We go almost every summer, and have grown to really love it. Yes, we expect it to be crowded. But there is just nothing like that feeling of being in
Disneyland on a summer night. What made it even better was the Electrical Parade (just seems like summer to me)--but even with that gone, it is still great.
The girls and I made a quickly planned 4 night trip the last week of July last summer, and we all agreed it was our best trip ever. When it got too hot or the crowds too much, we just walked back to the Disneyland Hotel and took naps, swam in the pool, and got ready for a big summer night. Now that my girls are older (they are 10 and 14) they have more endurance to stay in the park later, and we had so much fun running all over the parks after dark going on rides. We discovered that we could do Pirates over and over (we got out and ran around to the entrance many times!) during Fantasmic because it was walk on. This is how I got over my fear of the "drops" (I am a total whimp!)--so much so that all 3 of us could do them without holding on and with arms raised in thei air!
I remember on our last night sitting with my girls in front of the Castle waiting for fireworks to start, all of us eating the best mint chip ice cream in a chocolate dipped waffle cone. We were all laughing and talking and the weather was perfect--warm enough to be out there eating ice cream and feeling so relaxed.
We have been there in August in a massive heat wave (way over 100 each day), and I will say that wasn't the greatest trip! But we all have trips like that and you just have to get back on that horse.
I found that our trip on the days before Thanksgiving this year to be much more crowded than many of our summer trips, and I think this is because in the summer people have 3 months in order to spread out their visits, while the Thanksgiving week is very limited.