Disneyland November 2021 Trip Report - Day Four

If you've been following, you know that our first couple of days inside the Disneyland Resort theme parks were a little rough. The parks busier than we had anticipated, any efforts at crowd control by Cast Members seemed to be lacking, and we hadn't gotten a rhythm down for this unfamiliar West Coast park. So you would think going into the weekend as we were, we were really in trouble. We thought that too.

But instead, this is where things began to turn around. If I had to speculate, I would say that behind the scenes, Disney too was ramping up for the weekend. If there was a shortage of Cast Members, those that were there probably had their days off during the week so by weekend it was all hands on deck and the shortage was less evident. We encountered better Cast Members and more efficient lines starting on Day Four, which was a Friday.

After a good sleep, I decided to forego the weak coffee in our room in favor of a Be Awake vitamin and caffeine patch I had brought along on a whim because patches take next to no room in luggage. I also took an Aleve first thing in the morning to ease my soreness from the previous days' walking. These actions seemed to make a good difference.

We were back at Disneyland for rope drop with a tentative touring plan in our hands, but the understanding it was definitely just a guideline. Part of our goal on this day was to pick up the little original rides in Fantasyland and I think we did pretty well at that.

But before we got to rides, we noticed something very strange upon arrival. The entire entrance plaza - I mean the whole thing from the ticket gate to under the railroad station - had been covered in blue carpet overnight. Apparently, it was Disney+ day, which explains why we were let in at about 7:30 when the park didn't even officially open until 8:00. I am a Disney+ member and apparently could have benefited from early park entry (how early, I don't know), and special photo ops throughout the day with Disney+ characters. I'm not sure how I had missed the memo on this, but nevertheless, I was pleased because we received souvenir baseball caps upon entering Disneyland and were in line for our first ride before 8:00.

Our first ride was one we approached with mixed feelings. We wanted to experience it because we had heard it was one of those rides that exists at both parks but was better at Disneyland. However, neither of us had enjoyed our first experiences on this ride at Walt Disney World because we are chicken. The ride? Space Mountain. Surprisingly, my mother,, who was the most excited about riding it again, HATED it. I was reluctant to ride, but ended up enjoying it a lot. It is much better than Disney World's. Instead of pitch black, you at least get a lovely star field to look at.

Because mom was still reeling, we skipped Matterhorn which was supposed to be our next step and went directly to Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run. I would easily say this is one of my favorite rides now, and the line at Disneyland for it was never intensely long like it can bet at Walt Disney World. While we waited to board, we chatted with our pilot and navigator who had obviously been on it before. We were gunners and although we crashed the Falcon, we had a great time.

View from the docking bay over the top of the Falcon

This is the one day I was unable to get a virtual queue for Rise of the Resistance when I wanted one, so sadly, we did not spend a ton of time at Galaxy's Edge, and we moved on to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. This is super cute at Disneyland. I wouldn't say it's really that different, but the queue is definitely prettier at Disneyland.

Next, we did the Storybook Land Canal Boats, one of the original attractions. The queue for this one was compact and hot in the full sun. The attraction itself was something from another time for sure. Cute. But I don't need to ride it again.

Then, Casey Jr. Circus Train on recommendation of many whom we had run into who said it was their favorite ride. The entrance to this one was a little hard to find, and it wasn't just us who struggled. Once we did get in the queue, we encountered many other people passing by who asked what ride we were in line for because they could not find the entrance either. The problem is the queue entrance to Casey is marked for Dumbo because it's right next to the Dumbo entrance.

In the Casey queue, we started to get a little bit cranky, but understandably. It was about 11 AM now. The queue was in the full sun. And the temperature was already 93 degrees as it approached its high for the day of 97 degrees. We were behind a family guzzling lemonade and eating pickles for the electrolytes. And the wait time was posted as 10 minutes but was more like at least 20 minutes. Again, the ride was just cute, nothing special. I think people love it because of nostalgia, kind of like I have an enduring love of Spaceship Earth at EPCOT.

We had a lunch reservation at La Brea Bakery and Cafe at Downtown Disney, which is thankfully just outside the exit to the park, so we rushed over there in the heat. We were seated outside, but in the shade, and once in the shade, a California 97 degrees becomes fairly bearable and feels like a Midwest 80 degrees. I did drink a record number of lemonades and waters, though, as I think the Casey Jr. line had dehydrated me, and our server was very attentive and just kept the ice cold liquids coming. I would say this was one of our better meals. The server was great and the food was delicious, and we also stopped following the pretense of any rules and split an entree while each ordering our own desserts. The desserts were amaaaazing. We had a seasonal dessert which was a pumpkin cinnamon tart with pumpkin mousse and cinnamon ice cream, and my mother had a warm bread pudding which was heavenly.

Seasonal dessert at La Brea

Revived from our lovely meal, we went next door to World of Disney for a little shopping and I picked up my favorite Christmas sweater, a spirit jersey I'd been seeing people wearing around the parks. I had seen it in stores too but hadn't yet sprung because, well, spirit jerseys are expensive. But every time I saw it on a guest, I thought "Cool sweater!" so finally I was ready to bite the bullet.

We had decided that given our afternoon fatigue and disappointing evenings the other two days that we would take a nice long afternoon break, so we did take a nice break from about 12:30 to 4:00. Because it was nice and warm (ok, VERY warm), I decided to take a swim in the hotel's pool to cool off which was lovely. Then we just lounged under the palm trees for a while. Very nice break.

Around 4:00, we walked back to Disney California Adventure. The crowds at first were a little intense but this time we stuck it out and learned that they do dwindle after 7:30 PM or so. While the crowds were intense, we decided to watch some live entertainment in Avenger's Campus. We camped out for about 10 minutes for Avenger's Assemble. This one was a Black Widow themed show which was pretty cool. Then, we moseyed around the corner and camped out another 10 minutes or so for Warriors of Wakanda, which was really cool. During all of this, the sun was slowly setting which made for some gorgeous lighting.

I was so glad I got to see Okoye!

After these two shows, we headed to Cars Land and did Mater's Junkyard Jamboree because it was one of few rides with a reasonable wait time.... and I don't know why! This ride was hilarious fun. Because it was holiday time, they were doing the Jingle Jamboree version where Mater, bless his heart,, sings Christmas songs with his own automotive related lyrics. It was a little ride, but it was great... and easily ranked among my favorites.

Mater's Jingle Jamboree

The other ride posting a short wait was Little Mermaid, so we headed over there. My goodness, they gave Ariel quite the setup at California Adventure. This ride, which is basically an omnimover dark ride situation, is in a grand building with chandeliers and shell decor everywhere. The ride was ok. Good for today's standards of dark rides, but the grand building was somewhat of a false lead-up as I would say the ride was average as far as Disney goes.

We had a dinner reservation around 6 PM at Wine Country Trattoria, the premise of which was "When in California, you must drink the wine" and I will say the wine did not disappoint. And boy, did we drink it. We both wanted the California wines flight, and we also both wanted to try the red sangria, so I thought we'd agreed to share a flight and share a the sangria, but when it came time to order, we mistakenly ordered a flight and a sangria for each of us. So there was much wine. The red sangria, in particular, was absolutely delicious. The food here did not quite live up to the wine. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't amazing.

After this, we had agreed to suck it up for the wait times, and we knew we wanted to ride Toy Story Midway Mania, so we headed over there and waited in the 40 minute standby queue, which is just about my wait-time tolerance threshold. While waiting, we watched the Incredicoaster since it rides just above the queue for Midway Mania, and we speculated on whether we could really bear to ride it as we had both wanted to, but it looked scary.

Viewing area off to the side of Luigi's Rollickin' Roadsters

After Midway Mania, it was back to Cars Land for Luigi's Rollickin' Roadsters, also a super cute fun ride, but not quite as good as Mater in our book. Crowds were now beginning to ramp down, and we were thinking about ramping down too as we were tired, but as we made our way to the front of the park, we passed the Animation Academy and had remembered a YouTuber we love to watch showing how beautiful the inside of this building was, so we sort of decided we'd just duck in to see what the inside was like, but didn't want to wait in any line for the Animation Academy. So, we went in and the building was cute but also there was NO line for Animation Academy, so we walked in and did our first Animation Academy ever. And it was FUN! 5/5 would do again.

Exiting Animation Academy, I saw on my app that Monster's Inc. was back up as it had been down all evening and was something I really wanted to ride. We headed over there in what felt like a practically empty park at this point, and rode. Again, it was just cute. But Roz at the end had been upgraded to sing "Deck the Halls" in that voice, and that tickled my funny bone.

It was just before 10:00 now and DCA closed at 10:00 that night, so we made our way out. We had found that between 7:30 and 10:00 things got quite bearable. And also, getting off the main drags of this park really did help as most crowds were on the main drag from the ticket gate to Pixar Pier. On the way out, we saw several characters in their holiday best in Carthay Plaza.

We had not yet seen Disneyland's castle at night in its holiday finest yet, so we decided to cross the esplanade and re-enter Disneyland. The crowds here were much more intense, especially on Main Street, but we were just there to look and the castle was gorgeous. I also took this opportunity to go get a dole whip float. Much better than a churro, in my opinion.

Mickey at the train station

The characters were out at Disneyland too, at the train station. The fab five was in their holiday gear waving, and a band was playing Christmas tunes by the huge Christmas tree.

I think we made it back to our room around 10:30-11:00 ish. It was a very nice evening, and a good day overall at the parks. I don't think the heat really bothered me a lot except just at the height of the day when I was standing in the sun. This is one major thing California has going for it over Florida. In Florida, 97 degrees would have felt oppressive all day, no matter sun or shade. Florida heat is sticky where California heat is just bright, in my opinion.

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Speaking of California, our next day was a day outside of the parks. The crowd calendars had the crowds at a 10/10, and we wanted no part of that. Also my good friend lives in the area and I wanted to see her, so we spent a day with her, driving around Southern California on a mystery picnic, where we also visited Huntington Beach pier. It was a really great day, very refreshing to have a rest day, and a good time overall. So the next post will be about Sunday at Disney California Adventure in the morning, and Disneyland (with holiday parade and fireworks!) in the evening.

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