Disneyland 2: Now With More Disneyland!
Oct. 12th, 2016 05:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrSo it looks like waking up at 4-5am is becoming a pattern, on the plus side that gives me time to write this kind of post and plan. Yesterday morning I sat down with a map of Disneyland and added all the charging stations/power points (an image I plan to neaten up then put online, since noone else seems to have made one) then planned out what I wanted to do assuming Cam also woke early and we could take advantage of the one early morning start ("Magic Morning") you can do with a 5 day ticket. And he did!
***NOTE: mention of implied fictional rape***
Magic Morning starts at 7am but Cam persuaded me to leave early to avoid lines and he was right, there was a bit of one even when we got there at 6:15am. It seemed a bit silly to wait in line to...avoid lines, but the cooler morning weather was pretty magical compared to the heat of the day before. There was a countdown started in the moderately large crowd as the gates opened and then everyone rushed off past us as we gently noodled on our way. Alas it turned out the parts of the park in my Plan weren't opening early, so we wandered over to Tomorrowland and did the two rides that seemed most appealing: Finding Nemo's Underwater Adventure and Space Mountain. They were both great!
Finding Nemo puts you in a "submarine" on an underwater track that goes past various seascapes and scenes from a little post-Finding-Nemo story about Nemo getting lost again. It's set on the Great Barrier Reef with Real Australian Voice Actors as the submarine crew (the physically present Disney staff were of course American) and there's a wide vista of mysterious ruins, a volcano, animated screens etc and lots of bubbles to remind you you're underwater. No real plants or fish, and everything looked a little worn down, I guess it's hard to do maintenance.
Space Mountain is a roller coaster in a tunnel lined with star like lights. Simple but effective, and old enough that we'd both grown up hearing about it as space nerd children. There were also a few images of ghost skeletons for Halloweeen which looked kind of out of place but did add some variety. I tend to avoid roller coasters because of my anxiety but decided to give it a shot, my mental journey was: Oh it's all stars, cool! WHOA FAST HAHAHAHAHA THIS IS FUN. Ooh more...AHHHH MORE FAST this is a little...OH GOD I'M GOING TO DIE WHEN DOES THIS...phew it's over. Which was overall positive, glad it was short though! We got partway through the queue before being told wheelchair users go in via the exit and skip the queue, again parking to the side then stepping into the seat.
We wandered through the Star Wars store and looked at overpriced "make your own small droid toy" and "make your own lightsaber" things then it was nearly 8am when the main park opened. We were in time to see the rope go up from the MASSIVE crowd of people coming in for the main opening and had to navigate through them to AdventureLand, a racially unfortunate Jungle themed area with the Indiana Jones ride. Which was broken, so we kept going to the New Orleans area for Pirates of the Carribbean. We got to skip the queue again but had a moderate wait to actually get in. The ride is "boat" cars on tracks that are in a sort of river underground, you travel through the very pretty fake bayou next to an "outdoor" restaurant then there's some mild downward rides to get to the main caverns of animatronic pirate themed dioramas. These looked mostly like the ones I'd seen on tv as a kid, but were very immersive in person, being life sized with the atmosphere of sound and water. Most impressive was going through a wall of mist to emerge in the middle of a battle in a huge cavern between a pirate ship on one side of us and fortress of soldiers on the other. Most troubling was the "buy a wife" section with crying women tied up with rope??? WTF Disney. They'd gone to the bother of adding in Jack Sparrow/Barbossa/Davy Jones but not any of the kickass female characters from the movies, the few women were in very old fashioned cliched roles. And I don't remember any POC at all. It would not have been hard to make some of the pirates a different shape/colour without having to even add new ones.
Still, it was otherwise pretty great, and gave me some ideas for my 19th century fantasy fiction. I can see why Tim Powers was inspired by it. When he came to Swancon he said he watched the first Pirates of the Carribbean movie and went "this seems eerily similar to On Stranger Tides :/", then remembered how often he'd been on the ride. When I saw the announcement of Pirates of the Carribbean: On Stranger Tides a few years later I was very amused.
We then went to the Haunted Mansion, which I'd always wanted to go on as a kid (for such an anxious child I was really into ghost trains) It had a Nightmare Before Christmas theme for Halloween and was cheesy as hell, not very immersive at all, but I'm glad I went on it. Alas their wheelchair access was broken so I had to walk more than usual to get on, but it was good to stretch my legs at this point.
We were now done with Disneyland and it wasn't even 9am! We went shoe shopping Downtown Disney, since my feet were sad about wearing closed shoes so much when I usually lay barefoot in bed all day, and bought some overpriced ugly thongs (I remembered to ask for 'fip flops' ;)) which my feet were VERY happy about. I wanted to charge my chair since it was looking sad but Cam was confident it would make it back to the hotel and he was right.
We ate lunch in the hotel, napped, and then went out for dinner to the Cheesecake Factory. As you might guess from the name and my dairy intolerance, this was Cam's choice. He ADORED it last time he was here and they do steak so I was ok with being a supportive spouse. Except my steak was AMAZING, it even came with a jus sauce I could eat, and bread rolls and two types of vegetable to soak it up. Mmmmm. I even got to steal a little bit of the graham crackers and marshmallow from cam's smores cheesecake. This is actually my first steak and steamed vegetables of the trip, I thought I'd be eating it every day since there's not really anywhere to get my other staple of eating out, Japanese. Meanwhile Cam had to stop eating his cake due to Too Much Sugar and got it to take away where it sits in our fridge. We'll see if he resists the temptation to eat it for breakfast :)
We noodled back home through "Anaheim Garden Walk", eg an open mall with a small number of plants, and had fun poking through "Geeky Mama", a geek themed women's clothing store with a very etsy vibe. It was all kind of crap, but fun to look at on principle.
And today: Universal!! We changed plans on how to get there at the last minute so there's some issues with making sure the coach is wheelchair accessible, here's hoping.
Anyway, yesterday was a GREAT day, and just as restful as I'd hoped. I'm still fairly buggered, and expect to be more so after the Universal tour, so have decided not to do my original plan of going to LA for the La Brea tar pits. Instead I'll just make sure I feel I haven't missed anything at the two Disney parks on Thursday and Friday before we leave on Saturday. This trip was partly a test of how I cope with travel, and it's been fine even with things going wrong, so we'll probably come to the Americas again sometime, which means going through LA. And we've decided that when we go on that trip, we'll stay in the city for a few days to rest from the flight and check out stuff like the tar pits, and then go on to whatever place the main holiday is at.
***NOTE: mention of implied fictional rape***
Magic Morning starts at 7am but Cam persuaded me to leave early to avoid lines and he was right, there was a bit of one even when we got there at 6:15am. It seemed a bit silly to wait in line to...avoid lines, but the cooler morning weather was pretty magical compared to the heat of the day before. There was a countdown started in the moderately large crowd as the gates opened and then everyone rushed off past us as we gently noodled on our way. Alas it turned out the parts of the park in my Plan weren't opening early, so we wandered over to Tomorrowland and did the two rides that seemed most appealing: Finding Nemo's Underwater Adventure and Space Mountain. They were both great!
Finding Nemo puts you in a "submarine" on an underwater track that goes past various seascapes and scenes from a little post-Finding-Nemo story about Nemo getting lost again. It's set on the Great Barrier Reef with Real Australian Voice Actors as the submarine crew (the physically present Disney staff were of course American) and there's a wide vista of mysterious ruins, a volcano, animated screens etc and lots of bubbles to remind you you're underwater. No real plants or fish, and everything looked a little worn down, I guess it's hard to do maintenance.
Space Mountain is a roller coaster in a tunnel lined with star like lights. Simple but effective, and old enough that we'd both grown up hearing about it as space nerd children. There were also a few images of ghost skeletons for Halloweeen which looked kind of out of place but did add some variety. I tend to avoid roller coasters because of my anxiety but decided to give it a shot, my mental journey was: Oh it's all stars, cool! WHOA FAST HAHAHAHAHA THIS IS FUN. Ooh more...AHHHH MORE FAST this is a little...OH GOD I'M GOING TO DIE WHEN DOES THIS...phew it's over. Which was overall positive, glad it was short though! We got partway through the queue before being told wheelchair users go in via the exit and skip the queue, again parking to the side then stepping into the seat.
We wandered through the Star Wars store and looked at overpriced "make your own small droid toy" and "make your own lightsaber" things then it was nearly 8am when the main park opened. We were in time to see the rope go up from the MASSIVE crowd of people coming in for the main opening and had to navigate through them to AdventureLand, a racially unfortunate Jungle themed area with the Indiana Jones ride. Which was broken, so we kept going to the New Orleans area for Pirates of the Carribbean. We got to skip the queue again but had a moderate wait to actually get in. The ride is "boat" cars on tracks that are in a sort of river underground, you travel through the very pretty fake bayou next to an "outdoor" restaurant then there's some mild downward rides to get to the main caverns of animatronic pirate themed dioramas. These looked mostly like the ones I'd seen on tv as a kid, but were very immersive in person, being life sized with the atmosphere of sound and water. Most impressive was going through a wall of mist to emerge in the middle of a battle in a huge cavern between a pirate ship on one side of us and fortress of soldiers on the other. Most troubling was the "buy a wife" section with crying women tied up with rope??? WTF Disney. They'd gone to the bother of adding in Jack Sparrow/Barbossa/Davy Jones but not any of the kickass female characters from the movies, the few women were in very old fashioned cliched roles. And I don't remember any POC at all. It would not have been hard to make some of the pirates a different shape/colour without having to even add new ones.
Still, it was otherwise pretty great, and gave me some ideas for my 19th century fantasy fiction. I can see why Tim Powers was inspired by it. When he came to Swancon he said he watched the first Pirates of the Carribbean movie and went "this seems eerily similar to On Stranger Tides :/", then remembered how often he'd been on the ride. When I saw the announcement of Pirates of the Carribbean: On Stranger Tides a few years later I was very amused.
We then went to the Haunted Mansion, which I'd always wanted to go on as a kid (for such an anxious child I was really into ghost trains) It had a Nightmare Before Christmas theme for Halloween and was cheesy as hell, not very immersive at all, but I'm glad I went on it. Alas their wheelchair access was broken so I had to walk more than usual to get on, but it was good to stretch my legs at this point.
We were now done with Disneyland and it wasn't even 9am! We went shoe shopping Downtown Disney, since my feet were sad about wearing closed shoes so much when I usually lay barefoot in bed all day, and bought some overpriced ugly thongs (I remembered to ask for 'fip flops' ;)) which my feet were VERY happy about. I wanted to charge my chair since it was looking sad but Cam was confident it would make it back to the hotel and he was right.
We ate lunch in the hotel, napped, and then went out for dinner to the Cheesecake Factory. As you might guess from the name and my dairy intolerance, this was Cam's choice. He ADORED it last time he was here and they do steak so I was ok with being a supportive spouse. Except my steak was AMAZING, it even came with a jus sauce I could eat, and bread rolls and two types of vegetable to soak it up. Mmmmm. I even got to steal a little bit of the graham crackers and marshmallow from cam's smores cheesecake. This is actually my first steak and steamed vegetables of the trip, I thought I'd be eating it every day since there's not really anywhere to get my other staple of eating out, Japanese. Meanwhile Cam had to stop eating his cake due to Too Much Sugar and got it to take away where it sits in our fridge. We'll see if he resists the temptation to eat it for breakfast :)
We noodled back home through "Anaheim Garden Walk", eg an open mall with a small number of plants, and had fun poking through "Geeky Mama", a geek themed women's clothing store with a very etsy vibe. It was all kind of crap, but fun to look at on principle.
And today: Universal!! We changed plans on how to get there at the last minute so there's some issues with making sure the coach is wheelchair accessible, here's hoping.
Anyway, yesterday was a GREAT day, and just as restful as I'd hoped. I'm still fairly buggered, and expect to be more so after the Universal tour, so have decided not to do my original plan of going to LA for the La Brea tar pits. Instead I'll just make sure I feel I haven't missed anything at the two Disney parks on Thursday and Friday before we leave on Saturday. This trip was partly a test of how I cope with travel, and it's been fine even with things going wrong, so we'll probably come to the Americas again sometime, which means going through LA. And we've decided that when we go on that trip, we'll stay in the city for a few days to rest from the flight and check out stuff like the tar pits, and then go on to whatever place the main holiday is at.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-12 01:12 pm (UTC)Urgh, what even?
*unimpressed*
no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 09:24 pm (UTC)I know, right?
no subject
Date: 2016-10-13 11:31 am (UTC)Cheesecake for breakfast. Living the dream, Cam! =)
Most troubling was the "buy a wife" section with crying women tied up with rope??? WTF Disney.
Uh, way to fail to move out of the 17th century, Disney.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 09:23 pm (UTC)Yeah :/