Planning trip to Disneyland in December

[rogercallejas]

Hello everybody,

I am planning a trip to Disneyland from Dec 14th to Dec 16th, I am undecided on if buying the 1 day per park tickets for 3 days or doing the park hopper option. I have a 10 year old girl and a 14 year old boy and they've been to Disneyworld already, so it won't be all new to them. I also want to do character dining.

I am planning those dates as I have been told the week before christmas is basically just too busy a week to go.

thanks for your suggestions

 

[niffer5150]

hoppers are actually useful at DL but either choice is fine. personally, i like hoppers because CA just doesn't hold our interest for longer than a few hours. i really enjoy the storytellers cafe breakfast. check out the disneyland board on here for the wdw veterans guide to dl.

 

[bcinohio]

We just did our first DL trip last month and got the 3 day hopper. It was worth it because the 2 parks are so close together that you can walk between them in just a couple of minutes. You can leave one and be in the other in less than 5 min. You only have to go through one security check when you first enter the area. We have been to WDW many times and we really enjoyed our trip to DL.

 

[warrenz1963]

Most planning sites will strongly recommend hoppers for at least one of your days. Because the parks are so close to each other, hopping in DLR is very different than hopping in WDW.

There are Disneyland specific planning forums here in Disboards. You may find good information there, too.

 

[cmph]

It seems like most people go for hoppers there. We just went in Apr and decided against it, actually, so I guess we aren't normal! It was cheaper to add an extra day to our one-park/day passes than get hopper, so I got a 4-day pass thinking that if we didn't feel like going on our last morning, we'd use the 4th "day" to hop on the 3rd. As it turned out, we were just fine with one park per day. I think hopping is ideal if you have all teens or adults, or only little ones in strollers, but for us with elementary school aged kids - they just didn't want to do all that walking back and forth and were happy to stay in one park. We never even got to do everything we wanted by the end of the trip, so we certainly never ran out of things to do by staying in one park. Also remember that Downtown Disney is right there, so if you do wrap up in one park - you can go there after. We had to cut corners somewhere, so hoppers didn't make the cut, and I don't regret it.

We loved the Plaza character breakfast. We scheduled it for 10:30 so we were able to get tons done in the early morning hours. The 7yo (a boy) wasn't jazzed about a character meal, but even he loved it. So many characters! Minnie, Pooh, Eeyore, Hook, Chip and Dale, Max, Fairy Godmother, and more.

 

[sharonabe]

so I got a 4-day pass thinking that if we didn't feel like going on our last morning, we'd use the 4th "day" to hop on the 3rd

Just so you know for future use, this doesn't work. You can't use an extra day to hop at DL or WDW. If you want to hop, you must have the hopper option.

 

[cmph]

Just so you know for future use, this doesn't work. You can't use an extra day to hop at DL or WDW. If you want to hop, you must have the hopper option.

Hmm. Well, that wasn't what the DL CM told me when I asked earlier this year before we booked... Guess this falls into the category of "ask 3 CMs a question, get 3 different answers", ha! Guess it's good I didn't try it.

 

[gatorlisa]

Went to DLR for 5 days last month. Had the park hopper. Would not do DLR without it. The parks are so close together that by having the hopper it makes it feel almost like one big park. For the most part, we started at DL with rope drop, then when crowds started to pick up late morning, we would head over to CA. Usually returned to DL in the late afternoon/early evening after a couple hour break at the hotel. Worked well for us.