Ah finally, a day where waking up was as natural as walking. I rolled over and checked the time, 8:00am a new record for this wearied traveller. I put my arm over my loved one and found her awake too which set off our normal morning ritual of getting ready for the day ahead. We had informally set aside this day to make our respective returns to Disneyland but hadn’t looked into it much past that. Figuring we could work out the details over breakfast we set about finding somewhere to get something to eat. Since this was our first full day here we assumed that finding something would be as easy as it was in NYC. Unfortunately it wasn’t and we wandered for a good 15 minutes before finding anything, making our future plans include finding somewhere good to go and making that our regular joint.
Just like in NYC southern California has its own version of CityPass which I picked up on when looking for cheap Disneyland tickets. Since it had been such good value before we decided to get them again even thought we didn’t think that we’d need 3 days at Disneyland (although we welcomed it). After battling through the dregs of the morning rush traffic we found ourselves outside those hallowed gates, now a multi-story parking lot capable of holding thousands of cars. We parked and then caught the tram into Disneyland proper and began our revisiting of childhood and teenage memories.
I’ll be honest, I was mostly doing this for Rebecca and was happy to go along with it as long as she enjoyed herself. That all changed almost the second I saw the massive TRON Legacy stage that was smack bang in the middle of the walkway. I had forgotten that Disney was behind the whole TRON thing, not to mention a whole lot of other cool things like their Tomorrowland Exhibits which house the Honda ASIMO robot. We spent a good 4 hours touring the various shows and riding the California Screamer rollercoaster. Towards the end of the day Rebecca wanted to ride on of those rapids rides which, while I’m not adversed to usually, didn’t particularly want to ride on since I’d be wearing wet jeans until we could get back to the hotel. Still I thought I’d go along with it and you can pretty much guess the outcome, I got completely soaked. Since we had booked tickets for Medieval Times I didn’t want to spend the next 5 hours in wet pants so we headed back to the hotel, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse.
Now I had been in some pretty heavy traffic back when I was driving around in Miami, but it was all pretty comparable to say Sydney or Melbourne during their more busy times. Still we figured that leaving at 4:30PM we’d have enough time to get to the hotel and back to Medieval times before it started at 7:00PM. It took us about 2 hours to get to the hotel which was only 28 miles from Disneyland. Thankfully the trip back was a little better but it still took us almost an hour to drive back making us late for our tournament. Still we were assured we’d get in as long as we had our tickets so we persevered.
Once we got in we grabbed our seats, right up in the front row. I had found a good set of coupons that gave us the best package you could get for less than the cost of the regular tickets and boy was it worth it. Even on a Thursday night the place was packed to the rafters and the crowd was roaring as we walked in. The entire show is really something to behold with skilled equestrians, falconers and enough choreographed fights to give me a thrill I wouldn’t soon forget. I had had reservations about it when I had first heard about it but after experiencing it for myself I was totally hooked, cheering for our champion and booing all others. If anyone has a chance to catch one of these shows I highly recommend you do, it’s 2 hours that you’ll be sure to enjoy, especially if you’re a fantasy nut like myself. Thankfully the drive home was much smoother than the previous trips, getting us back to the hotel in record time.
Tomorrow we’ve got some errands to take care of (like getting our clothes washed) but we’re hoping to hit up Universal Studios in Hollywood. After today’s experience at Disneyland I must say I’m now looking forward to visiting the other theme parks as well as spending another 2 days at Disneyland, as the tickets we bought allow us to. Hopefully too my server will be up soon so I can post these for you guys because I know how desperate you are to hear about my last week over here 😉
