Great summary!

Thanks for explaining this so we can avoid the same confusion!
Question - you ran for the FPs, what did the rest of your party do? Were they able to save you a place in standby for another ride? Were you able to get into the queue, and find them? Or did they just wait by the entrance for you to meet them and you all joined the queue together?
I had them slowly make their way to the bridge that connects Mediterranean Harbor to Mysterious Island, where we agreed to meet up again. I wasn't sure how long getting FPs would take so I'd have hated for them to be standing in a line, and for me not to make it back in time to catch up to them. Plus I wanted them to take in all the sights and take pics for themselves.

What technique did you use to get so many FPs?
Is the way it works that you can get a new one either 2 hours after the first, or once you've used your current one if that's sooner?
I think I was able to get a lot of FPs because of many factors. Happy 15, being among the very first people to get into the park, and the first person to get to TSM. My TSM FP return time was about 45mins after I got them, so the logical thing for us was to ride JTOC on standby, and for me to run back to American Waterfront to get FPs for ToT. It just "snowballed" from there...
TSM - FP
JTOC - Standby
ToT - FP
20K LUTS - Standby
Indy - FP , Standby
etc .


If you're a Miracosta guest wanting to do Happy 15 at DL - is the special entrance different?
We only went to DL the day we had Happy 15 from TDL Hotel. I'm assuming the special entrance for Miracosta guests was somewhere off to the side (?)
 
I think so? I can't remember if it has its own separate one or shares with Maihama. I wasn't paying close attention when I exited Maihama so ended up just walking to the Disneyland Hotel and after the first time, it was easy enough to keep doing it. I find I like to walk after I eat dinner.

I think the walk to Ikspiari is going to be closer to 15 minutes from MiraCosta because I don't think it has the nice walking path that Disneyland has. If you pull up Google Maps, you can get some idea of the walk by looking at Maihama Station. Though to be fair it is hard to estimate your walking speed since I don't know that much about you or your traveling party. I tend to walk a bit slower now because I am with my grade school daughter. I know we walked from entrance gates of Maihama Station to the hotel in 5-10 minutes. I know because I timed it for when we were checking out. The monorail path is Maihama/Ikspiari/resort gateway to Disneyland to Bayside (a station for good neighbor hotels) to Sea and back to the first station. So for us, since we were going the opposite direction as the monorail trying to get back to Maihama, it made sense to walk it. The walk between Disneyland and Sea is around 20 minutes but you need to walk back through Ikspiari because the walk to Bayside and around is much further because it's around the park.

For us it wasn't worth it to walk between the parks since the monorail ran often and was faster than the 20 minutes it would take us to walk.
 
Thank you again for all the useful info!

The walk from Ikspiari to TDL is about 5 mins if you aren't a slow walker. I wouldn't recommend walking from Miracosta to TDL. Instead take the monorail from TDS Station to Gateway Station for Ikspiari, or TDL Station for TDL park. Hopefully this map below helps.
 

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