RD experience 12/28-29

[DC in DC]

Wanted to post a short report since this board was so helpful. We had 2 day pass, no park hopper. (Didn’t want to pay $60pp, family of 4 with 11 and 8 YO). Also did not want to pay extra for ILL, only did Genie+.
Day 1: Disneyland
We successfully RD ROTR and had no wait
Got to security by 6:50, let us in around 7:10.
Scanned tickets around 7:30.
Was about 5 people back from the rope. We booked it to ROTR (started out walking but everyone was running). Your whole group needs to be together at the start.
got there in time to be first or second group.
thankfully ride was not down.

Smugglers Run- we did it next but should have waited or just done single rider. My kid did it 7 times later that day using SR.

Lucked into 15 min wait time for Space Mountain bc the ride just reopened.

LL return times were the longest as the day went on, and we didn’t quite get the hang of it until a few hours in.

Crowds were high but not big problem with Genie. Biggest issue was filling time between Genie rides- we did a bunch of Fantasyland rides then.

Top rides for us:
ROTR
Smugglers Run
Pirates
Big Thunder Mtn
Indy.

Matternhorn was not thrilling enough for thrill seeking tween. Rest of us felt that it and Space were too jerky.


Day 2: DCA-Did same RD procedure as and did RSR in first group.

Then went to Webslingers, waited a solid 75 min at 8:20. Did Guardians LL after that, then incredicoaster. Those were our top priorities before the rain was forecasted to start. Killed time doing the drawing classes at Animation Academy (actually pretty cool). Did Soarin’, Grizzy Peak (hey it’s raining so why not) and monsters.

Character meets were stingy in DCA. Every character we saw had a short line and a handler waving people off saying the meet was closed. At DL, the characters hung out for much longer.

We left around 4pm due to rain and not wanting to hang out for another 2 hours just to do LL for any remaining rides, which we weren’t that into.

Personally I think you could probably do both parks in one day with RD and paying for ILL for the other 2 big rides. Especially if you don’t have young kids and/or don’t care for nostalgia rides.

No issues ordering food and finding places to eat outside. You do need to plan a few hours in advance, esp at dinner.

Happy to try to answer any questions. Excuse typos!

 

[Calidisneyfam]

Thanks for sharing your experience! Sounds like a great trip!

 

[underminer]

Great report! What days were you there?

 

[Wesley815]

Great report and summery of how things went, thank you!!

Great report! What days were you there?

I was wondering that too, but just caught the subject line before I replied I think they were there Tuesday 12/28 and Wednesday 12/29.

 

[Pluto468]

Sounds like a great day! Glad to hear it isn't too difficult to find food.

 

[DC in DC]

Forgot to add a few details:

One person in our party didn’t have his ticket scanned at the gate for some reason. We didn’t realize it until we were at the rope and tried to buy Genie+ for all 4 of us. (Actually we did notice we only got 3 paper tickets back, but the agent said it was fine). We didn’t want to waste precious AM hours trying to fix it right away, so we did ROTR first, Smugglers Run (without LL), then Pirates. Then, went back to gate to get it fixed. Guest relations line at City Hall was really long. So, we didn’t get going on using Genie+ until probably 10:30 (and lucked into short Space Mtn line without using LL).

DL, ultimately we did 22 total rides and stayed for fireworks and saw the parade. The parade turned out to be a convenient way to see nearly all the Disney princesses without trying to figure out where / when they would be in the park.

We stayed until fireworks ended.

DCA the lines were really long in the afternoon, even with the rain. Except Grizzly Peak, lol

We were there this week, Tues DL, Weds, DCA.

 

[gelatoni fan]

They have lines for characters again? Usually they have lines for Avengers and Cars but in other parts of the park, they just had crowds form in front of the character without proper lines.

Do you remember which other characters had lines?

 

[DC in DC]

Lines only at Avengers campus (Black Widow, Iron Man, Spider Man, Dr Strange. Captain America on the roof of Avengers building).
Didn’t see any characters at Cars but we were only there at RD.
Otherwise, characters at DL were on stages (Chewy, Alice, Miguel, storm troopers) or roped off and you could talk to them, no line, but with handlers who kept people socially distanced. Some Princesses (Belle, Aurora, Snow White ) were in places that you had to wait in line to talk to, others were around (Tiana, no line).