't at the time, ends in a dead end. We stopped in the shop over there next to Winnie the Pooh, and Steph and I ended up asking two separate cast members the same questions (do you have a map, and how do you get to Adventureland?), and got exactly the same answers from the very friendly folks that worked over there. I was very, very impressed at how friendly almost everyone was down here. So back through New Orleans Square and over the bridge we went. We quickly grabbed the Indy fast passes and popped back over to Tomorrowland (for those counting, this makes the third criss-cross of the entire park in just a couple of hours).
Autopia...I gotta admit, I almost forgot about the ride altogether before I checked out my notes. I do remember we measured DS's height before we left, and the only thing he was too short for (by two inches) was actually driving the Autopia cars. He was a little upset, but the rules are the rules, and we've always taught him to follow the rules, so he happily hopped in the passenger seat with his mom while I drove the car solo behind them (I do remember mine was a VW Bug). This was the first time so far in the trip we'd really had to wait in line at all, but with the fast pass it was really only about a 10 or 15 minute wait.
I've driven go karts all my life, and I was surprised at how different this felt. The single pedal in the left foot position was pretty awkward for a taller guy like me. It was fun enough, though, I suppose, but not something we felt like we needed to schedule again this trip.
It was also, by this time, very hot outside - somewhere around 95 - and the exhaust and gasoline smells were making this corner of the park particularly oppressive. So we were hankering to do something inside with air conditioning. Buzz Lightyear had a posted wait time of 15 minutes, so we decided that would be a good choice.
I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed at how steadily those omnimover rides load guests. The line wrapped around the outside of the building, over towards what I think was Pixie Hollow, but was pretty constantly moving. As soon as we got past the animatronic Buzz Lightyear, a tour guide stopped us to let her tour group on, intending for us to follow past her groupbut we didn't realize that was what was going on.. We thought we were being stopped there for...well, we didn't really know why. After about 30 seconds, the tour guide ran back and had us continue, horrified at the thought that she had stopped the line dead. We all had a good laugh, and continued to the loading area.
Buzz Lightyear ended up being one of DS's absolute favorite rides in the park - he loved the interactivity of the ride. I ended up getting the high score between the three of us, but I suppose that's to be expected given how many hours I wasted on video games in my youth. About half way through, my blaster stopped working, and I mentioned that to the cast member as I was unloading, just intending to be helpful. The cast member, though, must have assumed I was griping, and they just said "yeah that happens sometimes when we have to stop the ride." I just responded with an "oh gotcha" and we went on our way.
By this point, we were ready for a short break. We headed back to Main Street for a snack and to sit for a few minutes. I grabbed a Mickey Mouse pretzel - I'm a sucker for a pretzel, and didn't feel too bad about the price - $3.50 is about what I'd pay at a ball game, and the Mickey pretzel has more pretzel, on account of his ears and mouth. I also asked where the nearest water fountain was, and the cast member wasn't sure. She asked the other cashier, who told me, but I promptly forgot since they handed me two ice waters without asking. Good customer service is often about figuring out what the customer wants without them coming right out and asking, so I was suitably impressed. We sat down at the tables on Main Street nearest the hub, kind of where the big piano is. Honestly, I'm not sure what that place was called. After a few minutes, Mary Poppins came strolling through the area.
DGF had a bit of a chat with her, complimenting her dress and whatnot. Soon after, Burt came around. I was especially impressed with his terrible cockney accent. It's hard enough impersonating a regular accent, but it must be doubly hard to perfect a bad accent. I snapped a picture of them and a young couple on their honeymoon, and left them to go about their business.
By this time, it was still not quite time to use our Indiana Jones fast passes, so we wandered through Fantasyland, trying to find a ride with a short wait. DGF is enamored with Fantasyland, as she loves the dark rides that feature those classic Disney characters. Luckily, one of the ones she remembered from her youth at Disney World - Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - had a pretty short wait time of maybe ten minutes or so.
DS and I were in the front car, with Stephanie in her own car. I don't remember a whole lot of details about it, but whoo boy was that a wild ride. Almost like being a passenger when DGF is driving (ba-dum-bum)! I kid. I did worry about some of the imagery being a bit dark for DS, who can be sensitive about things like that. But he seemed fine afterward even if he wasn't sure it was his favorite ride in the world. It is impressive how your brain supplies all the details you need in some instances, like when you're about to run into a train that is really nothing more than a light bulb in a dark room. The folks at Disney really don't do anything halfway, even on the less popular rides.
By this point, it was time to start thinking about heading back to the hotel to get checked in and take a little bit of time to recover. But before that, we needed to take advantage of our Indiana Jones fast passes.
Even with the fast pass, this was easily the longest line of our day so far - I feel like it was probably close to 20 minutes. But boy, is that ride worth it! What a marvel of engineering. The idea of a motion simulator that's also moving on a track - it's crazy! DGF, who doesn't like thrill rides of any kind (her first roller coaster was the Manhattan Express at New York, New York in Vegas about 6 or 7 years ago), loved this ride. DS is a bit of a different story. He wanted to like it, since he loves the movies. And he definitely wanted to give it another shot. But it was his first time on any ride that might be even remotely considered a "thrill ride" and he definitely was a little bit freaked out, closing his eyes in a couple particularly intense parts. But he was game to try more, and to try this one again, so I considered it a victory.
After the ride, we headed over to the transportation center. I figured that since the Toy Story parking lot was right across from our hotel, we could take their shuttle and walk the rest of the way. That's just what we did for most of the trip. I was a little worried that they would get mad at us since we weren't parking in the lot, but on one of the occasions where we were walking over to the loading area, a gentleman on a golf cart hopped out and asked us if we parked there or came from the hotels across the street. I wasn't about to lie, so I told him that I came from across the street, totally prepared to have to meet DGF and DS at the park (they had already boarded, and I assumed they were going to make me walk), but he just wanted to tell me the best place to get off on the way back. Just another example of an extremely helpful individual at Disneyland.
I had fully expected this post to take me to the end of our first day, but I apparently had a lot to say! So I'll end it here and finish the day up on another post.
, amount of pictures!
