March 17-22 2012 DLR trip report!
Well I have not yet quite finished writing the trip report yet, so I'm going to post it as I put it up. I have a couple days written now, but in order the keep it to some sort of schedule to start, I'm going to try to do a day a week. That will hopefully change after this week though since I'm getting ready to get my finals done and then I won't have anymore excuses! Hopefully, since there was some time between me starting and (eventually) finishing, I won't repeat myself too much. Anyway, I hope you enjoy so I can make this the first of many trip reports to come!
-Bret
Day 3, Part 1! continued..
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We then jumped across the street and rode Snow White’s Scary Adventures followed by Pinocchio’s Daring Journey. Pinocchio is among my first memories of ever visiting Disney when I was a wee lad of almost only 4 years old, so the movie and now ride, hold a special place with me.
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The Sword in the Stone by BretJMiller, on Flickr
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We went from there back across the street to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which, like the previous 2 rides, had absolutely no wait, and we were in our car almost immediately. Even though I had gone to Disney World a couple times when I was younger, I don’t recall ever riding Mr. Toad until my first Disneyland trip in 2010. Morgan on the other hand had only gone to Disney World once as a wee lass (when she was 5) - but she remembers this ride as being one of her favorites - she must have loved Hades as a child, who knows. It is a fun ride that continues to grow on me. I am a sucker for any dark rides and could probably ride them over and over if lines allowed.
Next up was a quick walk over to ride the Alice dark ride which is another fun one except for the outside portion that lacks any sort of theming or story overall...unless I am completely missing something?
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By this time, it was about 8:40am, and we finished the rides in Fantasyland that we KNEW we wanted to get done early, but we were not done yet! Storybookland Canal boats were up and they are pretty awesome in the fact that they have the miniatures of all the great fairy tales and Disney stories. It is also nice to see another attraction like Jungle Cruise in that it is personalized by the cast member for each boat.
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it’s a small world came next and I decided I wasn’t going to ruin it with any mediocre pictures, but instead I decided to ruin it with some mediocre video. Video ride-thru’s of attractions are something I would like to do more of - eventually. I must say, I do love the facade of this ride especially when compared to the Disney World version and Morgan and I always have some fun trying to point out each of the Disney characters that were incorporated with the refurb.
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Next we headed back into the heart of Fantasyland for an attraction I could definitely do over and over: Casey Jr. Circus Train. We were getting pretty hungry at this point, and we hadn’t grabbed any fastpasses yet. Morgan went over to get fastpasses for Space, but I decided to take advantage of that time to take a few more pictures. I made my way around the castle and noticed that Ariel was out and I knew that Morgan would be excited so once I found her, I brought her right over to meet Ariel. Unfortunately, she did not have a cast member with her so we could not get one together. The little girl before us may have even been more excited to meet her than Morgan was...we’ll never know.
Day 3, Part 1! continued..
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We made our way to the Jolly Holiday bakery for our planned cinnamon roll which was a lot smaller than last year, but we didn’t care enough to go elsewhere (on any day). I love eating cinnamon rolls, but eating them on Main St. is even better (but not as good as eating them at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom).
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Chef Oscar was making his rounds, came by to say ‘hi’ and see how we were and then moved on. In retrospect, I wish we would have gotten a picture with or at least of him since he is a Disneyland celebrity himself! We finished up and headed over to Adventureland. As we were passing through, we noticed that Tarzan’s Treehouse was open for the first time since our March 2010 trip, so we had to take a walk up and around. It is always nice to go up there and enjoy the higher vantage of the park and get those views you wouldn’t see otherwise.
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Tarzan's Window by BretJMiller, on Flickr
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Afterward, it was time to check the wait for Pirates, which was still fortunately a walk on. At that point, I guess I had already worked up an appetite from sharing the smaller cinnamon roll...and besides, I can always go for some Mickey shaped beignets! On our way over to the Mint Julep Bar, we stopped at the pin shop there to see if they had any St. Patrick’s Day pins left. They did, but there was only 1 there and it wasn’t the one that I wanted and I wasn’t going to give up the search so easily and we pressed on!
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Dead men tell no tales. by BretJMiller, on Flickr
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We ordered a half dozen beignets, even though Morgan only wanted 1, and took a seat in the French Market seating area there to nosh. As Morgan was finishing up, I took the short walk over to Indiana Jones to get a couple fastpasses for us to use later. Next up was Winnie the Pooh, and after that, we took one of many walks across the entire park to grab another fastpass for Space Mountain and ride it. Well, since I am behind and am not sure if I talked about this version of Space Mountain because of how long it has been since I wrote the first two parts, I will bore you with those details again (or not if I haven’t!). Disneyland’s Space Mountain excels over Magic Kingdom’s in that it is a very smooth ride. The side by side seats don’t bother me as much as they do Morgan, but it isn’t something that ruins the ride for her - or even threatens to. We love Space Mountain and if I had to pick one bad thing out about this version - It always seems to be turning in the same direction! However, as I said, this doesn’t taint the experience for us as it is still one of our favorites on each coast.
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Fastpass return yonder.. by BretJMiller, on Flickr
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Since we hadn’t yet checked out Mickey’s Toontown on this trip, we decided to run over there to see what the wait times were looking like. Of course with it being the middle of the day at this point, the wait for Roger Rabbit’s Car toon Spin was only growing so we decided to pass on it for now and on to Mickey’s house to see if we could get lucky in meeting him. I don’t even think we got a quarter of the way through his house before we hit the line to see him so we passed on that as well. As it turned out, it was not yet our time to visit Toontown and we took the train over to Main st. so we could stroll on over to Pirates of the Caribbean, but more importantly, to our lunch reservation at Blue Bayou.