The View From My Beer
My first visit to Yard House in Irvine for a half yard of Golden Pilsener from Fort Collins, Colorado. They have over 100 beers on tap and a whole lot more in bottles or cans. Sadly, with all that choice there are no Australian beers. Third world country! After a day at Disneyland it was nice just to relax and enjoy a cold ale before heading off for my next adventure.
Disneyland
Definitely not my first visit to Disneyland, but it is possible this might be my last. Perhps the only prospect of me returning would be with grand-children.
The main reason for today’s visit is that I was visiting California with my sister Jenny and she has long been a big Disney fan, so we just had to make make another visit with her so she could enjoy the park one more time. The feature of today’s visit would be a new ride in Toon-Town called Mickey’s Wild Train Ride. Its always cool to see new rides when they open.
Our Day
Disneyland is always one big long walk from one ride to another, broken up by lengthy stands in long queues that wind there way in and out followed by a short exciting ride. The challenge is always to figure out a way to get to as many of the ‘good’ rides as possible. These means making use of the fastpass system, monitoring queue times, and knowing the fastest way to get from one place to another. Food, toilets etc often have to be squeezed in between everything else.
Halloween at Disney
While Disneyland is fun to visit any time of year, it always fun to visit at either Christmas or Halloween, when the park is decorated for those special times of the year. Not only is the park filled with seasonal decorations, but some of the rides are transformed.
Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters
This ride has always been a good one to visit when the queues are long and you are waiting for your allocated time with a Fastpass. This is one of the few rides where you can really compete with your friends. I truly suck at first-person shooting games. My only saving grace is that I have done this ride so many times that I know to focus on shooting one of the diamond targets when they are lit. One of those will score more points than just random shooting at everything else.
Autopia
Next up was a visit to Autopia. I’ve been doing this ride ever since my first visit in 1984. Back then the queue times were over an hour. These days the ride is no longer state of the art and a relatively short wait time of 5-10 minutes is all that’s needed before being able to get in and take a drive around the circuit.
Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage
This is one of those rides I do not do every visit. When it first opened Ashley and I lined up for over ninety minutes to hop onboard. Today was a much more pleasant 10-15 minute wait. Unfortunately, I always struggle when it comes time to capture any decent photos of the scenes underwater that can be viewed from the sub.
Mickey’s Runaway Railway
The feature of today’s visit was to try out a new ride. I have not visited Toon Town in quite a while. Like Fantasy Land, its one of the lands that focus on rides for younger kids. As Ashley got older we visited this land less and less. A new ride gave me a chance to visit again and remember many of the things from earlier visits.
Disney consistently deliver excellent rides. While some of the rides have now lessened in excitement, that is usually because they were designed and built a long time ago. All the new rides usually employ leading edge technology. That was the case with Mickey’s Runaway Railway. It provided a fun an interactive way of viewing the history of Mickey Mouse as a character in various movies. On my first visit to Disneyland in 1984 they had a theatre in Main Street where you could simply watch old movies like Steamboat Willie. Now you got to be zipped and spun around various sets that would feature clips to related movies. Definitely a good ride for young kids that now expect so much wow when they are entertained these days.
Star Wars: Rise of The Resistence
Star Wars land is one of the most recent additions to Disneyland. The land itself is worth visiting on its own with the awesome sets and restaurants that help to make you feel what it might have been like to live on one of the planets featured in the movie series. This ride i would consider to be the best at Disneyland. The wait in a long line is rewarded with a pretty long ride broken into multiple parts. The highlight of which is being a member of the Resistance and whizzing around the set of a Star Destroyer while trying to escape.
Pirates of The Caribbean
I always remember this ride for being the last one designed by Walt Disney himself. And while it is rarely the number one ride on anyone’s wish list for the day, it is usually in the top-five. Which always makes it a good ride to visit, especially in the middle of the day when it is getting hot outside. The lines for this can still get quite long, so its one that warrants keeping an eye on during the day. The other thing I like about the ride is it is close to the point where I can get my favorite treat on my visits to the park – Dole Whip – a special pineapple sof serve ice-cream that have adored ever since a visit to Hawaii a few years back.
Halloween Scream
We ended the night watching the special Halloween light show called Halloween Scream. It seems the traditional fireworks display over Cinderella’s Castle has now been replaced with a projection show that combines some fireworks over the castle combined with laser projections on the buildings in Main Street. It spreads the show over a wider part of the park, making it less of a squeeze to get a good spot to watch.
