It's a beautiful mornin' ahhh, I think I'll go outside for a while. An jus' smile, just take in some clean fresh air boy.
Ain't no sense in stayin' inside, if the weather's fine and you got the time.
It's your chance to wake up and plan another brand new day, either way;
It's a beautiful mornin'.
I know I said we’ll try to get this TR moving a little more quickly, so here it goes.
Sunday, August 26, 2012. Went to DL in the morning, DCA in the afternoon and finished the day back at DL. I now return you to your regularly scheduled TR over on Nebo’s thread.
Still around?
Really, Nebo’s is more exciting at the moment. Our day is literally a walk in the park compared to his; but if you insist, I’ll try to make our day sound exciting and magical.
Today is our first full theme park day, and our only chance to take advantage of the early magic morning we got when we purchased our tickets. There are 4 days Disney allows you to take advantage of this perk: Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday; and the only park you can use it at is
Disneyland. We had just arrived on Saturday and wouldn’t have made it to theme park early anyways. Tuesday our plan is to hit DCA. Thursday will be the relaxation day I promised Lady H and of course we leave on a Saturday. So today’s plan is to be at the park at 8:00 am, as Disneyland originally opens at 9.
That dreaded alarm goes off again. This time at 6 am, and no I didn’t go back to sleep. Don’t want to waste any precious park time. I mosey on over to the kitchen to get some coffee before I wake up sleeping beauty. She is not a morning person. For that matter neither am I. As others have mentioned, there are only 2 times that I’m up early: work and vacation. Since I work 5 days a week, that means I’m up early all week. Given the chance, I will sleep in and I take full advantage on the weekends. Since we’re on vacation though, I’m up.
I get to the kitchen and coffee isn’t ready yet. The coffee pot in our room has an automatic timer and I set it up before going to bed. I walk over and inspect the coffee pot. Timer is on. Put the correct time I wanted it to go on.
Doh!
http://yoursmiles.org/s-negative.php?page=2 I didn’t set the clock right.
I fix the time on the coffee maker, because any sensible person would this; and every now and then I’m smart that way. Had I been smarter, I would’ve checked to make sure I had the correct time when I first set it. The time looked correct, but I was off by 12 hours. I switched day to night, and night to day. Anyways, I turn the coffee maker on and head back (unarmed with coffee) to wake sleeping beauty. This time I didn’t need the bucket of ice water to get her up. A kiss worked just fine. Soon coffee is ready and so are we. Pack our bags, grab our tickets and put them in the new lanyards we bought the night before, and off we go to the lobby. Need to buy passes to ride the ART (Anaheim Resort Transportation) shuttle.
For those that have been asking how far our hotel is from DL; it wasn’t too far, but far enough if you decided to walk there. The hotel is a mile down the road from the DL turnstile, or a 20-25 minute walk (depending on how fast you walk). 45-60 minute walk at the end of the day if you’re tired and don’t want to walk anymore. Knowing that we would be in for a full day of walking, standing and walking some more; we didn’t really want to walk. Especially if we decided to go back to the hotel for a break.
While I was planning this trip, I made sure to research how much parking was going to cost. Had we parked at any of the Disney Theme Parks parking lots, it would’ve cost us $15 per day. To use ART, it costs $4 per adult for an all day ride pass. Given we were 2 adults, it would cost us $8 per day to get to DL; instead of paying the $15 that DL charges and you still have to take a shuttle to get there. Yup, I typed that out correctly. You pay to park at the DL parking lots and you still have to take s shuttle to DL. Let me show you what I’m talking about.
Here is Google’s current map of DLR and the surrounding area. I added a few lines and description to it so you can hopefully follow along.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/realgoodman/8021749714/
I indicated on the map where Lady and I were staying. The light blue line is how far Lady H and I would have to walk to catch the nearest ART shuttle. The green line would be the route the shuttle would take to DL after it picked us up. Notice the nearest parking lot to us is the Toy Story Mania parking lot. Could’ve been the parking lot was just called Toy Story and I’m adding Mania. Anyways, this parking lot isn’t too far up the road from where we were staying. There were also no short cuts from our hotel to this parking lot. Not unless you wanted to jump the wall. The red line indicates my best guess of the route the DL parking lot shuttles would take. We never parked in this lot but looking at a closer Google Map of this lot, I indicated where the shuttle pick up probably is; and it dropped off/picked up in the same vicinity as the ART shuttle once it got to DL. Needless to say, our shuttle ride would more or less be the same distance if we took the ART shuttle or the DL shuttle. I think there is a parking garage closer to DL, but we never went looking for it. So I can’t tell you if it was closer or not. I did see as you got to the end of DtD, there is an area where the parking lot trams (same type used at WDW parking lots) picked up and dropped off.
Ok, now that I covered the whole parking issue, let me get back to the TR itself. We head over to our hotel lobby to buy our ART passes. There’s a kiosk in the lobby that you can buy your tickets from. We figured it would be easier to do it this way, rather than pay the driver. As we walk into the lobby, Sneaky Larry is already hard at work figuring out who will be his next victims. We try not to make eye contact and proceed directly to the kiosk. He spots us but just gives us a friendly good morning and goes to a back office. Phew. We escaped for now. We quickly buy our tickets and get out of there before he comes back.
ART passes in hand we head over to the shuttle stop. Right now it’s about 7:45 and the ART shuttle is supposed to pick up about every 20 minutes or so. We get to the shuttle waiting area and there is about 10 people waiting for the shuttle. One observation I do make, just like at WDW, there are people with big strollers waiting to get on. I start to fear for my shins and the back of my heals seeing these monster strollers.
We wait about 5 minutes and the ART shuttle pulls up. They’re not very big shuttles. I’m guessing they can hold about 50 passengers max. As luck would have it, it wasn’t really packed at this hour; little did we know it wouldn’t be a quiet trip to Disneyland.
The shuttle driver must have been a yellow jacket in disguise. No offense to anyone out there when I say he was an older man. I would say he was either in has late 50’ or early 60’s. I know what you’re thinking, “T_Man is calling us old.” He was older than me so how else would I refer to him. On our 5 minute or so shuttle ride, the driver decided he needed kid participation. He asked the kids if they knew where they were going. Naturally the kids yelled out Disneyland. Now here’s where his old age kicks in, he tells them “I can’t hear you.” Now we have the kids yelling out even louder and some adults joining in. Again he says “I still can’t hear you.” Did he remember to turn his hearing aids on? Lady H wanted to tell him “Alma, turn the pack on.” This time everyone screams out Disneyland, Lady H and I included. We wanted to make sure he heard this time. He must have heard everyone this time because he seems satisfied and stops asking. Good because now my ears are ringing. He then gives the kids a public service announcement. “Stay with your parents, listen to mom and dad, have fun, blah blah blah.” Finally, our shuttle arrives to shuttle drop off/pick up area. Once again, the driver wants crowd participation; “Kids, do you know where you are?” They kids yell out “Disneyland” and the driver is now Mr. Funny Man, “Wrong. You’re on the bus,” and with that he lets us off.
Now it’s time for the ever so famous, daunting task of slipping by security un-noticed. Walls are too high to jump here and I don’t know where the snipers are positioned. Best to play it safe and just go through security. Lines aren’t too long at this hour. Lady H and I open our bags to show security all the supplies we need for the day. They confiscate our mountain climbing gear. They said they already have CM’s that act as mountain climbers and they aren’t holding open auditions for future climbers. So much for climbing the Matterhorn today. They let everything else we have pass through and we head towards the gate. I look at the time on my phone; shoot, we’ve already lost 5 minutes of valuable touring time already. Time to tour commando style. We walk up to the turnstile and hand the CM our City Pass. She scans them and hands them back to us, along with 2 new tickets. Oh boy, bonus days I thought. We must be the billionth visitors through the gate. Nope, turns out these will now be the tickets we use for the rest of the trip. Our City Pass for Disney is no longer valid. Now the tickets we got are the cheap paper tickets. They’re not even the Tyvek type tickets that you get at WDW. I would’ve rather have stuck to my sturdy, credit card like City Pass ticket.
After we get our cheap paper tickets, the CM now scans these tickets. No fingerprint system like WDW. This would be a love/hate relationship later on in the TR. We walk through the turnstile and we are finally inside Disneyland.
Since it has obviously been stated on here that some like Lady H’s writing style more than “THE OTHER GUY”, TOG is ending this chapter here and will try to turn it over to Lady H so she can keep you entertained while I quietly sit in the back of the class; occasionally filling in any details that Lady H may not quite recall. Secretly plotting my revenge and how I can torture you with more chapters.
Bwaahhh hhhaaaa hhhaaa hhhaaa.
I like that!
So they're dumb and dumber for not knowing where their car is... then you guys come along and don't know where your car is either...
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, but don't tell the "other guy" that...I've been telling him I got through college by paying smart people to write my term papers! 
I don't need a burger so bad that I'll pay $20 for it. Four orders of burgers or dogs, fries and drinks came out to around $80. I suspect they cranked up the prices to pay for the primo spot they had in the mall... probably why we never went back.
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