I’m Too Excited To Sleep!

I love that commercial for Disney!  And even though we’ve been to Disney World, Disneyland and on the Disney Cruise many times, it never fails.  Every time we leave, I’m too excited to sleep.  We finally got to bed after 11 pm last night (very late for me) and I got up at least twice in the night and finally, an hour before the wake up call, I gave up.  We’re going on a Disney Cruise today!!

We’ve spent the last two days at Disneyland and had a great time.  Disneyland is still my favorite, and that includes California Adventure.  I think we spent more time at California Adventure this time than we did at Disneyland.  I love that everything is so close.  Yesterday we were in California Adventure but I wanted lunch at Downtown Disney.  10 minutes later we were at Downtown Disney and didn’t like the menu where I wanted to eat so we went back to California Adventure for lunch.  You wouldn’t do this at Disney World, it would just take too much time.

When we arrived in California, we checked in and our room was ready, even though it was early.  We went for the theme park view this time at Paradise Pier.  While we have always loved this resort, with a short stay we were wishing we were closer to the parks.  We tried to fit too much in a couple days and were exhausted from the walking.

The first night we had dinner at the Vineyard Room.  This is a great open air restaurant upstairs from the wine tasting area.  The food was very great, but we heard that the restaurant is closing at the end of August.  During dinner, the Pixar parade came by our seats so we got to see a bit of that.  After dinner, we got in touch with a DISer to pick up our lanyards and spent some time talking and getting to know Desiree and Monica.

The plan was to stay up until closing of Disneyland at midnight, but no matter how we tried, we kept thinking that we had been up since 2 am west coast time!  We did stay up until nearly 11:30 and feel that that worked for adjusting us to the time zone quickly.

Saturday, we slept in a bit, but made it to California Adventure for the rope drop.  We immediately went over to Toy Story Mania and all I can say is this is definitely a winner!  We went twice on this and had a blast.  Afterwards we needed to try out California Screamin’, the best Disney roller coaster ever.  The wait was only 20 minutes so it was definitely worth it.

We wanted to cool off with Grizzly River Run but the lines were much too long so we decided to do the single rider line.  As luck would have it, the ride shut down, but not before the first two in our group got through.  They started evacuation and my husband, Bill’s raft was evacuated.  When they came to mine, the ride started up again, only to get stopped at the top of the mountain!  We had to be evacuated but they needed to drain the ride first.  It was neat seeing the behind the scenes stuff.

Since this trip is for my 40th birthday, we of course had to get a birthday button for me.  If you are celebrating a birthday, anniversary, or are newlyweds, you should get a button from the resort or the parks.  I had many people, not just cast members, wishing me a happy birthday.  At the Mission Tortilla Tour, I got a bag of flour tortillas.  The best birthday surprise though was at dinner at Yamabuki.  Two servers came over with a fruit plate that had a orange that was carved with a face and ears were added so it looked like Mickey Mouse!  They sang Happy Birthday to me in Japanese.