After trip report: Disneyland!

In our school district the first weekend of October is a 3-day weekend to observe Columbus Day (a.k.a. Indigineous Peoples’ Day). Seeing an opportunity to take a short trip out of town my wife and I decided it would be a good time to take the kids to Disneyland for a few reasons.

First off, kids under 3 years old can go to the park for free! My daughter was 2 and a half and has recently become obsessed with Minnie Mouse and Elsa & Anna from Frozen. She hasn’t seen much of either of the Disney cartoons but she has a few hand-me-down Disney pajamas that she frequently demands to wear at every opportunity. It’s cute but also extraordinarily frustrating when she’s hellbent on wearing unwashed, filthy Frozen pajama tights.

Secondly, Halloween at Disneyland is really special. The park pulls out all the stops with Halloween-themed decorations all over the park and they redecorate several of the rides. The Haunted Mansion gets a full makeover to look like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. They also sell Halloween-themed churros and other menu items.

Third, we’ve never been to California Adventure! Usually our trips to Southern California are filled with visits to see relatives from both sides of the family so it’s pretty rare that we have 1 day to tool around a theme park let alone have 2 full days.

Fourth, my parents would coincidentally be in town for the long weekend making the weekend a good opportunity to swoop into town and have dinner with my parents a couple of times.

Lastly, I finally had the gumption to use some of my Chase Ultimate Rewards points that we earned through the epic 100,000 signup bonus points promotion that ran from mid-2016 to early-2017 that reward point bloggers are still talking about. My brother lives about 20 minutes from Disneyland but we wanted to burn some points and be able to get into the park without having to deal with parking. I am not scientific about redeeming points for the maximum dollars-per-point value and we’ve had the card for almost 2 years now and I haven’t canceled it despite the $450 + 75 (for spouse) annual fee. In that way we must be ideal customers for Chase. But I think we’ve gotten a fair value for the card because of the $300 travel credit and a substantial cost of the trip to Disneyland, which I’ll get to in a second, was covered by miles redeemed at the 1.5x bonus travel redemption rate. I do need to be sure to redeem travel points more frequently because Chase could take away the 1.5x bonus any time.

Hotel: Hyatt Place at Anaheim Resort/Convention Center

Cost: 40,600 points or approximately $609.00 including taxes & fees

Extra fees: $20 per day fee for parking

At first I wanted to stay at the Disney Grand California on the park grounds but the weekend was prohibitively expensive at around $700 per night! $2,100 for a 3-day weekend in SoCal? I don’t think so. I probably get 6 nights in a pretty good hotel in Hawaii for that.

There are plenty of hotels in the Disneyland area to choose which gave us serious paralysis by analysis. We filtered through the options applying the following criteria which the Hyatt Place mostly satisfied.

Filter criteria 1: Free hot breakfast, not continental breakfast. In the 3 nights we stayed at the Hyatt place we had scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs, pancakes, waffles, bacon, sausage, oatmeal, cold cereals, english muffins and assorted fruit. Overall I would say they offer a good hot breakfast on par with IHOP/Denny’s.

Filter criteria 2: In-room fridge. Bonus points for microwave. We need a fridge for late night milk. I was hoping for a mini kitchenette with a microwave and some plates but it turns out we wouldn’t have needed the microwave anyway because we in the parks for lunch and had dinner with my family each night.

Filter criteria 3: walking distance or frequent shuttle to the park. The Hyatt place is a 20 minute walk from the front door to the Disneyland entry gates. It’s an easy walk. The only frustration is that the wait times for crosswalks are probably around 2-minutes per intersection. The hotel is conveniently across the street from Disney’s Toy Story parking lot. It’s about a 5-7 minute walk to the shuttle bus area and a 5-7 minute bus ride to the gate. The shuttles are abundant so we didn’t wait for more than 5 minutes to go from standing in line to the bus leaving to get to the park.

Overall I was very satisfied with Hyatt Place. It is a solid option for a Disneyland hotel. We considered staying at the Hyatt House which is about half the distance to the park entrance gate but it cost $40 more per night. Since Hyatt Place satisfied our requirements I don’t regret trading the distance for cost.

Car: Standard sedan from Alamo LGB airport

Cost: 14,438 points / $216.57 including taxes & fees.

Extra fees: No extra fees to drop off car at LAX.

I like renting cars at Long Beach Airport (LGB). The car rental lot is directly across the street from the terminal. The downside is that the Alamo/Enterprise booth always has a line! There are 6 car rental agencies on the premises but everybody has to get in line at Alamo. Clearly they must be the cheapest. We got a nice surprise this time around because I reserved a Camry from Alamo but they gave me a free upgrade to a Premium class Nissan Maxima with 300hp because that’s all they had. The Maxima felt like driving a Ferrari compared to my daily-driving 150hp Toyota Prius V. :-)

Disneyland: 2-days, 1 park per day

Cost: 2 adult tickets, 1 youth ticket. $618

We opted for the 1 park per day passes because we’ve never been to California Adventure. My brother had a season pass to the parks 2 years ago and he assured me that California Adventure has enough to see to fill a 1-day pass. We bought directly from the Disneyland website and eschewed the recently introduced MaxPass option. MaxPass might have been worthwhile at Disneyland but we did OK at California Adventure without it.

California Adventure

Cost: $50 lunch, $40 midway games, $10 snacks

We woke up around 7am, ate breakfast and walked over to the entrance gate. Disney has bag-check and metal detector scanning before you get to the ticket booths. The security guards do a comprehensive through everbody’s bags. Outside food is allowed so I brought a lot food & drink (a couple Cokes, chips, juice boxes, granola bars, fruit gummi snacks). It took us around 10 minutes to get through the line. After all is said in done we got in through the park gate at 8:30 in the morning. Nice! A nice thing about California Adventure is they serve beer and alcohol all around the park. Basically starting around 11am I saw adults double-fisting brewskis ($10 each) all around the park.

Without going into too much detail here’s how we did the day.

• 8:30 get into park, go to Cars Land
• Get FastPass for Radiator Springs Racers (1:45pm-2:45pm)
• Ride Mater’s Graveyard Jam-BOO-ree.(a.k.a. Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree when it’s not Halloween) 5-minute wait
• Luigi’s Honkin’ Haul-O-ween was closed
• Took a photo with one of the characters
• Ride Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, 5-minute wait
• Ride Golden Zephyr, 5-minute wait
• Ride Jumpin’ Jellyfish, 5-minute wait
• Pick up FastPass for Toy Story Midway Mania (3:15pm-4:15pm)
• Pixar Pal-a-round, non-swinging. 30-minute wait.
• Play some Games at Pixar Pier. $5 per play
• Lunch at Cocina Cucamonga
• Attend Turtle Talk with Crush from Finding Nemo
• Ride Radiator Springs Racers with FastPass, 30-minute wait
• Take a break to people watch
• Ride Midway Mania
• Explore Redwood Creek Challenge Trail
• 4:30pm, Done! We had to leave park to go to dinner.
• Later in the evening my wife went back to the park to ride the Incredi-coaster and she watched some of the parade which looked really impressive but there’s no way the kids would have been able to survive another 2 hours at the park.
• Park closed at 10pm.

Disneyland

Cost: $90 lunch, $10 snacks

We were worn out from the first day in the park. If we go to Disneyland again in the future I’ll take 1 day off in between parks to recuperate. Disneyland is bigger and more crowded. I didn’t see any beer in Disneyland.

• We got into the park around 9:30am.
• Head straight to Tomorrow Land to get FastPass for Buzz Lightyear for 11:15
• Ride Nemo, 10-minute wait
• Ride Autopia, 20-minute wait
• Ride Buzz Lightyear
• Walk across to New Orleasn Square
• Get FastPass for Haunted Mansion at 5:20pm (6-hour delay!)
• Lunch reservations at Cafe Orleans 11:45. The Monte Cristo sandwich is a beast! It’s either a deep-fried turkey sandwich or a beignet stuffed with turkey and cheese. Delicious any way you think of it.
• Visit Tarzan’s treehouse
• Ride Pirates of the Carribean, 30-minute wait
• Picture at Sleeping Beauty Castle
• Watch the musical show Mickey’s Magic Map at 2:15pm
• Split up to ride Dumbo vs toddler nap time
• Grab FastPass for It’s a Small World
• Wait in line to take picture with Goofy in Toon Town, 30-minutes
• Ride It’s a Small World, 15-minute FastPass wait
• Ride train back to New Orleans Square
• Ride Haunted Mansion
• Leave park to have dinner
• 9:30 come back to park for fireworks!
• After fireworks ride some more things
• Ride Autopia twice (no wait)
• Ride Dumbo, 2-minute wait
• Ride Carousel, 2-minute wait
• Ride Tea cups, 2-minute wait
• Ride Pinocchio’s Journey, 5-minute wait
• Ride Snow White’s scary adventure, 5-minutes
• 11:30 done! Ride shuttle back to hotel.