Elizabeth Smith
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- May 7, 2017
Dampened Spirits
After the Lion King show, we decided to see Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln up on Main St. You may be able to tell, but we were just following our whims wherever they decided to take us.
I enjoyed the show. The Lincoln animatronic is pretty impressive, but the film they show is a little hokey. I enjoyed listening to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The songs is known as being a patriotic tune, but the lyrics are very moving to me. Kind of interesting to hear such a religious song in a theme park. I also love the Golden Dream song, though, which they also use in the American Adventure show in Epcot, even though it's kind of sappy too.
That was quite enough patriotism for me! So we went to ride Space Mountain again around 3:10pm.
I finally knew where the photo section was.
We got a third ride in on Haunted Mansion as well with another LL.
We were able to secure a LL for Splash Mountain that could be pretty much instantly redeemed, and since it was getting a little warm outside, it sounded refreshing. This was a mistake.
I know I look happy and carefree in the ride photo (and sorry about the watermarks, I forgot to download the photo until it was too late, I guess), but that's only because by the final drop, I had nothing left to lose. The people in our boat asked to sit in the back, leaving Jacob and I in the front. It was a heavy boat, full of adults and I got absolutely drenched. There was hardly a square inch of my body that was unaffected. Each drop felt like a bucket of water had been dumped on me. Some of the water went up over my head, and I'm not a short person! With each step I took after departing from the ride, I made a wet, squelching sound and left puddles everywhere.
We stopped at the restrooms in Hungry Bear and tried to ring out all my clothes and dry myself with paper towels. It was useless, really. Even my sweatshirt, which I had brought along this day to keep me warm, had gotten completely saturated.
We hung out by the river and I draped my hoodie over the railing to try and dry it off, but this didn't help much.
I didn't want to give up, though, so we rode the River Boat to try and soak up the sun's rays on the top deck. I felt bad because Jacob really would have preferred to do the Sailing Ship Columbia, but it was done sailing for the day.
After the river boat ride, I was still mostly wet. (The amount of time that passed from getting off of Space Mountain and getting off the river boat was almost three hours, so we were moving kind of slowly by this point in the afternoon).
We went for one more ride on the Matterhorn, with my arms spread wide to try and let the wind dry me.
This also didn't make much of a difference.
I wanted to see Snow White's wishing well, so we walked over there and took some pictures.
You can see how wet the bottom of my hoodie still was at this point, but my hair had dried out.
This is a very peaceful and pretty part of the park and easy to miss if you don't know where to look! I think it was around this time that Jacob ordered some kind of special chili-lime corn on the cob from a cart. I didn't get a picture of it because I didn't care. But it might have been earlier. I truly don't know.
The thing that was really making me uncomfortable at this point was my socks/shoe situation. So we popped into a shop and I bought some new socks. They were quite cute with sparkles and Sleeping Beauty Castle on them. I bought them near Peter Pan, and the shop had lots of cool merch in it. I was tempted to buy a new hoodie too, but Jacob didn't seem as excited by the idea. So, just socks. Then we mobile ordered our dinner from Bengal Barbeque. We ordered the plate with two skewers and rice with an extra skewer. We got one of each beef, chicken, and pork belly. There were no seats in Adventureland, so I walked around until I found a table in New Orleans Square along the river. I picked a table in the sun, took my socks and shoes off as well as my hoodie and laid them all out to dry. Jacob returned with the food and we ate our dinner. This was excellent! I really liked the skewers and it was a nice, not-too-heavy meal.
I changed my socks and tucked my old, wet ones into my fanny pack. It was kind of gross, but I didn't want to throw them away! Besides, my fanny pack was also wet.
Jacob also mobile ordered us a Dole Whip.
This was delicious, as always.
We got a LL for Millenium Falcon Smuggler's Run, so we went back into Galaxy's Edge. We got several photos while we were there and walked around even more of the marketplace area.
(You can see my new socks here!)
On Smuggler's Run, I was whining to Jacob in the line about how I wanted to be the pilot, since last time as the engineer I could barely see the screen. We were assigned a ship with one other guy, and even though he was in front of us, he let us both be pilots, which was super nice of him. But... I was absolutely horrible as a pilot! I was in charge of lateral movement and the brakes and it was a little too much for me to handle. The guy was yelling at me the whole time.
I felt horrible. I'm sure he regretted letting me be one of the pilots. This experience kind of solidified my preference for Mission Space in Epcot. You still get to push buttons in a flight simulator, but it's not really stressful and everyone gets to see where you're going.We got more pictures in Galaxy's Edge while I was pouting over my embarrassing performance.
As we left Galaxy's Edge, we walked along the river and secured a Mickey Premium bar, which was frozen solid.
Look how frosty! It was hard to eat, since we weren't patient enough to let it thaw completely first, but the good thing about it is that the chocolate didn't fall off as easily!
We had a LL for Indiana Jones, so we rode that once again.
Today, some portions were not functional, namely the rolling boulder. That was disappointing, but the ride was still good! The sun basically set while we were inside the show building.
We also had a LL for BTMRR, but it went down for a few seconds, so we got an "anytime" LL to use, which we'll get to a little later. But while we were in Adventureland, we got another ride on Jungle Cruise.
This was by far the better trip. Our Skipper had so many jokes. It was like a joke per second! I am so happy we got to ride it again.
While we still had that floating LL, we got one for Star Tours, so we made our way to Tomorrowland and rode that again.
We decided to do Autopia while in the area as well, just because. There were some really rowdy people in the line ahead of us. We watched a kid slam into the car in front of him, then he and his adult came around to our line where their friends were also getting out of a vehicle, before the CM told them they could, and they tried to cut us and got into our car. The CM caught them and told them to get out. It was a mess.
Enjoy this totally illegible selfie of us on the speedway.
The fireworks were about to begin. I had no interest in staking out a spot to watch them, so we just tried to find a good view from Tomorrowland. We found a good spot facing toward the Matterhorn, standing sort of underneath the monorail line.
Since we were still in Tomorrowland, we decided to ride Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters again. The line took a while because there was a group there that evening comprised largely of wheelchair users. Obviously, not a complaint, but it was definitely something we were aware of while waiting in lines.
I felt a little depressed after the ride because my score still sucked.
My spirits were lifted slightly by the grey stuff!! It was really nice. We picked it up while walking through Fantasyland toward Adventureland to Indiana Jones to try to use our floating LL.
I don't think the LL worked on this attraction, but the CM let us in the queue anyway. In our app, it still showed that we had the LL available to use.
We went over to Big Thunder next, because the line wasn't too long. We grabbed a pepperjack pretzel on the way, which I failed to capture a picture of as well.
The park was nearly about to close, so we walked across the park back to Space Mountain to try and make use of the bonus LL. The cast member here laid down the law, though, and told us that our LL was no good! I didn't know it, but there was some fine print about what rides the LL could be used on. There is no official stratification of LL attractions, aside from the ones you must purchase individually, so it did not occur to me that there should be any kind of restriction. Also, the LL we received was the result of Big Thunder going down. Why are Big Thunder and Space Mountain in two separate tiers? They seem to be on par with each other to me. Furthermore, the LL couldn't be used on Matterhorn! (Which was irrelevant, since Matterhorn had gone down anyway). When I studied the list, it looked like the LL couldn't be used on anything that would be considered an e-ticket. The best thing on the list was Haunted Mansion, so we went and rode that again. The line was nonexistent, so we didn't even need the LL.
I was kind of annoyed because we wasted all that time walking to and from Tomorrowland, but we were kind of cheating the system anyway since we got to illegally use the LL on Indiana Jones.
So with that, our day was pretty much done. We walked our way toward Main St. where we did a bit of final souvenir shopping. While I was in the bathroom, Jacob bought a mug for his dad. When I came out, we picked up a Mickey Rice Krispy treat commemorating the Electrical Parade, which we had indeed caught glimpses of that night.
There were other Electrical Parade commemorative treats in the form of caramel apples.
Look how cute the little snails are!
We bought a couple of pins as well. The last place we checked out was the art shop, and there a kind CM re-did our names on our First Time visit buttons, since they had pretty much gotten totally wiped clean by our Splash Mountain shower earlier that day. I really appreciated how well they did! It was probably one of our best CM experiences of the trip.
We left the park and ubered back to our Air BnB. We packed up all of our freebies from the convention, filling almost an entire suitcase with free books, water bottles, and t-shirts. Of course, we packed away our sweatshirts. I was kind of grossed out by them, since they had only ever been washed by Splash Mountain water. The next morning, I ate my final two Randy's donuts and we headed back to Long Beach Airport to fly home. I got one last souvenir there: a free stress ball shaped like an airplane with the Long Beach Airport Logo.
Some final thoughts:
I found the quick service and snack food, on the whole, to be some of the best "theme park" food I've ever had. The corn dogs, for example, are truly a cut above the rest. The sit-down food was excellent, too. There was not much that we ate that I wasn't impressed by. I wish we had eaten more on our first day, but I think I was too excited to make any extra stops!
I was not that impressed by most of the merch, especially the pin selection. Three of the seven (eight, if you count the Rice Krispy Treat) souvenirs we bought were out of necessity, the two hoodies and the socks. I wouldn't have gotten them if I didn't think I otherwise needed them. I think they're all cute, but not enough to just buy anyway. One of the souvenirs was purchased as a gift for someone else. And the three pins we bought were kind of hard to find. We got one Matterhorn pin, since it had become a new favorite of ours, we got a Mr. Toad pin, since the ride was a unique combination of history and humor, and I picked out a castle pin, since I already had the matching version from WDW. I wish they had more pins featuring unique parks attractions and icons. It also bothered me that they don't differentiate much between the merch at WDW and DLR. They even had Flower and Garden festival merch for sale. I thought it was tacky. It could maybe be sold at Downtown Disney, but I didn't think it should be in the emporium. It's irrelevant to the California parks.
The cast members were not nearly as friendly as the ones I'd interacted with at WDW. Many were snarky or even kind of short with us. I wonder if they've all gotten burnt out as a result of COVID or if Disney, like most employers nowadays, are stripping back privileges and ruining morale. We didn't have any truly horrible experiences, but didn't really have many good experiences either.
I would like to return to Southern California some day, but not because of the great time I had at Disneyland. Don't get me wrong, I did have a lot of fun at the parks, but I'm not really itching to go back any time soon. If I went on another Disney trip, I'd rather try a cruise or Aulani. As far as amusement parks, there are others I'd prefer to see right now like Universal, Knott's Berry Farm, or Kennywood, just to name a few. In California, I'd like to see more beaches and parks, museums and oddities. It seems like a beautiful and interesting place to explore.
Thank you for joining me on this trip report! I had such a good time being a theme park commando and reliving it through this thread.
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