Our Amazing Holiday Part 3 - Disneyland

Another day another post - this one will cover the two days that we spent in Disneyland. Hope you enjoy it! Before I go any further with details of the days I will just let you know that when we first planned this holiday it was me, and me only that wanted to go to Disney. Tom really wasn't that keen but he agreed anyway as he knew how much I wanted to go there. A few weeks before we went we started to watch You Tube videos of the park and rides and he became slightly more interested. However since we have been he is now well and truly hooked and already planning a return visit - who says Disney is just for kids?

Disneyland was about an hours drive from where we were staying but we had heard bad things about the LA traffic, especially during rush hours so we made the decision to get up extra early to start our day. As it was it wasn't too bad a journey and the only little bit of traffic we did hit was just a couple of miles before the Disney turnoff. As you come off the freeway you are straight onto Disneyland Drive and the first sight of the signs announcing this made me burst into a huge grin - it was time to get my ears on. Getting into the parking lot was no problem at all, we were parked, through security and on the tram to the park gates in about 10/15 mins. We had booked our tickets on line directly with Disneyland and I had printed off the vouchers that they had sent me. We were directed straight to the main gates where a lovely lady exchanged the vouchers for our 2 day park hopper tickets and with that done in a matter of minutes we were in the park standing at the top of Main Street - at this point I think I may have cried just a little.

The Happiest Place in the World

As it was still early it wasn't too busy so we headed straight down to the camera shop where we bought a Photo Pass. Basically this is a little card that has a bar code on that links to your Disneyland account. All around the parks are official Disney photographers - you just head on up to them and they take your photo with a character or in front of the castle etc. At the end of snapping away they scan your pass and then your pics are online for you to view and download to your own pc or laptop. You can also upload them straight to Facebook if you want to. The photographers take loads of pics and they will also take some on your own camera or phone which is pretty handy. If you want to have plenty of photographic memories of your hols I highly recommend you get one of these passes.

We spent the entire morning doing rides and finding characters to have our photos taken with and we managed to do all the rides we wanted to to with the exception of a couple that had super long queues. We were both loving the atmosphere, it was a lovely warm day but it wasn't to hot so any queuing that we did wasn't uncomfortable at all. I think the longest queue we had was around one hour and that was for Pirates of the Caribbean which was pretty popular due to the new film having just been released. It was now a little after lunchtime and as we hadn't had much in the way of breakfast we headed to the River Belle terrace for lunch. Tom had a beef brisket sandwich and I had a pulled pork sandwich. Both were lovely and were not huge portions, we had a table outside so we could sit and people watch while eating. Lunch done we continued to stroll around just enjoying all that Disney has to offer. It was considerably busier now though, this was largely in part due to local schools now being on holiday and something called Grad night. We headed round towards Splash Mountain which was high on our list of rides to do but the queue was massive - I think the sign said a min of' 1 hour 30 min wait so we decided to skip that for now. I did a quick check on the park app on my phone and saw that the queue time for Soarin over in the California Adventure park was only around 30/40 mins so we decided to head over there and do that while we could. There are only two Disney parks in Anaheim and they are both opposite each other so its really easy to park hop, you just come out of one walk across the square and there is the other one. Soarin was amazing and was by far our most fave ride of all the ones we did - if you are headed to Disney anytime soon I highly recommend it. Our plans were to stay in the parks late as we wanted to see the Main Street Electrical parade which was due to happen around 8.45pm. By now it was still only about 5ish so we headed to the shops and food places in Downtown Disney where we treated ourselves to yummy ice cream sundaes from Haagen Dazs. I also did a little bit of shopping and bought a hoodie and a Disney Pandora bracelet.

We headed back into the main park so we could find ourselves a spot to where we could sit and wait and watch the parade. Its lucky we found a spot when we did as pretty soon the whole of Main Street was lined with people. The parade was amazing and I was so glad we decided to stay for it (cue more teary moments from me!!). It was a truly magical way to end our first day in Disney.

Day two in Disney was a slightly more relaxed affair. We slept in and left a little later but as we hit no traffic today we were in the park just over an hour after we left Marina del Rey. We went straight into Disneyland to do the Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones rides and then headed over to California Adventure. It was a lot busier today and because of that a lot of the rides had much longer queue times. We did a few but we also ended up skipping a few because of this. The new Guardians of the Galaxy ride had a wait time of +160 mins and that was at 11am!! We had a leisurely walk around and did a few more rides, including Mickeys Fun Wheel (or not so fun wheel - seriously I thought I was going to die). We stopped for a light lunch in Starbucks and then headed back to the other park for one last character meet -  there was no way I was not going to get my pic done with Daisy and Donald Duck! With this done we took one last look around and headed out - our time at Disney was over (for this year). Honestly I could have quite happily stayed there all day but we needed to head back as we had plans for our last evening.

We spent our last night with Chris, he picked us up and drove us around a few more of the sights before we headed to the Grove in LA for a lovely meal in Marmalade. We finished the night off with a couple of drinks on the hotel terrace before heading to bed. The next chapter of our holiday was just one nights sleep away!!

Hope you are enjoying my trip report, please pop back soon for the next installment.

Love and hugs, Jane xx