Hey, friends! Today I’m recapping Day 2 of our Disneyland trip! I must have been feeling extra “picture’y” that day because I have lots of photos to share! You might want to go grab a cup of coffee first!
First off, if you missed Day 1 & How to save money on your next Disney vacation, you can click HERE to read.
So after a LONG day of travel the day prior, we planned an early bedtime and got up bright and early the next morning to enjoy the extra magic hours at California adventure. If you are not familiar, extra magic hours are only for guests of a Disney resort hotel. It’s an added perk to staying there. On this day, California Adventure opened up at 7 for hotel guests and at 8 for everyone else. We took full advantage of that extra hour!
Cash & Gage were excited to see Mator coming!
Because there was no line, we stepped right up to take a picture with him!
We made our way to Radiator Springs and got right on the Cars ride! No line at all!
As we were leaving Radiator Springs, we saw Lightning McQueen who was ready for pictures!
Ok, on the picture below, Kelby & Kevyn are in the front on the left side and the rest of us are sitting right behind them. We weren’t sure how the boys would do riding Guardians of the Galaxy (previously Tower of Terror) but they absolutely loved it! I couldn’t stop looking at Cash’s face – it was pure excitement! As soon as it ended, they asked to do it again… And because there was no line…
We hopped right back on!
So I failed to mention earlier that as soon as you enter the park, you can pull your first FastPass. We pulled one for Toy Story and if I remember correctly, it was for 8:30 so we still had a little time to kill. So as we made our way to Toy Story, we did Soarin along with some of the smaller rides that had no lines so we could check those off.
See those two cuties below on the Toy Story ride? Behind them is sitting Kevyn & Gage. Why I thought it was ok to allow my two clumsy kids to ride together is beyond me. Long story short, Gage fell onto the tracks while loading (I still haven’t figured out exactly how this happened!) and COMPLETELY SHUT THE RIDE DOWN! Yes ma’am. The entire ride. The ride that others had been waiting in line for for a good while already. We tucked our tails and left quickly. Thankfully as we were exciting they had an attendant load your ticket for a FastPass to be used whenever.
We had pulled 6 FastPasses for Incredicoaster but since Cash & Gage were too little to ride, Jeff and I took turns riding with the girls back to back.
Back to Toy Story with our FastPass!
We didn’t let Kevyn and Gage ride together again…
At this point it might have been 11 now… So we had roughly been in the park 4 hours and had already done so many rides. We pulled FastPasses for Cars but our time was not until later that evening. We decided to walk back to our hotel room (keep in mind that the Grand Californian has that special entrance making it super convenient) to have lunch and to rest a bit while we watch the Aggie bowl game.
We kept checking my Disneyland app to check wait times for rides and they were insane. Nobody wanted to spend hours waiting in line and we all chose to stay at the hotel until it cleared out a bit.
So this is kinda random… Our school Principal knew we were going to Disneyland over the Christmas break and he told us that coincidentally he too would be in Anaheim visiting family during the time we would be there. After we returned, he told us that he felt so bad for us because the local news kept reporting on the massive crowds at Disneyland. At one point, they had to turn away guests because the parks were at max capacity! Here is one of the articles about it.
Later that evening we went back to the park for a few more rides!
So my one bust for this trip was that I had booked dinner reservations that included special seating for the World of Color show. We showed up at our designated reservation time only to be told that the early show was already full. *eyeroll We didn’t want to keep everyone out late since we had had such an early morning so we just had dinner and skipped the show.
That’s it for today! I’ll be back later this week with Part 3 of our trip!
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