The Wonderful World Of Disney
To say today was huge is a total understatement! Good old Walt, bless his frozen heart, sure does know how to put on a show!
Before we headed across the road (literally – we are so close we can see the snow on top of the Matterhorn!) we sampled our all-included, all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast here in the hotel. It was a shocker! Not meaning to boast, but we Aussies really do food a whole lot better than the Americans. There is nothing you can buy, or eat for that matter, that hasn’t been tampered with in some way. Even the bread has sugar in it! It tastes so sweet and disgusting. The breakfast consisted of a couple of different sugary cereals that you could eat in a plastic bowl, with a plastic spoon, and add your own powdered “creamer”. Yes, that’s right, no milk for the cereal, just some white powdery stuff! The other choice was sugary bread with apple or raspberry jelly or a cinnamon, iced Danish, the size of a plate! The juice on offer was SO sweet, it tasted like lemonade! There was coffee but again, no milk for that either! We’ve since gone and bought some milk and we’ll BYO tomorrow morning!
Now, back to Disneyland. We were there before the big rush and managed to get ahead of the crowd to head for our first ride of the day, Buzz Lightyear! It was awesome! We’d downloaded some software from home, that was based on park statistics regarding the time of the year, the weather, the ages of the people in your party, the popularity of the rides etc. The way it works is, you type in all the rides you want to go on for that particular day and it does all its calculations and spits out a tailor-made schedule for you with minimum waiting times in queues. It’s called Ridemax and we thought we’d give it a go. If it was too rigorous a schedule for the kids or if we found it too restrictive we were happy to ditch it but it worked like a dream! Every ride we went on, when Ridemax suggested, we walked straight on, with virtually no waiting and then when we saw those rides at later times in the day, the queues were a mile long! We did have a couple of hitches in the plan when Space Mountain was closed due to “technical difficulties” and we were turned away. Splash Mountain also had some issues and we had to abandon the ride mid-way through. This didn’t matter though because we were given “FASTPASSES” which meant that later in the day we could bypass all the crowds and go straight on! Oh what a feeling!
Another highlight today was when Toby and his two cousins Emily and Sophie were chosen to take part in the Jedi Training Academy. They all had to don their sacred brown Jedi robes, were issued with their own lightsabers and taken through some moves before coming face to face with the Dark Lord Vader himself! Tobes was an obedient padwan and pulled out all the right moves against his formidable enemy!
We also climbed treehouses, rode in teacups, climbed aboard Indiana Jones’ jeep, walked through haunted houses, visited a Small World and rode the Big Thunder Railroad! We had a ball.
Tonight we lined up for the Parade, in a secret location that the Ridemax software revealed to us (sorry we’re sworn to secrecy) but we had the BEST view and the most fantastic time! They did fail to mention that we’d be forced to listen to the loop of “it’s a small world after all….” about four thousand times! Guess what we’ll all be singing for the next year! Seriously though, these Disney folks sure do know how to have a good time! The kids got to do the twist with Goofy, conga line with Pluto, Pinocchio, the chipmunks and Alice in Wonderland and sing, clap and bang drums in time with the music! It was called “Celebrate” and that’s exactly what we did!
