Nicest Restrooms at Disneyland

I swear I don't have a bathroom fetish, but I stumbled upon the nicest restrooms at Disneyland this weekend. Seriously, some of the restrooms are super crowded and of course, their quality deteriorates accordingly as the day goes on.

My new favorite restrooms are located in Fantasyland, right behind the Alice in Wonderland ride, across from the back side of the Matterhorn. Not a heavily travelled path, so they were practically deserted.

They're Alice-themed and all the doors are cards - how cute is that?!

OMG - my kids like rollercoasters!

This Disney trip was taken with my kids' best friends and it made for a wonderful trip where the parents had much more downtime than usual. And much to my surprise, the girls both developed a love for thrill rides!

We've been to Disney countless times - we would consider ourselves a big Disney family. My kids can debate the merits of the Pirates ride at DisneyWorld vs Disneyland vs EuroDisney. But they've never wanted to try all the Disney mountains (for your newbies, that would be Space, Matterhorn, Big Thunder, Splash etc). Older daughter still remembers the unfortunate trip when she was around 6 - she had just hit the height limit for the Indiana Jones ride and I (rather over-ambitiously in hindsight) had her go on it with her dad. Boy, was that a mistake. She came off crying and by pushing her into a ride that she wasn't ready for, I set her thrill ride bar back about 5 years.

Fast forward 5 years - this trip, both kids went on California Screaming (twice or three times, I lost count - this is a major coaster with loops and corkscrews and a really good accelerating start), the Matterhorn (again, I lost count - 4 or 5 times?), Big Thunder Mountain (only once - we were running out of time), Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones (it's been so long since I was on that I had forgotten what a fun ride this was!). We ran out of time for Space Mountain so that's top of the list next time.

Alas, I still couldn't talk either of them on the Tower of Terror :(

HalloweenTime at Disneyland

We took a very quick trip down to the Disneyland Resort this weekend - flying down Thurs night and coming back Sunday midday. Since the only agenda for the trip was Disney, we took a taxi from the Orange County airport and stayed at the resort the whole time. At the Grand Californian Hotel, which is the most convenient place to stay, if you can find a good rate. I did, at the website of Ares Travel - yes, $300 is not chump change, but it's a great rate for this property (trust me on this!).

Alas, we did not get the requested room configuration of one Queen and one bunk bed - although after 5 stays, the staff FINALLY divulged the secret for getting that very popular room type. Call ahead and check yourself in over the phone the morning of your arrival. This is an important tip. You can thank me later.

Of course, it did us no good on this trip since we ended up in a room with two queen beds, and I had to listen to some initial bickering when the kids had to share a queen. They have no idea how good they have it!

Halloween is a great time to visit Disney - besides a myriad of very adorable Halloween decorations and Halloween-themed food/drink, you also get to ride Haunted Mansion Holiday! If you're unfamiliar with this, it's a Nightmare Before Christmas-themed overlay of the Haunted Mansion - which is already one of my favorite rides, and is made even better by a very clever integration of the Tim Burton animated movie, and the standard Haunted Mansion elements. Lucky for you, this special theming (which makes it seem like a whole new ride) is around through the holidays, til Jan - so get yourself down to Disneyland!

Hong Kong Disneyland

We flew up to HK for a few days and spent one night at the HK Disneyland Hotel, in our continued quest to visit all the Disney properties around the world. The hotel looks just like the Grand Floridian at Disney World.



This is the newest of the Disney parks and faced a barrage of criticism when it opened that there was not enough to do. While we completely enjoyed the park, it was probably about 3/4 the size of Disneyland in Anaheim and had about 50% of the attractions. There was a noticeable absence of "E ticket" rides - no Pirates, no Haunted Mansion, one single Mountain (Space).

Still, our expectations had been set by reading some of the reviews beforehand and we had a great time. The one downside was that it was searingly hot - probably around 38 celsius (~ 100 F), and that really sapped our energy (HK had a bit of a heat wave while we were there - lucky us!)

Highlights included a Small World ride with an expanded Asia section and the incorporation of various Disney characters, and the lines were all very short.





It was the first time I had the option of snacking on Korean squid in a Disney park - and I had a really good blackcurrant jelly ice cream bar.






And the Chinese restaurant in the Disneyland Hotel (Crystal Lotus) was just phenomenal - check out the dim sum (this is known as "woo guo" - or crispy taro balls - first time ever presented as swans!)

If you're in HK with kids and have a day to spare, this is a worthy stop. But I wouldn't make a special trip here. As we left, my daughter asked, "Are we going to Tokyo Disneyland next year then?" Yikes!

Day Trip - Disneyland Paris

We had decided on one day trip out of Paris - and despite my cultural pretensions, Disneyland Paris won out over Versailles. Who am I kidding - was it even close?! My logic is that the kids would enjoy Disneyland very much at this age - and Versailles has been there for centuries. They can wait to see it on their next trip ;)

We hopped the RER A to the park - it was all very convenient. The only mar on the day was that it was pouring. It continued to rain on and off until about 4 pm that day. We were all soaked - our shoes would squelch a little as we walked and my jeans managed to dye my shoelaces blue due to all the rain.

The park was very beautiful (even in the rain). It seemed to have more open areas built in, with wider walkways, so it never seemed to be too crowded. Sleeping Beauty's castle was gorgeous - by far the prettiest Disney castle I've ever seen.

My kids have grown up going to a Disney park at least once a year, so they're pretty familiar with everything. The Paris park was lots of fun because even though it was very similar, it was fun to spot the differences. Some of them were somewhat predictable - the food (even at fast food outlets) was excellent, service was slow and relatively indifferent, smoking was allowed in the park, beer was served everywhere. There was such a blatant disregard of the rule against flash photography in dark rides that I began to wonder if that rule was suspended in Paris.

We especially enjoyed spotting the differences in our two favorite rides: Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. The Haunted Mansion was actually known as Phantom Manor and was really very changed in terms of setting to a Western theme. Pirates was still very similar although it harkened back to the old Californian version before they changed everything to make it more PC, i.e. pirates were still chasing wenches about as opposed to everything they added in CA to soften those scenes.

It's a Small World was also quite different - the most notable in my mind was that they had a whole scene on Thailand, not just two dancers mixed up with the Indonesian and perhaps Malay dancers that they have in the US. And the carousel had the most beautifully detailed horses - with Fantasyland (my favorite) being about twice the size as all the other lands.

Overall I thought the park was very pretty and whimsical, with lots of secret places to disperse the crowds. It was clearly set up for a much larger crowd than what we experienced - there were hardly any lines for anything, and we could see that the queue areas had been designed for much longer ones. Thank goodness - after our queue experiences of the prior day!

We had a full day there, finally leaving around 8:30 pm to catch the train back to Paris.