Part Six
Okay, so….I’ve lost my trip report notebook (which is a big deal for me) so I’m going to be writing at the very least this update without it. I’m hoping I’ll find it but I had to give up looking for it today because I’m just getting frustrated.
Anyway, after Soundsational Liz and I headed over to California Adventure. We hung a left once we got in and headed down into the Hollywood Land area. We popped into the Animation Academy building and I snapped this adorable picture of Liz:
Then we headed around to look at some of the Marvel things they had going on. When we first walked by Cap had a giant line, but I loved these posters and had to grab a photo of them.
We happened to be walking by as the Avengers show was starting so we watched a couple minutes of it:
Then we decided to go ride Monsters Inc since there was a super short wait - about ten minutes.
As we were walking towards the entrance the CM at the exit waved us over. “Is it just the two of you?” she asked. When we told her yup, it’s just us, she handed us this:
A Buddy Pass! I’ve never gotten one before! We were super excited and skipped up to the exit queue. We were on the ride in about two minutes and were out before the Avengers show ended! Gotta say hi to Roz before we got off though!
We were getting hot, so we decided to stop and get a drink at Cosmic Canteen. We each got a watermelon lemonade:
We continued to walk around, spying Mission: Breakout in the not-so-distance.
We did catch Cap at the end of his meet & greet being awesome with an adorable little boy. I cut the boy out just because, y’know, not my kid, but had to snap a pic of Cap because Cap.
Liz saw Cap do, in her words, "the most Chris Evans thing" while we were watching him. He posed with the little boy with him. Cap saluted and told them boy to do the same. The boy, instead, crossed his arms over his chest Spiderman-style. Cap side-eyed the kid, made an "alright then" face, shrugged, and went back to posing.
We kept going past Mission: Breakout
As we were walking I was getting texts from E. For those of you who have followed along from one TR to another, you’ll remember E as a childhood friend whom I spent my April trip with. She was back in Florida for the month of August with her family, visiting relatives. She had told me that if we saw Lightning or Mater to send pictures to her. We just so happened to have been standing near where Mater comes back on stage and he started driving by right then! So, we kind of chased him through to Carsland.
We managed to grab a picture of him as he started his set, and Cruz happened to, well, cruise passed us as we were standing there figuring out what to do.
A didn't see them til the next morning but he was super excited. This was the beginning of "Auntie Elle goes on a character scavenger hunt for A." Cars, Star Wars, and Toy Story? Believe me, this was no hardship for me!
We continued on our tour of DCA and headed towards Pacific Wharf. We went to Boudin’s and got a free sample of bread.
Then we headed on over to Paradise Pier.
Liz convinced me we should go onto the Funwheel. The Funwheel is my absolute favorite thing in the parks, aesthetically. However, it scares me something awful. But the wait was short for a fixed gondola (there were only maybe 4 or 5 families in front of us) so we got on within 10 minutes - we got on a Mickey gondola!
The views were great!
But my verdict? Yup, it gets the Nope song. Anyone know the Bang song from How I Met Your Mother? Whenever there’s something I super don’t want to do, I sing it in my head but use “nope” instead of “bang” - “I said a nope, nope, noppity nope, I said a nope nop noppity nope!” I told Liz this as we walked past California Screamin’ and she started laughing at me but started singing the harmony the next time I started singing it. It’s still my favorite thing aesthetically, but it also terrifies me.
Once we got off we decided to walk leisurely towards the front of the park. Jen should be there soon and we needed to go to the front desk to pay off the rest of our hotel room. We wanted to get that done before she got there and figured it’d be easiest to just meet her at the hotel.
We walked through Elias and Company and were only in there for about five minutes before Jen texted us telling us that she was outside the hotel, sitting on one of the benches. She had forgotten to text us when she left the LA area and was earlier than we expected her to be so we high-tailed it back out of the park and over to Camelot. We figured we’d drop her bag off and let her relax a bit while Liz and I went down to the front desk to pay the last of the bill. When we got up to our room, though, the cards wouldn’t work. It didn’t surprise us, we just had forgotten Jen’s keycard in the room so we didn’t have it with us to reset. The woman at the counter told us not to worry, just drop it off when we checked out, and gave us a new card for Jen. It took less than 10 minutes (we were having a great evening timing wise!) and we were back in our room. Jen dropped her stuff off, and we all got changed for the evening. I gave Jen the presents I hadn’t given her yet - a Star Trek mug, a mini Loki pop figure pin, a Haunted Mansion shirt, her plaid we made her, her backpack to match mine and Liz’s, a real-sized Loki pop figure that I knew she had been looking for for years and I had managed to find at a local con, a mini Wall-E pop figure, and her 1-year pin she thought she had lost (it must have come off her nametag and fallen into the lining of a purse she had borrowed from me when she was a CM and we were living together). The mug had broken on the flight but everything else was fine and she loved it all!
Now a trio, we headed back out to the parks! Since we knew we’d be going back to DCA in the morning we decided to spend a little bit of time in
Disneyland. I didn’t take many pictures while we were there just because I didn’t think to. Oops!
It was about 8:45 and Liz and I hadn’t eaten anything (except a free sample of bread) since lunch at 2 and while Jen had gone to dinner with her great-aunt before heading down to meet us the meal had been small and she had needed something more because she had been traveling all day. We had walked over into Tomorrowland at this point so we figured we’d go over to Tomorrowland Terrace.
Remember the time? Yup 8:45. That means it was about 15 minutes before they switched over their menu.
It was a bad idea guys.
The line was slow-moving. They were running out of stuff. Liz got her burger quick enough, and I got mine pretty fast. Jen, though? It took 10 minutes to get her meal out. We stood there watching the signs change over to the late night menu while we were waiting for her. After standing there for almost 8 minutes they said that they had to make more french fries and that’s what the hold up was. But they told her that as they were bringing her food out.
I got the chicken sandwich:
It was pretty standard. It was probably better than the burger but still wasn’t the greatest. We all agreed that it was probably because of the timing.
It was a bit busy in Tomorrowland (isn’t it always at that time of night though?) and earlier in the day E had sent me a reminder that it was the Haunted Mansion’s “birthday” so we forded the crowds waiting for Fantasmic and rode again!
We weren’t tired yet so we danced past Fantasmic (don’t worry, we’d be back for it later!) and got in line for Big Thunder. We got on at a perfect time, right at 10 when the fireworks were starting - it was magical!
We started out of the park, but we did stop and ride Jungle Cruise since the wait was so short. We left while everyone else was watching MSELP through the little backstage area that they open between the hub and the top of Main Street, past where the Jungle Cruise boats “sleep” at night (that’s what we called it anyway!) and headed back to the hotel. We chatted a bit, catching up and kind of planning how we wanted our morning to go. Once we were all comfy we decided to just go to bed so we could squeeze in as much as possible into the next day!