Planning? What's that? A Solo Disneyland trip on Short Notice (Pre-Trip Report)

[Vexorg]

At some point, I am really going to need to learn to start planning my Disney trips more than three weeks in advance. This isn't that time. Thanks to a bit of late night impulse shopping on Expedia, it seems that less than three weeks from today I will find myself at Disneyland once agan. Since I'd kind of like to avoid any scenarios that involve spending 30 minutes standing around in the rain waiting in the Indiana Jones queue this time around, I suppose I should make at least some sort of effort to plan things.

But first, a little bit of background. My name is Brian, and currently I am a chronically single 31 year old (nearly 32) nerd living near Seattle with too many toys around. Although I may hesitate to admit it in polite company, a childhood loaded with falling anvils, exploding things and manic sound effects has left me with a healthy interest in animation (to be honest I'm a bit partial to the Looney Tunes stuff, but since this isn't a Six Flags board I'll just conveniently ignore that fact for now.) My Mother grew up near Disneyland, and visited the park frequently during that time. As for myself, my first visit to Disneyland was for one day when I was nine years old back in 1987. Most of my memories of that visit are rather vague, but at the time Star Tours and Captain EO were the hot new attractions (You used to be able to say that to illustrate how long ago that was, but now Star Tours is pushing 23 years old without any major changes, and Captain EO is being brought back. Go figure.) After that, I didn't make it back to Disneyland until January of 2006, when I went for three days (I ended up finding DIS when I was planning that particular trip, and although I drift on and off the boards, I've been around since.) Then in December of 2008 I made it to Disneyworld for the first time, a whilrwind 4-day trip with its fair share of complications related to a big snowstorm that happened in Seattle just before I left, and remained for several weeks afterward.) The trip reports for both of these trips can be found below.

Fast forward to now. Over the past few months my various life circumstances have changed in some rather unusual ways that I certainly wouldn't have expected. To make a long story short, at the end of December I got fired from my previous job. Although that's never much fun to have happen to you, by that time I had a pretty good idea that this particular job, although it was paying the bills, was really going nowhere. It was about three weeks later that I was asked to go help out a small mobile application development studio in Seattle with some testing for a couple of weeks, with possibility of extension. This short-term gig has so far turned out to be a lot less short-term than I expected it to, I'm quite enjoying the work that I'm doing there (unusual as it may be, I'm pretty sure my mother never expected to find her son working on the official Beavis and Butt-Head app for iPhone and iPad) and getting paid a whole lot more than the last place I was working. So all things considered, it's worked out quite well.

I've actually been meaning to get back to Disneyland for a while now (when I made my last trip, I decided I'd try to get back once the then under construction Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage ride had been completed,) but when I recently noticed that I had some frequent flyer miles which were going to expire if I didn't have some activity on my account within the next six weeks or so, it provided the impetus to make another trip (I actually figured out that I don't really need to actually travel for that, but a convenient excuse is a convenient excuse, right? With this in mind, I ultimately wandered over to Expedia last night and somehow ended up booking a flight and a hotel in the process.

Tenatively, the plan is to take an early nonstop flight from SEA-SNA on May 21st (a Friday) and take an airport shuttle to the hotel (I'll be staying at the Fairfield Inn across the street) from there, where I'll be dropping off luggage and heading straight for the park. If all goes well this should get me there sometime before Noon. I'll be taking an early morning flight back to Seattle on Monday, and probably heading straight to work from the airport (in retrospect, I suspect that this part will be referred to as "Big Mistake #1.")

For now, the stuff in between is just a bit up in the air. I suppose I'll figure that out in the next few posts...

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Coming up: Goals for the trip, Must-sees, must-misses, and probably a whole lot of procrastination along the way.

 

[DizNee Luver]

Great intro....will be interested in seeing how this all works out for you & to see what you actually do plan (other than flight, shuttle & motel)....lol

I'm exactly opposite....I'm an uber-planner & began my PTR months before we'll be going (which is the end of July). But I have 9 others going with me, so we kinda need to have a plan when our kids range from ages 3 to 25 & one of the grandmas going with us.

I wish I could say I was going in 3 weeks!!!

 

[tkitty]

Sounds good so far! Looking forward to your TR.
I'm one of those big planners for our family trips. Many involving Disney. I never felt that I needed to plan for DL, but with DCA added, and wanting to make the most of our time, I find that the Dis is just as valuable for DL info as it is for WDW.
We rarely spend more than a day in each park, so it helps to have a plan!

 

[wvnative]

Add me to the list of uber planners. I plan all vacations about a year out (to allow time to save appropriately) and can't imagine not having one in the works. lol

I can't wait to hear about your plans and if flying back on Monday turns out to be a mistake.

 

[Vexorg]

I meant to start updating this sooner, but I've been busy with work. I know it's kind of cliche to say that one has half a dozen things going at once, but right now, I pretty much have half a dozen things going at once. Based on the various trip reports I've read here and over on the WDW board, two weeks is just about the time to start second guessing all the prepwork and planning, and wonder if you did enough of it. Quite frankly, I should probably be panicking about now, but don't have enough time to do so. That said, here's some of my goals (and non-goals) for the trip:

The Goals:

• Try to catch the stuff I missed on the last trip. A rainy day on the last trip proved to be both a blessing and a curse, as it drastically reduced lines throughout the park, but at the same time it also resulted in a number of parade and fireworks cancellations (and even managed to stop Fantasmic five minutes into the show. Even so, I managed to cover just about everything in Disneyland pretty well, but missed most of the big rides in DCA, partially due to fatigue by the time we got there making me somewhat less inclined to take on the thrill rides or the water rides, and partially because I'm just not all that big on thrill rides. Not enough to avoid them entirely, mind you, but enough that I might hesitate a bit. I suppose this means I should actually try riding the Tower of Terror this time around (once)... Pretty sure I draw the line at the Maliboomer though.
  
  There's actually quite a few rides I missed on trhe last visit. The Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage was still under construction at the time, and It's a Small World was down for rehab/overlay removal. My last visit took place during the first week of the year, at which time the park was (to some extent) still in Christmas mode. That meant that the Haunted Mansion Holiday was still up, but also meant I didn't get to see it in its regular form. I also missed out on Splash Mountain (in retrospect, given the fact that it rained that whole day, my "didn't want to get wet" excuse was probably pretty lame.) Others I missed on the last visit included California Screamin' and a few of the Fantasyland rides. Peter Pan is another favorite, but the line makes it really hard to ride that more than once.
  
• My two favorite rides in the park would be (by far) Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. I think I rode these at least six times each on the last visit. With the low crowds I even managed to ride Soarin' quite a few times. That's another one that seems to be insanely popular over in WDW, but I'll have to see what the lines look like. I'll definitely have to ride it at least once though. Does it still have a single rider line?
  
• Generally I can skip the souvenirs, but there are a couple of items I'll probably pick up. The first is a couple of fridge magnets, since I've kind of formed an impromptu travelogue in magnets of the various places I've been. The second one is one of these:
  
  
  
  
  
  I've always been something of an animation junkie, and I've accumulated a small collection of animation art over the years. I picked this particular character sketch up from one of the Art of Disney stores on my 2008 WDW trip, and for the price I paid for it ($85 framed and shipped) I thought it was a really good deal. I think what I'll probably end up doing is getting one on each Disney trip. Definitely not the cheapest thing out there, but I really like it, and given the typical cost of animation art, it's a bargain, especially for something hand-drawn.
  
• Fireworks. They just never get old. I'll refrain from dragging a debate over the whole "Tinkerbell vs. Tinkerbill" question into this though...
  
• Try to get through the weekend with lower extremities intact. My mother would have a fit if I was ever caught dead wearing Crocs, in spite of their longstanding popularity for the purpose. I'm hoping the weather is nice enough to get away with Tevas, but I'll see what happens...
  
• Aside from these, I don't plan to be too structured about my time in the parks. I tend to have a notoroiously short attention span, but I also find all the little details interesting, and don't mind stopping to just watch things for a bit.

The Non-Goals:

• I'll probably pass on the parades this time around. Or more accurately, I'll probably end up getting stuck behind one at an inconvenient time and end up watching it anyway.
  
• There are a few rides I can probably safely pass on. These include Autopia, pretty much everything in A Bug's Land (I think the only reason I even ended up there the last time was because I was lost,) and I can probably even pass on Toy Story Mania if the lines are as insanely long as they tend to get on the WDW version.
  
• Splash Mountain. Down for a rehab the weekend I'm there, unfortunately.
  
• World of Color: It sounds like a really cool show, and it sounds like there could be definite possibilities of soft openings while I'm there, but I just don't have the patience to wait for hours.
  
• I don't plan to get too fancy with food. One of my typical ground rules for traveling is that I try to avoid eating at any place I can find at home (which, for all practical purposes, usually boils down to a "No McDonald's" rule.) I don't always do a good job of following this, but do at least try to keep it in mind. I've always found it a bit awkward doing table service on my own, although it doesn't stop me from doing so on occasion. If I can manage it I would like to try to find my way to an In 'n Out while I'm there, but I guess I'll see how it works out.
  
• Sleep. You mean people actually do that stuff? On the other hand, I suspect that between the late park hours and the early flights in and out (Come on, flying out at 6:30am? Whose bright idea was THAT?), I might find myself seriously reconsidering my longstanding caffeine avoidance at some point during the weekend...
  

All things considered, with three days, I suspect I should have plenty of time to thoroughly cover things without too much rushing. I was lucky on the last trip to have almost no need for fastpasses (Space Mountain was the only ride with a line long enough to need them,) but at least they're there if needed.

Next up: What kind of self-respecting geek would be caught dead at Disney? Also, the benefits and pitfalls of traveling solo.

 

[Vexorg]

You know, these countdowns tend to lose just a bit of their impact when you're dealing with something planned only three weeks in advance. Assuming all goes well, it will be at about this time one week from now that I will be arriving at the park. Of course, the 6:30 flight means that there's a distinct possibility I may be half-zonked by the time I actually get there (I can do bright or I can do early, I can't do both at once)

• I still need to come up with a park ticket somewhere. This shouldn't be too big an issue, since there's a couple of places that have them locally.
• I still need to sort out my shoe situation. On a half-mile walk from a parking garage to my office today, it became abundantly clear that my current pair of shoes isn't going to cut it for three days at Disney. Since I've been instructed by my mother to never be caught dead in Crocs, I'll probably need to figure something out...
• I booked the SuperShuttle from SNA to the hotel, but I'm giving some serious consideration to just cancelling that and renting a car instead. As interesting as DLR is, I'd like to have the freedom to wander around the area a bit as well.

Thoughts?