PixieDusting
The Red-headed Pixie!
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2000
Cast:
Me (39) true Disney fanatic. 8th or 9th DL trip in 7 years. Trip planner, lover of Pixie Dust.
Brett - DH (45) introduced me to Disney. Low key, easy to please, enjoys it all and has infinite patience.
Colin - DS (almost 11) wants to live in either S. CA or FL so that he can go to Disney whenever he wants
First Disney trip was at age 3....and he was sucked right in.
Sandy - My mother (62) has never been to Disney AND has never vacationed with us. I wasn't sure what to expect but she turned out to be quite the daredevil and a pleasure to vacation with.
Friday the 13th....and our hotel room was on the on the 14th (really the 13th) floor.....yikes!
The guys had ordered room service the night before, and it arrived promptly at 6:45 We left on the hotel trolley to the park at 7:25 for the 8:00 opening at DCA. Killed a few minutes in line before they opened at 8. For some reason I thought they might open a bit early (like they typically do at DL) but I was wrong. Oh well.
First thing in the park we smelled this horrible smell, as others have mentioned. Smelled like burnt bread to us. Terrible! Very strong, you cannot miss it. Thankfully it did not go any further than the entrance area of the park! Now, we didn't really have a game plan, since we hadn't planned on visiting DCA...but thanks to the super planner (my son) we did ok! First stop was Souring over California. I debated whether on not to go on this ride. I have a real problem with virtual reality stuff....it makes me sick. I decided to go ahead and give it a whirl, and I'm so glad I did! What an amazing ride, we all loved it! Never been on anything like it before. And the ending, talk about PERFECT! For those that have not ridden it yet, I won't spoil it, but the ending is pure Disney Don't miss this one! I did make the mistake of looking at something towards the bottom of the screen once, and that messed my stomach up but managed to look straight ahead the rest of the time which helped. The one improvement they could make would be to make the transition between scenes less abrupt. Maybe take a few seconds to change one scene into another? I dunno....
We then headed for Screamin'. We were all excited about this one, though we never did tell my Mom beforehand about the fact that it goes upside-down! What a fun, fun ride! Nice and smooth, and so much longer than RnR. We've all wished that RnR was longer since day one. Our picture was terrific, so my Mom and I took care of purchasing it while my DS and DH rode again. My Mom and I also went and looked at King Triton's Carousel. I was just awed by it...it's SO gorgeous! All the animals are so colorful! Loved the seahorses and the otters the best! One thing I couldn't understand is why the carousel played Beach Boys music. Music from the Little Mermaid would have been much more appropriate IMHO. The guys got off Screamin' and of course Colin wanted to go yet AGAIN, and since it was virtually a walk on, he and I did. We asked for the front, and it was AWESOME. So fun to be able to see where you're going, Colin and I both loved it! By the time we got off my stomach was not happy. Not terribly unhappy.....but borderline. So glad I hadn't eaten breakfast!
Colin of course wanted to go on the Maliboomer. Even though it was just shortly after 9, there was a 30 minute wait. They only had one side of the ride going at that time. There was no way Brett or I would go on it with him. Brett hates ToT, and my stomach would not take it well. Colin was all set to ride alone when I was stunned to hear my Mom offering to ride with him. She is amazing! So, they get in the line and DH and I wander off to do some window shopping. Got back about 20 minutes later and the line was moving very slowly :-( When Mom and Colin got to the front, they opened a second side of the ride, so their group was to be the first of the day to use that side....NOT. They had several false starts, and after about 10 minutes they let them off and had them wait for the 3rd side of the ride (which had not been going that morning either). They waited another 5 minutes, then loaded on the third side. Once again they had several false starts, and after another 8-10 minutes they were unloaded from that side. Finally they were un loaded, waited again and loaded onto the first side and VOILA...it worked! 'Bout time! All in all it took just over an hour for them to ride a ride that lasts literally 25 seconds. Pathetic or what?!? We were all disappointed that we had wasted so much of the morning.
While Mom and Colin were waiting for Maliboomer, Brett and I had gotten FPs for Mulhulland Madness. We wandered over there. DH had wanted to go on the Sun Wheel, but it was not working, and didn't run all day :-( Lines for the Zephyr and the Stinger were quite long, so we bagged those. Used our FPs on Mulhulland. Now...I thought this was a kiddie ride....oops! I supposed to most people it is, but not to me. I did not like this at all! The others got a kick out of listening to me mildly freaking out and saying "I don't like this ride" while we were on it. To me it felt like we were going to fall off the track at any second. The rest of the gang liked it though!
By now Paradise Pier was quite busy, so we stopped and took some photos, traded pins at the cart, then headed for the Hollywood area. On the way we stopped for FP's for Grizzly River. It was now 11. We stopped at the Soap Opera Bistro to make lunch ressies for 11:45, then saw Muppets 3D. Walked through Off the Wall.....I found a pretty etched Tinker Bell paperweight, had to buy that and add to my Tink collection
DS stopped to visit with Mushu and have a picture taken. Mulan was out too, and he was dying to see her but there was a huge crowd around her. DS is not agressive enough to take the lead when it's his turn, and I try not to butt in for him, so he gave up :-( I do wish the CM with Mulan had set up some sort of queue so Colin could see her....we had never seen her in the parks before. Lunch was good, but IMHO pretty pricey. Colin, Brett and I all had a garlic chicken flat bread pizza (YUM), Mom had a HUGE spinach salad. From what we had heard, there were supposed to be little impromptu skits, and servers were to be "in character" but we never experienced this. Oh well.
Time for our Grizzly River FP's. Mom wasn't interested in riding it, so she stayed put in Hollywood while the 3 of us rode it. The standby line was 105 minutes at that point. WOW! I don't think I'd ever seen a line that long. We really enjoyed this ride, more than Kali at WDW and more than the river ride at Sea World too. The twists and turns are unexpected and a lot of fun! As usual, I ended up being the one that got SOAKED. Don't know what it is....but it's typical for me. Thankfully it was about 70 degrees out, so I wasn't freezing. Got back to Mom and she'd really had enough. With the crowds, we had too. While we were on Grizzly she had gone into Off the Wall and bought the Imagineering book Colin had seen at the Gallery the day before. In fact she bought 2 copies. One for Colin and one for herself. Another Disney addict in the works???? Colin was thrilled! His goal is to be an Imagineer (or a marine biologist...LOL) when he grows up He spent the entire plane ride home reading that book. We headed back to the hotel and planned to come back that evening. Before we left we got FP's for Souring again. It was about 1:30 and the FPs were for 9:10-10:10. We knew they'd be for much later, but had no idea they'd be that late! Standby was about 2 hours.
Back to the hotel for swimming and a bit of rest. My Mom decided not to join us when we headed back to DCA at about 5:30. I did take my cell phone in case she decided to change her mind and join us later, but she didn't. She was really tired and her feet hurt.
We knew we wanted to check out the Animation building, other than that and the Souring FP's, we didn't really have a plan. When we got into the park I saw this wonderful Replica of King Triton's Carousel in the window of Greetings. We decided to stop in there for a while. I ended up having the carousel shipped home, DH bought a shirt and DS bought a Screamin' sweatshirt. I searched for postcards (I scrapbook and wanted some for this trip) but there were NONE to be found for DCA. I was very disappointed and surprised that none of the shops had any. DS really wanted to go on Screamin again, so rather than walking all the way back there for nothing, we stopped at the info booth to see if there were any FPs left for it. The CM there called up to the ride and told us there were no more :-(. We told Colin we'd go up later and see what the lines were like. We stopped for dinner at Cocina Cucamonga in the Bountiful Farm area. On the way I smelled a wonderful floral smell, I think it was Gardenias, yum! Much better than the burnt bread smell! We all ordered different tacos, and we all really liked them, though once again my son and I could have split an order. Each order comes with 2 tacos and beans and chips, and we both only ate just over 1 taco. I think part of the problem is that he recently went through a growth spurt (2" since Christmas) and was eating like mad. Now it's slowed down and he's not as hungry.
We headed back to Paradise Pier to check out the line for Screamin, it was about 45 minutes BUT, the guy at the info booth had bad info, there WERE FP's available. We picked up 3 of those (8:45-9:45), then went on the Carousel twice Love doing the basics, and I got to ride on a Seahorse. By now it was about 7:45 and we wanted to go to Animation, so we headed back down there (did a lot of criss crossing this evening). Stopped on the way to watch the Eureka Parade. DS loved it, DH and I thought it was "ok." Mom would have been scratching her head wondering WHAT it was if she had been there....LOL. Ok, back on track to Animation. Once in there, the line for the Sorcerer's Workshop was about 40 minutes, so we decided to save that for on our way out of the park. We went into a cute show with Mushu, but I cannot recall the name. We enjoyed the show, quite a few chuckles. We decided not to see the show in the Screening Room, since it's the exact same show with Walter Cronkite and Robin Williams that is at MGM.
By now it was time for Screamin...so back up to the other side of the park we went. Very fun at night AND the DL fireworks were going off as we rode it. Talk about a birds eye view, that was great added bonus! Back to Souring to use our FP's. On the way we debated Grizzly again, the standby was only about 10 minutes but...much as Colin wanted to go, DH and I decided no. It was too cold out to be all wet while walking around. Next time! Even with the FPs the wait at Souring was a good 15 minutes....better than standby though. At 10pm+ the wait was over an hour. Yep, spring break, ain't it grand?
We're burning out fast. Decided to save the Sorcerer's Workshop for another trip. It was a gard decision as we all really wanted to spend time in there, but as tired as we were, we knew we'd feel rushed if we did it then. Besides......gives us something to look forward to on our next visit to DCA, right?!? We stopped for a treat at the bakery right by the entrance...I had a miocha brownie bar, DS had a lemon bar and DH had a raspberry bar. We all tasted each others, and while they were all DELICIOUS the Raspberry bar won best dessert hands down. If you need a treat in DCA, give it a try. YUM!
For once the hotel trolley was on time...amazing! It had been so late every time that we had already decided just to walk back to the hotel, but when we saw it out there we were very happy campers! Got back to the hotel at 11:30. Poor Mom, she was quite worried about us. I had told her before we left not to wait up for us, but she did. She's such a Mom
Best parts of the day:
Screamin' and Souring...particularly the fireworks going off while we were on Screamin'
My mom going on Maliboomer with Colin
The (mostly) wonderful scents in the park
Disappointments
:
The delays at Maliboomer
Missing Sorcerer's Workshop
Colin missing the photo op with Mulan
All in all we REALLY enjoyed this park and look forward to going back to see the things we missed. Age and interest wise it seems perfect for our family. The park does not yet seem "finished" to us.....hopefully more attractions will be added in the next couple of years. Well this has been another LONG one. Thanks for reading! Will post about the Storyteller Cafe, our impressions of the Grand Californian and DtD next....if my fingers can make it!
<center>Lauren
All it takes is faith & trust....and a little bit of Pixie Dust!
Me (39) true Disney fanatic. 8th or 9th DL trip in 7 years. Trip planner, lover of Pixie Dust.
Brett - DH (45) introduced me to Disney. Low key, easy to please, enjoys it all and has infinite patience.
Colin - DS (almost 11) wants to live in either S. CA or FL so that he can go to Disney whenever he wants
First Disney trip was at age 3....and he was sucked right in.Sandy - My mother (62) has never been to Disney AND has never vacationed with us. I wasn't sure what to expect but she turned out to be quite the daredevil
and a pleasure to vacation with.Friday the 13th....and our hotel room was on the on the 14th (really the 13th) floor.....yikes!
The guys had ordered room service the night before, and it arrived promptly at 6:45
We left on the hotel trolley to the park at 7:25 for the 8:00 opening at DCA. Killed a few minutes in line before they opened at 8. For some reason I thought they might open a bit early (like they typically do at DL) but I was wrong. Oh well.First thing in the park we smelled this horrible smell, as others have mentioned. Smelled like burnt bread to us. Terrible! Very strong, you cannot miss it. Thankfully it did not go any further than the entrance area of the park! Now, we didn't really have a game plan, since we hadn't planned on visiting DCA...but thanks to the super planner (my son) we did ok! First stop was Souring over California. I debated whether on not to go on this ride. I have a real problem with virtual reality stuff....it makes me sick. I decided to go ahead and give it a whirl, and I'm so glad I did! What an amazing ride, we all loved it! Never been on anything like it before. And the ending, talk about PERFECT! For those that have not ridden it yet, I won't spoil it, but the ending is pure Disney
Don't miss this one! I did make the mistake of looking at something towards the bottom of the screen once, and that messed my stomach up but managed to look straight ahead the rest of the time which helped. The one improvement they could make would be to make the transition between scenes less abrupt. Maybe take a few seconds to change one scene into another? I dunno....We then headed for Screamin'. We were all excited about this one, though we never did tell my Mom beforehand about the fact that it goes upside-down! What a fun, fun ride! Nice and smooth, and so much longer than RnR. We've all wished that RnR was longer since day one. Our picture was terrific, so my Mom and I took care of purchasing it while my DS and DH rode again. My Mom and I also went and looked at King Triton's Carousel. I was just awed by it...it's SO gorgeous! All the animals are so colorful! Loved the seahorses and the otters the best! One thing I couldn't understand is why the carousel played Beach Boys music. Music from the Little Mermaid would have been much more appropriate IMHO. The guys got off Screamin' and of course Colin wanted to go yet AGAIN, and since it was virtually a walk on, he and I did. We asked for the front, and it was AWESOME. So fun to be able to see where you're going, Colin and I both loved it! By the time we got off my stomach was not happy. Not terribly unhappy.....but borderline. So glad I hadn't eaten breakfast!
Colin of course wanted to go on the Maliboomer. Even though it was just shortly after 9, there was a 30 minute wait. They only had one side of the ride going at that time. There was no way Brett or I would go on it with him. Brett hates ToT, and my stomach would not take it well. Colin was all set to ride alone when I was stunned to hear my Mom offering to ride with him. She is amazing! So, they get in the line and DH and I wander off to do some window shopping. Got back about 20 minutes later and the line was moving very slowly :-( When Mom and Colin got to the front, they opened a second side of the ride, so their group was to be the first of the day to use that side....NOT. They had several false starts, and after about 10 minutes they let them off and had them wait for the 3rd side of the ride (which had not been going that morning either). They waited another 5 minutes, then loaded on the third side. Once again they had several false starts, and after another 8-10 minutes they were unloaded from that side. Finally they were un loaded, waited again and loaded onto the first side and VOILA...it worked! 'Bout time! All in all it took just over an hour for them to ride a ride that lasts literally 25 seconds. Pathetic or what?!? We were all disappointed that we had wasted so much of the morning.
While Mom and Colin were waiting for Maliboomer, Brett and I had gotten FPs for Mulhulland Madness. We wandered over there. DH had wanted to go on the Sun Wheel, but it was not working, and didn't run all day :-( Lines for the Zephyr and the Stinger were quite long, so we bagged those. Used our FPs on Mulhulland. Now...I thought this was a kiddie ride....oops! I supposed to most people it is, but not to me. I did not like this at all! The others got a kick out of listening to me mildly freaking out and saying "I don't like this ride" while we were on it. To me it felt like we were going to fall off the track at any second. The rest of the gang liked it though!
By now Paradise Pier was quite busy, so we stopped and took some photos, traded pins at the cart, then headed for the Hollywood area. On the way we stopped for FP's for Grizzly River. It was now 11. We stopped at the Soap Opera Bistro to make lunch ressies for 11:45, then saw Muppets 3D. Walked through Off the Wall.....I found a pretty etched Tinker Bell paperweight, had to buy that and add to my Tink collection
DS stopped to visit with Mushu and have a picture taken. Mulan was out too, and he was dying to see her but there was a huge crowd around her. DS is not agressive enough to take the lead when it's his turn, and I try not to butt in for him, so he gave up :-( I do wish the CM with Mulan had set up some sort of queue so Colin could see her....we had never seen her in the parks before. Lunch was good, but IMHO pretty pricey. Colin, Brett and I all had a garlic chicken flat bread pizza (YUM), Mom had a HUGE spinach salad. From what we had heard, there were supposed to be little impromptu skits, and servers were to be "in character" but we never experienced this. Oh well.
Time for our Grizzly River FP's. Mom wasn't interested in riding it, so she stayed put in Hollywood while the 3 of us rode it. The standby line was 105 minutes at that point. WOW! I don't think I'd ever seen a line that long. We really enjoyed this ride, more than Kali at WDW and more than the river ride at Sea World too. The twists and turns are unexpected and a lot of fun! As usual, I ended up being the one that got SOAKED. Don't know what it is....but it's typical for me. Thankfully it was about 70 degrees out, so I wasn't freezing. Got back to Mom and she'd really had enough. With the crowds, we had too. While we were on Grizzly she had gone into Off the Wall and bought the Imagineering book Colin had seen at the Gallery the day before. In fact she bought 2 copies. One for Colin and one for herself. Another Disney addict in the works???? Colin was thrilled! His goal is to be an Imagineer (or a marine biologist...LOL) when he grows up
He spent the entire plane ride home reading that book. We headed back to the hotel and planned to come back that evening. Before we left we got FP's for Souring again. It was about 1:30 and the FPs were for 9:10-10:10. We knew they'd be for much later, but had no idea they'd be that late! Standby was about 2 hours. Back to the hotel for swimming and a bit of rest. My Mom decided not to join us when we headed back to DCA at about 5:30. I did take my cell phone in case she decided to change her mind and join us later, but she didn't. She was really tired and her feet hurt.
We knew we wanted to check out the Animation building, other than that and the Souring FP's, we didn't really have a plan. When we got into the park I saw this wonderful Replica of King Triton's Carousel in the window of Greetings. We decided to stop in there for a while. I ended up having the carousel shipped home, DH bought a shirt and DS bought a Screamin' sweatshirt. I searched for postcards (I scrapbook and wanted some for this trip) but there were NONE to be found for DCA. I was very disappointed and surprised that none of the shops had any. DS really wanted to go on Screamin again, so rather than walking all the way back there for nothing, we stopped at the info booth to see if there were any FPs left for it. The CM there called up to the ride and told us there were no more :-(. We told Colin we'd go up later and see what the lines were like. We stopped for dinner at Cocina Cucamonga in the Bountiful Farm area. On the way I smelled a wonderful floral smell, I think it was Gardenias, yum! Much better than the burnt bread smell! We all ordered different tacos, and we all really liked them, though once again my son and I could have split an order. Each order comes with 2 tacos and beans and chips, and we both only ate just over 1 taco. I think part of the problem is that he recently went through a growth spurt (2" since Christmas) and was eating like mad. Now it's slowed down and he's not as hungry.
We headed back to Paradise Pier to check out the line for Screamin, it was about 45 minutes BUT, the guy at the info booth had bad info, there WERE FP's available. We picked up 3 of those (8:45-9:45), then went on the Carousel twice
Love doing the basics, and I got to ride on a Seahorse. By now it was about 7:45 and we wanted to go to Animation, so we headed back down there (did a lot of criss crossing this evening). Stopped on the way to watch the Eureka Parade. DS loved it, DH and I thought it was "ok." Mom would have been scratching her head wondering WHAT it was if she had been there....LOL. Ok, back on track to Animation. Once in there, the line for the Sorcerer's Workshop was about 40 minutes, so we decided to save that for on our way out of the park. We went into a cute show with Mushu, but I cannot recall the name. We enjoyed the show, quite a few chuckles. We decided not to see the show in the Screening Room, since it's the exact same show with Walter Cronkite and Robin Williams that is at MGM. By now it was time for Screamin...so back up to the other side of the park we went. Very fun at night AND the DL fireworks were going off as we rode it. Talk about a birds eye view, that was great added bonus! Back to Souring to use our FP's. On the way we debated Grizzly again, the standby was only about 10 minutes but...much as Colin wanted to go, DH and I decided no. It was too cold out to be all wet while walking around. Next time! Even with the FPs the wait at Souring was a good 15 minutes....better than standby though. At 10pm+ the wait was over an hour. Yep, spring break, ain't it grand?
We're burning out fast. Decided to save the Sorcerer's Workshop for another trip. It was a gard decision as we all really wanted to spend time in there, but as tired as we were, we knew we'd feel rushed if we did it then. Besides......gives us something to look forward to on our next visit to DCA, right?!? We stopped for a treat at the bakery right by the entrance...I had a miocha brownie bar, DS had a lemon bar and DH had a raspberry bar. We all tasted each others, and while they were all DELICIOUS the Raspberry bar won best dessert hands down. If you need a treat in DCA, give it a try. YUM!
For once the hotel trolley was on time...amazing! It had been so late every time that we had already decided just to walk back to the hotel, but when we saw it out there we were very happy campers! Got back to the hotel at 11:30. Poor Mom, she was quite worried about us. I had told her before we left not to wait up for us, but she did. She's such a Mom
Best parts of the day:
Screamin' and Souring...particularly the fireworks going off while we were on Screamin'
My mom going on Maliboomer with Colin
The (mostly) wonderful scents in the park
Disappointments
:
The delays at Maliboomer
Missing Sorcerer's Workshop
Colin missing the photo op with Mulan
All in all we REALLY enjoyed this park and look forward to going back to see the things we missed. Age and interest wise it seems perfect for our family. The park does not yet seem "finished" to us.....hopefully more attractions will be added in the next couple of years. Well this has been another LONG one. Thanks for reading! Will post about the Storyteller Cafe, our impressions of the Grand Californian and DtD next....if my fingers can make it!
<center>Lauren
All it takes is faith & trust....and a little bit of Pixie Dust!
