OK, just to warn you, this is the longest update in the history of the DIS. I didn't want to break it up over 2 weeks cuz then it'll take even LONGER for me to finish this report, so... here we go!
Tuesday! Our deal was that if Patrick finished shooting at midnight the night before, we’d go to
Disneyland, but if he didn't get home til 3am again, we’d go check into our hotel and visit Ikspiari but not do the parks til Wednesday. Well... he got home at 3am.
But when I woke up at 5:30am, I lay there agonizing over whether we should go to the park that day anyway so we could have an extra half-day there, and on a weekday to boot. So I woke Patrick up (I know, more Bad Wife points!) and we dithered some more. We finally decided just to go for it. Also,
I, the uber-planner, learned from
him, that our hotel had a shuttle straight to Disney! I’d been seeing the Good Neighbor hotel sign all week but never registered what that meant. There are only 15 hotels in all of Tokyo that offer this service, and we just happened to have been booked into one by the ad agency!
So that made it even easier to go ahead with our plans. We packed up all our stuff and checked out. I may or may not have made off with a year's supply of free slippers…
The bus was a plush motorcoach like the ones they use for Magical Express in Florida.
They even had Disney propaganda on a video loop—in English!
The trip is not particularly scenic, but we were super-excited to see what it looked like outside of downtown.
It looked like blurry!
We got really excited when we spotted the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel, our home for the night. I can’t believe I thought it was a Ramada on the trip in from the airport, but, in all fairness, it was dark…
This is where the buses drop you:
I left Patrick to wait in this line while I took our luggage and checked into the hotel.
Check-in:
I was given inactive room keycards and a map to our room location. We were told that the key cards would become active after the 4:30pm check-in time. They will only do this if you give them a "local" phone number on which you can be reached if things change—otherwise, you must go back to the desk and get active keycards at around 4:30pm. We assured them that they could reach us on my US cell phone, though, so they let us do it.
When I went over to buy our park passes at the end of the check-in desk, I was offered several types of passes not available on the TDR website or to the general public. These were:
2-day Park Hopper: ¥11,600
3-day Park Hopper: ¥14,500
4-day Park Hopper: ¥16,600
I wish I'd known about these ahead of time because we wouldn't have locked our schedule in to be all day at each park for the first 2 days. However, I have heard that this is just an occasional offer and they might not always have it.
The line at the park:
A few characters came out…
And suddenly everyone was standing!
Oh they look friendly now, but just wait til everyone starts throwing elbows on the way to Pooh's Hunny Hunt!
I sashayed up bearing breakfast from the hotel sundries shop just a few minutes before park opening—because for some reason they opened it at 8am instead of the 8:30am posted on the web site. Good thing we'd left in plenty of time!
As soon as we passed through the turnstiles, we took off running with the crowds. Ordinarily most of us would have been heading for Monsters, Inc., but since it was closed, we all ran to Pooh's Hunny Hunt.
What I forgot is, I’m in no shape to be sprinting 5+ football fields at 8am! This is where it really hit me how much larger Tokyo Disneyland is than Disneyland and even the Magic Kingdom. My chest was burning and I began to drop back as we rounded the side of the castle—and the guy running next to me actually fell to the ground! The theme to "Chariots of Fire" was playing in my head as Patrick came up from the back of the pack and I passed him the baton (my park pass).
When he got to the FASTPASS machines for Pooh, every single one had someone feeding 10 or 15 park passes into it! FINALLY we got our FASTPASSes and hopped in the standby line, which only took 5 minutes.
Me: "Don't stop to gawk at the theming! Just grab a picture of it to look at later!"
The boarding area…
"Oh man, this ride is already soooo much better than ours…"
We only got one shot inside the ride, but it turned out pretty dang good considering we never stopped moving.
I was skeptical—not a huge Pooh fan, frankly—but Pooh's Hunny Hunt really is as spectacular as they say. It wasn’t as frenetic as the spinning cars of Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, and you get spun around to different parts of the rooms each time you ride, so there’s always something new to see. Fabulous!
And I'd also wear those hair clips - LOVE them
Well, I have to confess it took me a while *not* to be constantly thinking of our Vegas vacation in terms of a trip report, but I am half tempted to do one despite my full plate of other reporting at the moment. DH says he's going to cull the best photos for me, so maybe I can do a mini-photo report.
! I vote for a Vegas trip report -- I'd love to hear about Wynn, etc.
I can't ever decide if I want to go or not. Part of me does for all the really cool hotels if nothing else but part of me is put off by the whole Sin City thing.
