The Long Road to Cabo, a Carnival Panorama Review: Day 2 – Disneylandfeatured

When I was in college, I was a champ at rallying on little to no sleep. In fact, before that 2006 trip we were replicating, I pulled three consecutive all-nighters during finals week WITH a sinus infection, fueled entirely on caffeine and albuterol. I actively take trips where I know I’ll exhaust myself because I can sleep when I’m home. This is why I almost never call some of these trips a vacation — I’m a firm believer that there’s very little “vacationing” in wake up calls that happen before the sunrise.

Traveling during the winter time means adding an extra day or two of buffer for us — Chicago weather is unpredictable at best — so we went back and forth on what to do with our time in Los Angeles. Mom was going to be working during our time in LA, so Stephanie and I knew we’d probably just go to Disneyland. Stephanie was in charge of buying the tickets and waited long enough for the entire month of December to sell out before she even checked availability. She thought of other things that could be fun (like going to a Lakers game — big time Lakers fan over here!) but nothing could really top a Disney day. I asked her to keep an eye out on the Disney reservations page just in case and then, one Friday night a week or two before our trip, Stephanie was noticing that random dates were opening up and just as she was about to click out, our dates opened up. She jumped on them and added on every possible add on she could get (Genie+? Check! Park hoppers? Double check!). We initially planned on visiting on Thursday so we could spend Wednesday recovering from the late travel day but as we inched closer to our trip, the weather forecast was pretty terrible for Thursday with heavy, drenching rains for the entire day. I’m not a dances-in-the-rain kind of girl. I’ve spent years trying to embrace the fact that I can’t control the weather and that sometimes you’ve just got to strap on your boots and get out there but it’s Disneyland. It’s just so much better on a clear day. With Omicron sweeping through California, finding reservations at Disneyland was suddenly much easier and we were able to swap our tickets from Thursday to Wednesday.

On the plus, the weather was mild and mostly sunny. On the minus, I slept for less than three hours. Thankfully, the Kimpton had an incredible coffee bar they set up every morning in the lobby (complete with flavored syrups, toppings and my personal favorite, a nitro cold brew station) and so I caffeinated up, strapped on my fanny pack and Stephanie and I headed out to the land of Mickey.

I hadn’t been to Disneyland since 2014, I think. Stephanie’s been more recently than I have and her last visit wasn’t all that recent, so we were both buzzing with excitement. Add to that the fact that Disney is just extra magical around the holidays and we were SO ready to hit that park!

Parking at Disneyland isn’t cheap — $30 for regular parking or $45 for premium parking in the spots closest to the elevators, escalators and stairs. We sprung for the premium parking because, well, we could and we knew coming back we’d want to be in the car ASAP and, spoiler alert, 5/5 would pay for that convenience again.

We went through security checks in the parking garage and then started the trek to the parks. Usually, there’s a tram that will shuttle you from the garage to the front gates, but those weren’t running so we got a nice, brisk, 20-minute power walk in to start our day. Thankfully, the weather was great. If it was hot or raining, this walk would have been legitimately awful.

Disneyland has changed a lot and so have the ticketing rules. With our park hoppers, we didn’t have free rein to start wherever or hop whenever we wanted: we had to select a “starting” park when we booked, and we couldn’t hop until 1:00 PM. The park opened at 8:00 AM, so we started with Disneyland since that’s where most of the rides we wanted to go on were.

Then, there was the Genie+ service. For $20 per person per day, you can add a service that allows you to “book” reservations at different rides. Not every ride, but many of them. The caveat is, at Disneyland, you can only book one at a time and you can only book each ride once, and you can’t book them until you’re scanned into the park. It basically replaced Fast Passes (which were free, and back in the good old days, you could get like two at a time if you wanted to). I have the attention span of a fruit fly and the patience of a hungry toddler so $20 to not wait in lines is an easy sell, but if you’re traveling in a family or a large group, that $20 a person adds up to a whole lot more and quickly.

On top of all of that, premium rides aren’t available through Genie+ but you can (insert shocked!Pikachu emoji here) pay for Individual Lightning Lanes to skip the lines on those. Prices fluctuate but figure they’re generally $15-$20. You can’t book these until you enter the park, either, and they go fast. We snagged ILL’s for Rise of the Resistance and Radiator Springs Racers and I think they were $18/ride/person. I’ll toss a $20 to avoid a long line any day so that part felt like money well spent, but what I really don’t love is how all of this has removed the spontaneity out of the day. I miss the days of “what do you feel like riding next” and “that was so much fun let’s do it again!” To efficiently use your time at Disney these days, it feels like you have to plan every step you take, every snack break and restroom stop.

We got to the park just as it opened and quickly made our way into our starting park at Disneyland. Every time I visit, I look down Main Street and catch myself wondering where the castle is. It’s just so much smaller than Florida’s! Main Street USA decorated in festive holiday garb and I had to stop for a second and do the whole “I am here” thing. I have to deliberately center myself sometimes because things just keep happening so fast that when I don’t, I find myself missing that joy of appreciating being in a specific spot at a specific moment in time.

The park was noticeably thin in crowds so we got our snaps in at the castle and began making our plans, charting our morning through the park. We relied on the research we’d done to help guide what to do when, where to be, how to most efficiently move around.

We booked a Genie+ Lightning Lane for Haunted Mansion, but it was walk on so we rode it first as a walk on, then again with the Lightning Lane. I love how different it is from Disney World’s version with the Nightmare Before Christmas theming, and the way they made the ride so festive for the holidays!

Stephanie was our Genie+ czar for the day, so every time we’d scan into a ride, she’d start making a reservation for the next one. I kept stopping to take pictures because I couldn’t believe how quiet the park was two days before Christmas. The park filled in by mid-morning, so those early morning hours are a key go time!

We split a breakfast chimichanga and downed some electrolyte water and then used Genie+ to walk on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (which was already sporting a 40-minute standby line). We snapped some more castle pictures and had a quick chat with Flynn Rider on our way to Fantasyland, where we walked on It’s a Small World (which was also decked out for the holidays!) and Alice’s Tea Cups.

The longest line we found was at the Jolly Holiday Bakery, where they had already sold out of the breakfast croissant I was hoping to get my hands on, but had this incredible grilled cheese slash tomato soup combo where I swear the soup was almost as good as Cafe Nordstrom’s (the gold standard tomato soup). And the holiday brownie? Delish. We were skipping lines and eating festive frosted carbs. Does life get better?

By the time we finished, our entrance time for Indiana Jones Adventure popped up, so we knocked that ride out (it was my first time on it and I thought it was SO cool!). This was another one where there was a very long standby line and we literally walked right through the queue.

We made reservations for Buzz Lightyear next and hopped over to Tomorrowland (which is also much smaller than it’s Florida equivalent!). We made a pact to not spin the car around like we normally do because Indiana Jones was super cool but also gave us mondo vertigo and Stephanie won because Stephanie always wins at Buzz Lightyear and won’t tell me how she does it.

It wouldn’t be long until we could enter California Adventure, so we slowly started making our way up Main Street and out towards the park. We couldn’t book our Lightning Lanes for Radiator Springs Racers or Genie+ until we were scanned into the park, so we joined a small crowd of others who were waiting to hop.

At 1:00 PM on the dot, they let us scan into DCA and Stephanie got right on her phone to book our Genie+ Lightning Lane (Soarin’), an Individual Lightning Lane for Radiator Springs Racers and check the wait times for everything else. I took pictures because this was her show now and she was giving the orders.

The timing was really regimented — we had to be on Soarin’ between 3:00 and 3:55, which overlapped with our Radiator Springs Racers slot, and then we had passes for Rise of the Resistance in the wayyyyyyyy back of Disneyland between 4:20 and 5:20. Spontaneity – 0, Disneyland Resort – 3. We had a bit of time before our next ride appointment, so we walked onto Mickey’s Philharmagic, where they’ve now swapped out Aladdin for Coco.

We slowly made our way back to Cars Land, which I hadn’t seen before and I thought it was so fun! The theming really is so fantastic with these newer pavilions. And we had to make a stop at the Cozy Cone Motel where all the foods are served in cones! Churro cones, ice cream cones and my favorite one, the Chili Cone Carne served in a bread cone.

Next, we walked on Voyage of the Little Mermaid (no Genie+ — it was walk on!) and then hopped over to take some snaps at the Pixar Pier. I was hoping to ride the big giant ferris wheel (but not in the swinging cars because that is a core memory from 2006 that I would very much like to forget), but the line was just too long so we just kind of wandered around until it was time to check in at Radiator Springs Racers.

I’d never rode Radiator Springs Racers before but Stephanie raved about it after her last Disneyland trip and said it was better than Test Track. Everything started out promising — we scanned in and walked up through the Lightning Lane queue. Justtttttttt as we were about to the section where you board your vehicle, everything came to a stop. The ride was momentarily shut down. Momentarily turned into a lot of moments. That turned into indefinitely. Indefinitely turned into an evacuation from the ride. We were told we could stay in line and wait for it to come back up, but they couldn’t offer refunds on the Individual Lightning Lane at the ride — we’d all have to go to Guest Services. If we stayed, we’d miss our Soarin’ Lightning Lane and we’d be at risk of missing our window for Rise of the Resistance. If we left, we could potentially lose the money we spent. It wasn’t a great situation.

We ultimately left to get Soarin’ in. Well, first we stopped for some waters (just me, or does it physically pain anyone else to spend nearly $5 on a water bottle?) and then we used our Genie+ reservation to walk on. Gosh, I love Soarin’. I miss the old Soarin’ Over California and I think it would have been fitting to keep that one specifically at DCA, but Soarin’ Around the World is just so special and captures the wonder and joy of traveling and experiencing all these incredible places.

On our way back to Disneyland, we stopped at Guest Services because the chat agent in the app said they couldn’t issue refunds and we’d have to do it live at Guest Services. We thought it’d be a quick and easy chat — they sold a service and couldn’t fulfill it, so that should be an easy refund case, right? No, of course not. A college student who could not help us even if he wanted to could only offer another “experience” pass. That was mostly meaningless for us — we paid to go on this ride, specifically, and we already had Genie+ and Rise of the Resistance. So then, the “only thing” he could do is re-issue another Lightning Lane pass for Radiator Springs Racers. I asked him if the ride had been fixed and gone back up. Nope, still down. And so I asked what would happen if it didn’t come back up and he said I was welcome to come back and “see what they could do.” Well, certainly, anything they could do in five hours when the park closed they could do now, so I had him spell it out: we had no plans of coming back to DCA and planned on leaving after Rise of the Resistance. So the only thing they could offer us was to stay in the park until closing to see if the ride would go back up and then “discuss alternative options” if it did not. And you could slowly see this kid start to understand how ludicrous this all was when he acknowledged that even though it was Disney’s issue that prevented us from going on the ride, we would have to wait five hours on the chance it did before they’d be willing to discuss a refund. It’s a terrible policy.

We “took” the reissued passes because, well, what else could we get out of this situation, and we headed back to Disneyland for Rise of the Resistance. I know literally nothing about Star Wars so the plot was lost on me but you guys, this ride was SO cool! Everything from the cast members acting to the theming and the special effects — it’s incredible. The standby line was more than three hours long. We walked on. This was $18 well spent.

Afterwards, we thought about riding It’s a Small World again but we were just about done so we headed over to Frontierland for some Dole Whips to contemplate our next steps. And, side note, the Loaded Dole Whip with Tajin, Mango and Chamoy? Holy crap. How have we gone this long without slathering our Dole Whips with Tajin?! The bao were pretty good, too, but I’ll probably be raving about this Dole Whip until the next time I have a Dole Whip.

We’d been checking on Radiator Springs Racers since we left the line and it was down for nearly two hours before we went back up. We were ready to just leave and go back to the hotel, but we figured we’d just get our money’s worth and ride it before leaving, so we hopped back into DCA and made our way to the back of the park where Cars Land is.

While the ride was down, Disney kept selling Individual Lighting Lanes (which seemed equal parts blind optimism and irresponsible given they didn’t know if or when the ride would go back up) and those coupled with the make goods for everyone who couldn’t ride during their designated time meant that the Lightning Lane stretched all the way back into Cars Land by the Cozy Cone Motel. We were sure it would take forever because the standby line (at 120 minutes) was much shorter, but the Lightning Lane doesn’t wind nearly as much as the standby line and I think we made it through in like 20 minutes.

Radiator Springs Racers? Faster and more thrilling that Test Track. I loved it. I hated how Disney’s terrible policies tinged my first time riding it but that ride was absolute fire. Wouldn’t wait in a standby line for it, but would definitely pay less than $20 again to skip the line to ride it.

By the time we hopped off, we’d been in the parks for over 11 hours, we’d walked more than 30,000 steps and we did all of that on less than three hours of sleep. We were done. The walk back to the car was killer, but that premium parking came in clutch and we crawled into the car, downed some Advil and complained about how our legs hurt because we’re getting old and can’t rally the way we used to.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a Wal-Mart to stock up on coconut water and bananas to ~rebalance our electrolytes after a long day of walking and stopped to pick up some dinner for Mom before heading back to the hotel and settling in for the night. We reconfigured our LA plans to account for the rain, and we went to bed hoping for the best but prepared to have a day either way.