First Ever Trip to Disneyland! Aug2021 Report

[d0naldduck123]

Hello!

I got back from a week long trip to Disneyland/LA last week, and I thought I'd start this trip report to cope from post-Disney blues as well as to share some of my thoughts about the trip. To start off, let me introduce ourselves. My name is Lindsay, and our travel party consists of just me and my husband, Chris. We live on the east coast and have been to Disney World several times but we both have never been to LA or Disneyland. As far as how this trip came about...well, we went to WDW in Nov 2019 and when we got back we were planning a Disneyland trip for 2020. Then the pandemic happened and I don't know if you guys remember, but Disney announced that Disneyland would halt the sale of admission tickets soon. So when I heard the news, I got worried that we wouldn't be able to buy tickets later on, so we bought them right before they stopped selling them and we kind of assumed maybe the pandemic would be done by Fall2020. Obviously that didn't happen, but at least we still had tickets And then of course they started ticket sales again when they reopened, so I was worried for nothing Fast-forward to May2021, we both got vaccinated, I was feeling pretty down from not being able to travel and just staying home all the time, and vacation hours were piling up, so we thought it'd be a good time to take that Disneyland trip. Originally I've always wanted to see World of Color at Disneyland, but who knows how long it'd be before that returns, plus I really wanted to see the new Avengers Campus, so we went ahead and booked flights!

Pre-Trip Planning:
We planned a 6-night stay and had 4-day non-park hopper tickets so our plan was to do 4 days at Disneyland and 2 days touring LA. We booked the Residence Inn near the convention center. It's a bit of a longer walk to Disney then the hotels right across the street, but the hotel seemed nicer and it was a 1-br suite as opposed to just a standard hotel room. The walk to the security lines at Disneyland was just about 15 minutes, so not bad at all. I didn't want to do a split stay at LA because I just didn't want the hassle of re-packing and switching hotels, so we figured we'd just rent a car for the days we were planning to go to LA. Our flight was scheduled to arrive in the morning at LAX, so originally we wanted to rent a car and tour LA for the first part and finish off with Disney but the prices for renting a car from LAX were very expensive. Then I found there was an Alamo right across the street from our hotel and the price was much cheaper there, so we decided to take Uber from LAX to our hotel, do Disneyland for the first 4 days, then rent a car for the last two days at LA and return it at LAX before our flight home.

For planning the park days, since it was our first time I figured we'd just alternate between DL and DCA. Day1&3-DL and Day2&4-DCA. I made our park reservations as soon as we booked flights+hotel. It felt kind of weird that I really didn't need to "plan" anything like I used to do for WDW (ADRs and 3 Fastpasses). I just spent my time on here reading various threads to figure out which dining reservations I wanted to make. The dining reservations weren't released exactly on the 30-day mark for some days so that was kind of frustrating but it all worked out in the end. I was able to get reservations for Cafe Orleans dinner for our first day, Lamplight Lounge dinner for the second day, and Oga's for third day. Then a couple weeks later they announced that Storytellers Character breakfast was coming back, so I was able to get a breakfast reservation for our last day! Oh, and neither DH or I had watched Cars but his coworker recommended that we watch it before we go, so a week before we left, we both watched Cars and loved it! I liked it a lot more than I thought I would - it was such a cute movie! DH really liked Luigi and Guido. Other than that I wasn't sure what else I needed to be planning, and my job kept me pretty busy right up until our travel day so I just kind of studied the park maps to see where everything was and pretty soon it was travel day!

That's pretty much it for our pre-trip planning. I'll have lots of pictures of our trip starting from the next post so please follow along on my journey!

Day 1 (DL)
Part1 - Travel Day & Disneyland!
Part2 - More fun at Disneyland
Part3 - Cafe Orleans & Fireworks

Day 2 (DCA)
Part1 - Avengers Campus
Part2 - Cars Land & Pixar Pier
Part3 - Characters and Lamplight Lounge
Part4 - Nighttime at DCA

Day 3 (DL)
Part1 - Fantasyland & Star Wars Land
Part2 - DTD, Dinner, and Fireworks again

Day 4 (DCA)
Part1 - Last Day at Disney
Part2 - Goodbye Disneyland

Day 5 - LA

Day 6 - Joshua Tree National Park

 

[Punky'sMama]

We are leaving in 17 days, can’t wait to hear all about your trip!!

 

[Tasscrapper]

Following along!

 

[d0naldduck123]

Day1 - Travel Day & Disneyland!

We had a 1-stop flight and the first flight was at 5 AM. We checked in on our airline app and decided to not check bags and do all carry-on to skip the bag line. I think we woke up around 2:30 - and our dog was very confused as to why we were up so early. Here is Tony (named after Ironman) trying to pack himself



Sadly, he wouldn't be coming along with us - my sister would house-sit and dog-sit for us while we were gone. We headed to the airport shortly after 3. It was so early in the morning but there were a lot of people there! It turns out our first flight and the connecting flight were both nearly fully booked. After a short layover, we finally arrived at LAX at 9AM!



We checked both Uber/Lyft and Lyft was cheaper - it was only about $50 to our hotel near Disneyland. I'm not sure if it's new but in LAX instead of rideshare picking people up at the gates, you had to take a shuttle bus to a designated area for ride pickups. This was where we took the shuttle and we only waited maybe 3 minutes before our driver picked us up and we were off to our hotel!

It was a Saturday morning so no traffic. We got checked in around 10:30 and surprisingly our room was already ready! We rested for a bit and unpacked some stuff to get ready to go to the parks. It was about a 15min walk and we were through the gates by 11:15.



Yay Disneyland!



DH wanted to get a hat on this trip, and a week or so before we arrived, I saw pictures of the new hat with the entrance metal plaque, so I wanted to check it out. We found it at the Mad Hatter in Fantasyland, but it was a bit heavy so he ended up getting a white Nike baseball cap with Mickey on it. The back fabric covering the head was very light so it was perfect for summer and I think he really liked it.

Anyway, as soon as we walked into the park, we spotted Donald and Goofy at the train station! There was kind of an informal line where you could go up and take pictures and the characters would pose behind you.


Just as we started walking up towards Main St, guess who else we spotted?



It happened so quickly so this isn't the greatest picture, but it's Cruella sitting in the back of the car! She was yelling some stuff to the guests lol. I was my first time seeing her at the parks. It hadn't even been 10 minutes since we walked in the park and we already saw 3 characters - it was the perfect start!

We walked down Main St and we hadn't had anything to eat yet and DH was pretty hungry. My stomach wasn't feeling great after flying (it usually lasts several hours after I get off from longer flights), so I didn't really want to eat much. We placed a mobile order for just one corn dog from Little Red Wagon. DH really enjoyed it, and I also took a bite and it was a really good corn dog, I was impressed.



We just sat on the benches near the castle and took in the sights and I took some pictures. One of the rides I've always wanted to do was Matterhorn, and it was a 30-min wait so we headed that way. On the way over, we saw Tigger catching butterflies!



We got in line for Matterhorn around 11:40 and remembered to set an alarm to try for a BG at RotR. We got Group 143 and our estimated wait time was 135 minutes, so it looked like we'd be able to ride today! Matterhorn was a true 30 min wait. It was so much fun! Faster than I thought it'd be.

Then we got in line for the Alice in Wonderland ride. While we were in line, we saw a calvacade with a bunch of characters! Not the best view, but there we saw the Fab5, Chip&Dale, a double decker with some princesses, Peter Pan, Wendy, Captain Hook, Pinocchio, and this huge drumming Mickey float!





I believe this was the only calvacade we saw of our trip. We did see more characters that were taking pictures, but this was our first and last Disneyland calvacade .
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[buteraa]

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[MaleficentMe]

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