"The Happiest Place on Earth"
(This is super picture heavy!)
Thought I'd start off with a picture of me and Damien in font of the famous statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse with the Castle in the background!
So getting to Disney wasn't as hard as we thought, once again I basically just left it all up to Damien and let him do the hard work of checking metro, bus and train timelines. In the end we just caught the metro to Union Station and then hopped on an Amtrak train to the nearest station to Disney land before jumping on a local bus that took us straight there. It really was pretty straightforward. (although waking up early wasn't fun - I'm really not a morning person)
The weather was glorious, completely clear blue skies so suncream was liberally applied! The first stop was this little artist studio store where an artist was busy sketching various characters and you could buy prints and original sketches!
One of my favourite ones from Tangled
All the buildings were picture perfect! And there were a complete ton of shops selling all the Disney Merchandise you could ever imagine!
One of the beautiful shops we walked into!
look at the size of the horses!
We managed to go on 5 rides in total, which for Disney land I think is pretty damn good! First up was, obviously, Space Mountain! The queue time said an hour when we joined, which felt like a lot but we reasoned that was probably what we could expect for a lot of the big rides.
Most of it was in the shade (thankfully) but when we got a little over half way there was an announcement saying the ride wasn't working and they didn't have an estimate for when it'd be fixed! A lot of people decided to leave and obviously try their luck on another ride, we decided to wait for the rest of the hour, and only 10 minutes later the ride was up and running again! Which was great since the queue had definitely gone down a fair bit!
The ride was well worth the wait! I wasn't sure what to expect since it's quite an old ride but we were both pleasantly surprised! It wasn't scary at all, in fact it was really cool and I can definitely understand why it's so popular!
Once you get off the ride there's a related shop (of course) that you have to walk through where Damien played a game and there was a star wars section where you could make your out lightsaber
That was all in Torrowland, which was kind of space-y. From there we walked under the castle doorway into Fantasyland! And the first thing we did was go up and explore the castle itself
The inside of the Castle was Sleeping Beauty themed, so obviously it was all incredibly beautiful and there were lots of little windows you could look through which featured scenes from the movie with small animations - it was all very cool!
Right next to the castle was this little shop - bibbidi bobbed boutique! Inside lots of little girls were waiting with their parents for the 'princess treatment' where they get turned into a princess of their choice - including dress, hair and make up!
(not going to lie, I was very tempted to join the queue myself - but I figured Damien wouldn't appreciate walking around with a grown woman dressed as a disney princess for the rest of the day)
Then we queued up for Snow White's Scary Adventures. It was only a short queue and it was a bit weird, as it wasn't so much a ride as a bit of a show - it was also a little creepy as it focused (you guessed it) on her scary Adventures only briefly mentioning a happily ever after as the ride finished..
Then it was onto the Merry-go-round! We couldn't leave Fantasyland without having a whirl on the carousel that dominates the centre!
I might have made Damien do the cheesy holding hand thing for a bit too… although that only lasted 5 minutes before we were both overwhelmed by our own cheesiness :p
Oh and after leaving Tomorrowland I got my face painted! If I couldn't dress up as a Princess for the day I was at least going to have glittery butterflies on my cheek!
After our spin on the horses we retreated to shade to give these frozen lemonades a go and to escape the scolding sun for a little while. We found a lovely little spot under a shelter next to the pond so we have a myriad of ducks keep up company
Just as we were finishing up there was an announcement that the parade was about to start so we rushed out to the main 'road' only to be greeted by the crowds having already claimed all the spots of shade. And after burning my bum by sitting down on a seat in the sun we proceeded to watch the parade stood up in direct midday sun…
The Parade was really good, although we couldn't help but feel really bad for all the actors and actresses dresses up and dancing in the heat - particularly the ones in the full head to toe costumes!
My pictures are obviously focused primarily on the princesses - although there were lots of other floats too!
There was one big princess float with Snow Whit and Aurora at the front, Rapunzel in the middle
and Cinderella and Belle at the back. None of the broke character for a sec on and were smiling and waving the entire time
Then Tiana, the Princess and the Frog, had her own float (I'm guessing since it was one of the more recent films)
This guy. In a full crocodile outfit was dancing away the whole time.
Obviously Mary Poppins made an appearance, the chimney sweepers came just before her and did a great dance
After the parade died down we made our way up to Toontown!
I wasn't expecting Toontown to be all that good since there were no rides we wanted to do and northing really jumped out at me on the map but I absolutely loved the buildings!
It was like walking straight into a cartoon and a lot of the buildings had little quirks, like doors that would rattle and make noise if you tried to open them
Obviously we needed a picture outside the game shop
and I still don't quite get this, I'm assuming it's a headless chicken… crossing the road.. I'm probably being really dim but I liked it anyway!
Pluto's Dogs = Hot dog shop!
I particularly liked the 'hills' as since there was nothing to be seen behind them, no buildings of any sort they looked really impressive and definitely added to the 'feel' of the place!
From Fantasy land we headed over to Frontierland to go on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (a roller coaster). The queue wasn't too bad, maybe half an hour or so and the ride itself was so fun! Again the ride wasn't so much about the physics and having lots of death-defying turns and drop so much as having fun - although I was certainly windswept at the end of it!
We pottered about Frontierland a bit but there wasn't much to hold us before aside from this little wagon on our way to New Orleans Square!
It had 3 different drinks all meant to bring you something either; Knowledge, Luck or Charm
I obviously went for some luck
While Damien opted to sample some knowledge
Now I was suitably refreshed with liquid luck coursing through me we set our sights on the Haunted Mansion! Just like the others it was all about the show and it was really fun, if a bit weird!
After the Haunted Mansion ride we walked through Adventureland
where Damien dragged me up the Tarzan Treehouse! I did get a nice view out over the roof tops of New Orleans though!
We ended up standing outside the Indiana Jones ride trying to decide whether we wanted to queue up for it, I was getting tired and didn't really want to have to wait for 45minutes to go on it since we hadn't heard much about it. But just as we were trying to decide a woman comes up and offers us a free 'fast past'! Well that was the decision decided for us and onto the Indiana Jones ride it was!
The ride was possibly my favourite as it was like being in a show with all the projections and special effects everywhere with wind and fire bits and pieces and at the end there's a giant boulder that you think you're going to drive straight into - it was really fun!
Trying on some Indiana Jones Hats after the ride!
Couldn't resist one last picture of the castle as the sun was going down!
We finished off our time in Disneyland by getting pretzels! I've only had one once before in Germany and I really wasn't keen. And the idea of the 'liquid cheese' dip that's popular over here didn't make them sound any more appealing. As it was I give the 'Mickey Pretzel' a go and it was actually surprisingly quite nice! even the cheese thing was good (so long as you don't think about what's in it)
I had such a magical day in Disney land, and I'm so glad we the time to go despite it being a bit out of the way and difficult to get to!
And aside from some confusion with the buses, where the driver told us we were on the wrong bus and instead of carrying on his normal route instead actually dropped us off at the train station(!) we got back to the home tired but having had a really fun day!
I'm most definitely not looking forward to tomorrow though!
