Since my dad was visiting and he had seen Disneyworld in the early, and then later days, he was curious to see Disneyland today, since it was the first park he had never seen.
While I was not in a huge hurry myself, I figured why not? so there we went after a reasonably short flight directly to fullertown airport just 10mn from Disney (closer than LAX and all that crap).
Disneyland
I'll give the summary first:
The roller coasters, as expected, were not very impressive, but then again it's never been Disney's forte. Space Mountain was otherwise decent.
I was really dreading the "it's a small world" rides with dancing puppets everywhere. There were a few, we did 2 and missed 2 (we otherwise did pretty much all the attractions), and it wasn't as bad as I had feared.
They were open from 07:00 to 00:00, so 17 hours is actually a lot of time to visit the park if you want to be gung ho about it.
We were able to pretty much do all of Disneyland in 1.3 days without pushing horribly (if you really do opening to close, it's likely doable in one day with intelligent use of fastpass).
Fastpass is not that bad an idea: you can register for one and only one ride in advance and get a time 1 to 4 hours from now, and then come back later when your time has come and get in with almost no line. That was useful for Space Mountain for instance. You just have to keep in mind that you may not want your fastpass blocked for 4 hours when you could do 2 other 2H wait only fastpass rides during that time.
Disneyland actually has a mobile online website where you can check ride wait times with your cell phone without having to go check them out. Neat!
All in all, I don't think we stood in line for more than 10mn for most rides. Maybe 20mn for one, and that was it. This was most unexpected (that was both use of fastpass, intelligent ride scheduling, and the fact that they were just not that busy on August weekdays, which was a good surprise).
Anyway, here are the picts:
moderately happy with the ride :)
Random pictures:
The Jedi Training Show was actually fairly good:
But Asimo in futureland was very cool, I had never seen it in person:
More random pictures:
California Adventure Park
Half morning on the second day, we were done with Disneyland and headed toward California Adventure Park. I went to pick up some fastpass spots for the 2nd World of Color show (which turns out to only be the right to stand in line almost 1H to get a standing spot somewhere in front of the water, not necessarily with a good view of the show. Thankfully we later scored some VIP standing spots after getting dinner at a local restaurant.
Anyway, back to California Adventure:
The animated rotated animation lit by strobe was really cool (looks better in real life than my camera video where it flashes a lot, but it gives you an idea):
We also got a cartoon drawing class:
ok, I won't quit my day job :)
Some rides are really good decors, I was impressed:
They also had a really well made Simbad Musical:
More random pictures:
this was a fun elevator ride up and down
The new 4D shooting show was quite fun
My high score, and my dad's
This is the waterfront where the world of color show takes place, it's actually pretty nice:
And we finished the day with the California Adventure World of Color Show. It was actually quite pretty, and cool to display video on water:
It was a packed two days, but we pretty much got to see everything in both parks, which for my dad is actually a really good job :)
Good fun was had by all as they say.
