Day 8: Disneyland May 16, 2008
I don’t care what you say about Hotel rooms, I’ve yet to spend the night in a hotel that I would consider comfortable. The beds are always too hard, the rooms as nearly always muggy and hot. The sheets are nearly always scratchy. The Disneyland Hotel is no exception. This is particularly true when you’re sharing two queen beds and a day bed between four grown men. As a result, I awoke on Thursday having enjoyed about five hours of restless sleep. Fortunately, I have had a sleeping disorder my entire adult life, so it wasn’t significantly less sleep than I usually get.
Today was my first day in the Disneyland–and from everything I have heard, I picked the perfect day in the year. Apparently, the middle of the May is time to come here. It’s a week before school lets out, so all the kids are in school, not here. Because we stayed in a Disney hotel, we were able to get into the park an hour early for Fantasyland and Tommorowland. The lines were non-existent. We had gone on seven major rides in two and a half hours. We never waited in line more than five minutes for any ride until after lunch. By one o’clock, we had ridden everything in the park we wanted to.
Disneyland is a fascinating place. The rides are pretty…well…for lack of a better word, tame. There’s nothing particularly thrilling or exhilarating (except maybe Space Mountain). What astonished me was the sheer brilliance of engineering and the fantastic attention to detail that goes into make these rides exceptional. Even the waits in line were entertaining (not that we spent much time waiting in line.) I can understand why people come here over and over again…it’s not the rides themselves that are the major draw–especially for people over the age of 12. It’s the whole feeling of the place. You have to "surrender" to the spirit of Disneyland to really enjoy it.
It’s also astonishing how they’ve managed to create an environment that is so clean and bright. Obviously, they work very hard to maintain the park and assure that the visuals are flawless. But they’ve even managed to create an atmosphere that encourages park visitors to participate. The people in the park were so nice. Nobody was rude. Even those toothless white trash people who are usually screaming at their kids at an amusement park were behaving themselves. It was a nice change of pace.
In all, I really enjoyed my first trip to Disneyland. As a 30-year-old male without children, I’m not sure I would come here again for a long time, because by 3:00 yesterday, we were out of things to do in the park. Fortunately, we got park-hopper tickets, so the group of us went across to California Adventure. This is a really neat park too, but in a very different way.
The main reason I wanted to go to Disneyland at all could be found in California Adventure: The Muppet 3-D experience.
I am a major Muppet Fan. I own all the Muppet movies. I had seen all of them but one: Muppet 3D Vision. I scheduled this trip with the sole purpose of coming to see this attraction. Yesterday afternoon, my dream finally came true. And I LOVED it! This was one of the last things Jim Henson did before he passed away. It was so exciting to see a new Muppet movie with the Jim Henson Kermit.
After a few more rides at California Adventure, we went back to the hotel, changed, and went to a very expensive restaurant in Downtown Disney. I had a Chorizo skewer with Garlic Potatoes and a saffron sauce, a crispy duck breast with a ragu of morel mushrooms fava beans, and a reduction of balsamic vinegar, and a berry shortcake with the most amazing berry sorbet I’ve ever eaten. After tip, it cost me $65 for just me, but hey, I’m on vacation. I’m going to indulge.
After that, I went swimming. Then, I crashed hard. By 9:30, I was struggling to keep my eyes open. By 10:30, I was dead to the world.
Today, we’ll be going back to California Adventure to ride the rest of the rides, then we’ll hit the road. I image that, by 3:00 or so, we’ll be on our way to San Simeon.





