Last time on Spring Break 2016, we finally made it to Don and Megan’s wedding! It was a beautiful ceremony, a fun reception, and I was so happy to be able to partake in this wonderful day with my friends. Now, off to the second-best reason to be in LA – DISNEYLAND!
Note: This series of Disney posts will be a recap with a lot of tips, if you were planning your first trip and would like to learn the bit of a scoop I got! Scroll to the end of the post for some overall tips. Let me know if you’d like just an overall tips post for Disneyland?
Also I wasn’t sure how to divide these up, so it’s going to be broken up roughly around the meals we had? … Here we go!
After spending several days in Vegas and a wedding together, there was a small chance that maybe Don and Megan had enough of us. After all, there was a really good chance that Megan had spent more time with me over the past week than we had over the course of our whole friendship? (This is almost definitely true for Don and Ben.) If they were tired of our faces… they were in for a tough break at the beginning of their mini-moon (Minnie-moon!) in Disneyland as I just had to have at least one day at the original happiest place on Earth.
Ben and I spent one magical day at Disneyland, and it started bright and early! We dragged ourselves out of bed to say goodbye to our AirBnB and see ya later to LA before hitting the road and crossing our fingers that traffic to Anaheim wouldn’t be too bad. Luckily, we managed to get there without sitting in too much LA traffic at all! That Disney magic was helping us right along! We checked into our hotel and got our room keys, although our room wasn’t quite ready yet, so we skipped off to have adventures without being tempted by beds.
The key was having the room key because Disney resort guests are able to enter one of the two parks during ~*~Extra Magic Hour~*~ aka an hour earlier than everyone else! This perk, in addition to the convenience of being right off park property, was one of the main reasons I wanted to spring a little extra to stay in a Disney hotel. On the day that we arrived, Extra Magic Hour applied to Disney’s California Adventure (aka DCA), so we head through the gorgeous Grand Californian (where Megan and Don were checking in later after sleeping in after, uh, getting married), which opens up directly into DCA.
Tip: While there is an entrance to DCA from the Grand Californian, that line gets very gnarly because Disney hotel guests want to use this exclusive entrance. However, there aren’t as many line attendants as there are at the main entrance, so, unless you got to that entrance very early, you’ll get into the park faster if you go through the main entrance, where you can also see all the folks waiting for both DCA and Disneyland to open up the gates. We stood in the hotel guest line, having kids gawk at me in my Disneybound for a bit, before deciding to do that and it was the right decision in the end, for sure.
Sip of Starrshine 