We spent the entire day at Disneyland. I’m not going to sugarcoat things and I hope everyone reading this blog appreciates my honesty and doesn’t take offense.

Disneyland stinks!!

I’m 100% all things Disney, but I’m definitely spoiled with DisneyWORLD! DisneyLAND is very small. In Orlando, we could spend a good 10 – 12 hours at each park and still not have gotten through everything we wanted to do. In Anaheim, we were done after 7 hours (and it would have been sooner if the wait times weren’t so long).

There would have been a lot of time wasted sitting in long lines if we hadn’t purchased the fast passes. That being said, there were only about 9 rides that even allowed you to use the fast passes. In addition, you could only book 1 fast pass at a time, on the day of, as opposed to booking up to 3 at once, 6 months in advance in Orlando. While it was nice to arrive to the park and not already have all of the fast passes booked up, after you booked 1, the next one might not be available until 4 hours later. We probably only got good use of the fast passes on 2 rides total. By the end of the day, the wait times we’re close to 190 minutes.

As if long wait times weren’t bad enough, the majority of the rides were entirely kid based. I know what you’re thinking; Disney IS for kids, but I 100% think that’s a lie. You’re never too old for Disney, unless you’re going to DisneyLAND in Anaheim! Out of the 40 some odd total rides, I’d say only 10 of them were for adults. Don’t think that doesn’t mean we squeezed ourselves on the slow-moving Snow White or Pinocchio ride, though!

All of the rides were much smaller than the ones in Orlando. The castle alone was more like a townhouse compared to Orlando. It’s a Small World (one of my all-time favorite rides since I was 5) was about half the size and quality as the one in Orlando. The landscaping in the line to get in was still beautiful to look at.

I was surprised at how small the park was because Eddie and I totally drove through about 4 states that were entirely empty desert land that could be used to build Disney parks on! Lol!

Now, don’t get me wrong, there were a few positives. In Anaheim, the characters were all over the park and very easily accessible. It reminded me a lot of when I was a kid and I had my autograph book, praying I’d catch a glimpse of a character while walking around the park. In Orlando, there are specific times and places where you can see each character. They are staged photos and the lines are usually very long. In Anaheim, the characters were pretty much walking around freely and you could bump into them anywhere; literally. At one point, I practically walked right into Donald Duck because I wasn’t watching where I was walking.

The other thing I liked was that the fast pass add-on included the photo pass. Any official Disney photographer could take your picture and easily sync it to your Disney app for you to save to your phone. I remember this option costing over $100 in Orlando. Unfortunately the only pic we decided to take was in the teacup outside Alice and Wonderland’s spinning teacups ride, but we plan to take full advantage of this option on Monday when we go to Disney California Adventure.

I bought a cool bottle of sprite in Star-wars land. It almost looks like a mini cannon/bomb and it says sprite in Aurebesh. I’m not fluent in Aurebesh, but I could tell it was sprite by the colors on the bottle, plus it tasted like sprite too. This was very exciting for me as I was able to walk around Star-wars land like I knew something. Everyone else had a light saber or a cloak (even in the 95° sun) but I had a cool bottle of star wars sprite.

One major negative about Disneyland was that they don’t serve alcohol in the entire park! Not that we needed to get drunk, but a cold beer would have been nice towards the end of the day.

When we left the park, we walked out to Downtown Disney to find a place to eat. There wasn’t much to eat IN the park. There were only 2 sit down places and they were both completely booked for all 3 meals. The other places were all fast food carts that didn’t even have seating areas.

In Downtown Disney, we found a place that looked like New Orleans so we decided to eat there seeing as how this time last year were we in New Orleans. The place was called Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen and the food was amazing! Eddie’s meal came with crawfish mashed potatoes and they were so good! Everything we had there was delicious.

After dinner we took the shuttle back to our hotel and enjoyed a few dink’s in the hotel pool and hot tub. We’re off to bed early because we have a big day tomorrow. We splurged and got VIP passes to Universal Studios Hollywood. It’s about an hour away so we need to get some sleep. All of the reviews of the VIP option have been very positive and we’re both very excited!

Hope everyone is enjoying their night!