Easter Holidays Holiday PART 2 - Disneyland!!!!

PART 1 - Skiing in Utah

PART 2 - Disneyland!!!!

After 10 days in Utah we hopped onto an internal flight from Salt Lake City to LA. It's a really short flight and it's just like getting on a bus. You don't even need your passports, which feels odd. Anyhow, after 1 hour and 30 mins in the air and flying across a time-zone so we lost an hour, we landed in Los Angeles at about 9:30 in the morning.
We collected our rental car and drove straight to Anaheim (about 45 minutes) where our hotel for the next 2 nights was located. Even though we arrived about 5 hours before we could officially check in the hotel reception guys were awesome enough to nominally check us in (even though our room wasn't available yet) and they let us park our car in their limited car park. We had a quick clothes change in the car (snow in Utah and sun in California within the space of 2 hours needs a costume change y'all!) and then we abandoned our suitcases in the car and walked to Disneyland!!!!

Not even kidding, it took us about 3 minutes to walk from the hotel to the gates of Disneyland. Even I was impressed with myself - I'd chosen GOOD! (entirely on purpose of course :) ). The hotel location was ridiculously close. It was right across the street to the main entrance!!!

We spent the rest of that day and evening in Disneyland (nipping out for 10 minutes later in the day to get the key to our hotel room and moving the suitcases in before hotfooting it back to the park again). It was a lovely sunny day and we did pretty much the whole park before we found a jammy spot on the sidewalk in the evening to settle down with a pastry (Rog bought me a crème brulee which was delicious but enormous. Naturally, I finished it all) to watch the light parade. It was so lovely. It was a special one for Disneyland's 60th anniversary which they're celebrating this year and the floats (or whatever you call them) were brilliant and really animated.
After the parade we moved out into Main Street ready to watch the fireworks. Again, they were special ones to celebrate the anniversary. They were really great and they had special effects projected onto the buildings all down Main Street all at the same time. They even made it snow at the end of the firework show (in their own very special Disney way!). It was fabulous day and we did everything we wanted to do.

They were also celebrating the release of the new Star Wars film with 'Season of the Force' so there were special displays and some of the rides had been updated with a Star Wars theme. The absolute best was that they had re-themed Space Mountain to Hyperspace Mountain and while you were whizzing around in the dark on the ride they were playing Star Wars music and you dash through a battle between Rebel X-Wing Starfighters and Imperial TIE Fighters. It made an already brilliant ride into an out-of-this-world ride! I really hope they consider keeping it that way because it truly took it to another level.
There was also an exhibit of Star Wars items, props and costumes which Rog loved (complete Star Wars geek!) and to top it all off you could meet Chewbacca if you queued for about 40 minutes. We HAD to do this. Rog has always wanted to hug Chewie since he was little so it was a must-do. I have to say that whoever was dressed up as Chewbacca was awesome. He completely got it that it was actually the dad's that were star-struck by him and not so much the little kids. Although he was great with the boys and me, it was actually Rog that he interacted most with, giving him massive hugs and keeping his arm round Rog the whole time we were with him. It was Rog that he waved goodbye to when we left. Honestly I haven't seen such a huge cheesy grin on Roger's face like he had during that experience for a long time. He really was like a little kid again. Brilliant!   

'Dabbing' for the camera seemed to be a theme for the holiday!

The next morning we were up at the crack of dawn to get into Disney's California Adventure Park at opening. The sun was shining again and made for another splendid day. The immediate priority was to snag some FastPass tickets to go on the Cars ride. FastPass tickets for this ride tend to be all out by about 10am, and without a FastPass ticket you're looking at about a 2 hour wait to get on it. I know, it's crazy right? There's no way I'll queue for 2 hours to get on  ride, even it is an amazingly brilliant and clever one! FastPasses in hand we hotfooted it over to the other side of the park to get the next most important thing - FastPasses for the evening show, World of Color. If you get one of these tickets it allows you entry into an allocated viewing area so you get to see the show from a good area without having to stake out your spot 2 hours in advance! Once those were safely tucked away in our bag we could relax and enjoy the rest of the day at a much more leisurely pace.

 

Meeting the Mouse

I love the California Adventure park. It's got a really nice feel to it and it's not overly big so you can get the whole thing done without having to bust a gut. In fact we did so well we were able to take a couple of hours out to walk to Downtown Disney, have a meal and then get back inside in time to find our spot for the show.

World of Color was fantastic. I'd seen it before 2 years ago but it was different this time because they'd changed it for the 60th anniversary celebrations. It's such a well thought out show with all the music, flashes and fountains on cue. Disney absolutely know how to do these things right.

We had two excellent days in Disney and did everything we wanted to do (sometimes twice!). It was time for a good nights sleep ready to move onto our third and final location the following day......

To follow...... PART 3 - Newport Beach, bumping into a celeb, and watching some whales.