Disney California, USA

Highlights

Disney California Adventure
Disneyland

Why visit Disney California?

For lots and lots of family fun!

Getting there and around

Disney California is located to the south of Los Angeles in the city of Anaheim. This was our last stop on our USA trip at the end of September 2022.

We drove from Santa Monica to Anaheim which took an hour. At Anaheim we checked in to our hotel, dropped our luggage off, and returned our hire car.

Our hotel was only five minutes from the Park gates so we walked everywhere (and walked a lot.)

Accommodation

We stayed at the Best Western Plus Anaheim Inn, just 5 minutes walk from the entrance to Disneyland. Being so close to the parks was great for getting an early start and for taking a break from the afternoon heat before returning to the parks in the evening.

We had a two bedroom suite with a king size bed and two queen beds. This was the first time the kids had their own space and their own beds since Iceland and while they quite like sharing, they did love having big queen beds to themselves!

The room was great. The pool area was fairly big and there was a handy coin laundry. The breakfast was pretty poor. The location was this hotel’s biggest selling point.

At £310 per night this was the most expensive of our hotel stays in the USA, partly due to its Disney location, but mainly thanks to the value of sterling against the dollar plummeting during our stay.

Our star rating: 3

Our cost rating: 2

Best Western Plus Inn Anaheim

Tickets and Reservations

We bought 3-day tickets and made our park reservations, 45 days before our visit. The $1280 ticket price worked out at £1,030 when we bought the tickets in June 2022. We made reservations for one day at Disney California Adventure and two days at Disneyland.

Thank goodness we booked when the pound was relatively strong. If we bought tickets today they would cost £200 more thanks to the fall in sterling. It’s fair to say that visiting Disneyland was the most expensive activity of our trip.

Disney California Adventure

On Day 1 we got up early and arrived at the park at 7.15am to clear security and joined very near the front of the queue for the rope drop. The anticipation that built for the rope drop was both exciting and quite stressful.

Cars Radiator Springs Racers is popular and wait times increase throughout the day. So we headed straight to Cars Land as soon as the rope dropped.
We queued for about 30 minutes for Radiator Springs. We loved this ride, with its fantastic styling and super fast racing. We totally understood why it’s so popular. When we got off we saw that the wait time had increased to 2 hours so we were very glad we had made the effort to get there early.

We are big Marvel fans and the Avenger’s Campus was our top priority. Next we headed to Spider-Man Web Slingers. We wore 3D goggles in this computer game style ride.

We worked as a team to defeat robot spiders by shooting them with our webs (waving our hands around and shrieking a lot basically).

After Web Slingers we watched the Spider Man stunt show. Spider Man flipped and somersaulted his way around the rooftops and between buildings.

After that we saw the Avengers Assemble show which we felt was a bit lame (Black Widow briefly fought some unnamed baddies) and then the Wakanda Training which was awesome.

Then we headed through the Avenger’s Campus to the amazing Collector’s Tower building for the Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout. William said he thought he saw a ride car up high in the tower and asked whether would it have big drops. “No no” we reassured him, “you can’t have seen a car that high, kids as small as 102cm can go on this ride so it can’t be that scary…”

We waited for 45 minutes in a well-designed queue taking us through the Collector’s collection and seeding the plot for the ride. Then we had a chat with Rocket who told us we have to help him free the captured Guardians from the Collector. Then we queued a bit more before getting into a ride car in a lift (yup, we stupidly still hadn’t figured out what was coming at this point).

Because we hadn’t listened to William or taken him seriously at all (boy who cried wolf springs to mind here) we hadn’t realised this was a dark AND a drop ride; and it wasn’t just one drop, it was lots of very big and fast drops in the dark. It was thrilling and pretty scary and even though Max (and Harriet) were frightened they did confess later it was fun.

We then headed over to Hollywood Land for the Animation Academy. Our kids LOVE animation. They make their own stop motion movies, flip books and animated games. We enjoyed learning how to draw Mike from Monsters Inc. with a Disney animator. We had expected more of a focus on animation rather than just drawing, but nonetheless this was a calm and pleasant activity.

By this point it was 1pm and time for lunch (hot dogs and jacket potatoes). Mal and Max headed back to the hotel for a rest while Harriet and William went back to Cars Land.

We queued for 25 minutes for Mater’s Jamboree which was a fun spinning ride and then queued for 45 minutes for Luigi’s Honkin’ Haul-o-Ween.

We finally got on and had just buckled up our seatbelts when the Disney cast members announced that everyone needed to get off due to a fault. Rather frustrating but these things happen. Harriet and Will also went back to the hotel.

We grabbed a quick dinner at Lucky Fortune. We had planned to watch the Coco Musical Celebration, Guardians of the Galaxy dance off and Dr Strange Mysteries of the Mystic Arts, but we were all tired by this point.

Instead we strolled around Hollywood Land and Buena Vista soaking up the atmosphere and illuminations. We’d missed the virtual queue for World of Colour and our kids weren’t going to make it to 9pm anyway, so we called it a day at 7pm and headed back to the hotel.

Disneyland

On Day 2 we got to the Disneyland Park at 7.15am for rope drop. We were right at the front of the rope drop queues. Harriet and Max waited in front of the beautiful Sleeping Beauty Castle for Fantasy Land.

Fantasy Land is full of nostalgic rides like Peter Pan’s Flight, Alice in Wonderland, The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, Snow White’s Enchanted Wish and Mr Toad’s Wild Ride. All the rides were so cute and it was nice to be on more gentle rides. Our favourite was Peter Pan, it was fun and beautiful storytelling.

Meanwhile, Mal and William waited at the front of the rope drop for Tomorrow Land. First they went on Star Tours, and then when it opened, they went on Space Mountain.

They enjoyed Star Tours which was a screen and motion based ride. Space Mountain was great but not as thrilling as the Incredicoaster the day before.

After this we reconvened. There is free wi-fi in the Parks so it’s easy to keep in touch and to monitor ride wait times and order food using the Disney app.

We went to Galaxy’s Edge for Rise of the Resistance and a look around this area. The staging and design is fantastic with loads of cool props and scenery.

The long queue for Rise of Resistance outside was dull (inside was a tad more interesting) but it didn’t matter because Rise of the Resistance itself was an amazing immersive and interactive experience that made us feel as though we were in a Star Wars plot. It was incredible, and worth the hour’s wait.

Both at the rope drop and in the queue for Rise of the Resistance we got chatting to seasoned Disney visitors who gave us lots of helpful tips about how to get the most out of our experience. This was a recurring theme across the 3 days. We met a lot of people who had visited Disneyland many many times and they were all very kind and helpful, and seemed to really enjoy imparting their knowledge.

After Star Wars we went to Critter Country for Splash Mountain. Unfortunately the ride broke halfway before we got through the queue so we got some lunch from the Hungry Bear (burgers and nuggets) and then went for a break back at the hotel.

In the late afternoon we returned to the park and while Splash Mountain was working again, it had a very long queue so we decided to go on Rise of the Resistance again, because it was so good!

After that we went on the gentle Mark Twain’s boat ride which is beautiful at dusk when the Park is lit up and there’s a carnival atmosphere.

Then we quickly made our way to Alien Planet where we had ordered pizza and pasta for dinner using the mobile ordering app.

We ended the evening at Fantasy Land where we got some churros and settled down for a wonderful Encanto celebration. Lights were projected onto the facade of It’s A Small World while the song from the film We Don’t Talk About Bruno played.
Encanto is one of our favourite films and we loved this! It was a sweet way to round off our day.

On Day 3 we returned to Disneyland but we took it much easier and decided not to do the rope drop. We had a much more leisurely start and got to the park at 10am. We used this day in Disneyland to do some of the things we missed the previous day.

We finally managed to go on Splash Mountain which was a fantastic river drop ride, and then we went on Winnie the Pooh (twice!), the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (fast and thrilling), Autopia (the kids got to drive the grown ups for once), Star Tours (again) and Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters (defeat Zurg with laser pistols and score points).

We ate lunch at the Golden Horseshoe (fish and chips, veggie chili and mozzarella sticks) and tried the Halloween special Churros sundae. It was very rich and sweet and we couldn’t finish it!

We didn’t manage to get to Indiana Jones or Millenium Falcon Smugglers Run but for day 3 we had decided that we would not go on anything that had a wait time of more than 30 minutes.

We ended our time at Disney with a relaxing ride around the park on the Railroad and then a walk around the Main Street shops.

By slowing down on this day we got to look at things like the old fire station with its vintage fire truck, the musical bands, the flowers, and we even started our own Disney pin collection. We enjoyed soaking up the atmosphere in the Park.

We left the park at 4pm to pick up our luggage from our hotel and get a taxi to the airport.

South America here we come!

USA Practical Notes

We paid for everything in the USA by booking online in advance or by using Mastercard debit or credit cards. By using our Starling and Halifax Clarity cards we didn’t pay foreign exchange fees. Contactless payments were available almost everywhere. Our USA trip was almost entirely cashless.

We tried to book accommodation with laundry facilities and many hotels had these. Laundry appliances were never free and a load usually cost around £6-£8 to wash and dry.

Our hire cars took leaded gasoline, and prices were around $3.30 USD per gallon / 70p GB pence per litre . Gas was self serve and occasionally there was the option to pay at the pump.

Speeds and distances are in miles. Driving is on the right. Roads were well maintained and smooth to drive. Highways were big and congested, particularly in cities.

Almost every town consisted of a number of retail parks with out of town shopping and fast food chains. Some towns had historic centres with independent shops and smaller cafes.

Outside of New York City which had a great choice of cuisines and price points, eating out was difficult and more expensive than in the UK. Healthy food options were most expensive, and while fast food was cheaper it was poor quality. A simple one course lunch with soft drinks for 4 people cost £50-£70.

We purchased Airalo e-sim cards for the USA and activated them on arrival in Sydney. A 5GB data allowance for 30 days cost £10. Airalo is really easy to use with iPhone and it worked well throughout the USA, apart from in Yosemite National Park.