Laura's Disney Lines

Lee and I spent October 10-12 at the Disneyland Resort. Some of this I have written about in previous blog entries (like the AllEars Meet), but here's a few more highlights.

I also wrote about our stay at the new Villas at the Grand Californian, which was very nice. Love that one-bedroom villa!!! Lee has decreed that we shall always stay in one-bedroom villas. :-) (Which we usually do anyways.)

Back to the rest of the weekend, though. Saturday was very crowded in the parks, even DCA had a lot more people than it usually does. They were even making AP holders get handstamps all weekend for park re-entry - and I've never seen that before! We were so glad we were staying on-site and not having to deal with parking and the parking tram and all of that.

Saturday evening we wanted to see the new fireworks show, Halloween Screams, again. We met fellow AllEars® teammate Lisa Berton at The Plaza Inn for dinner. Holy cow...it was soooooo crowded!!! Line out the door and no tables to be had (though we finally found one). It was my fault...I wanted their fried chicken for dinner. And it was good!

Anyway...after dinner we found a friendly CM outside who was starting to direct traffic into Tomorrowland, and we asked her about a good viewing spot for Halloween Screams, so she told us where she likes to watch it from. And Lee videotaped the whole show - it's a little better than the one he originally shot since he had a wide angle lens this time and he modified the exposure settings so the castle is a lot brighter. The show is over 10 minutes long, so there are two parts to the video.

As you can see, even though it was a great spot for seeing the fireworks and the projections on the castle, it was not such a good shot for seeing the "crystal ball", which was partially blocked by one of the castle's spires. Oh well.

Sunday morning Lee and I went into Disneyland for Magic Morning - which we were eligible for because we were staying at a Disneyland resort (and it's the ONLY way for AP holders to get it!) There seemed to be fewer people in the park than on previous occasions when we've done it on a Saturday morning. We did 5 attractions in an hour - Ghost Galaxy, Buzz Lightyear, Star Tours, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. And after the park opened we went to Haunted Mansion Holiday and Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Ride (more commonly known as "Indy"). Seven attractions in an hour and a half! That's more than we often do in an entire day. :-)

Fast forward to later in the day after breakfast, the AllEars meet, and lunch at Rancho del Zocalo. As we were walking out of the park with Deb and Cathy at about 2:00 we saw the Hook and Ladder Company performing in front of the fire station. This is one of the things I love best about Disneyland...all of the little things like this that you find happening around the park. They were joined by several characters - Cruella DeVil tried to steal the stuffed Dalmatian puppy toy they had sitting on the piano, and she was run off by Chip and Dale, who did a cute shadow dance.

And then Goofy came out and danced to "Come on, Get Happy" - who knew that someone with feet that big could dance so well? It was a lot of fun to watch.

That evening we came back to the park with Deb and Cathy and did the Fantasmic! dessert package. Cathy hadn't seen the Disneyland version of Fantasmic! before, and I don't think Deb had, either, and they both loved it. Cathy is a woman after my own heart and loved the pirate ship.

This time the dragon mostly behaved - she moved around a bit more than the first time we saw her, though she didn't breathe fire. I love the way she leans down to look at Mickey like he's some insignificant little thing that's bothering her.

From there we had an excellent view of the Halloween Screams fireworks, but we couldn't see the crystal ball at all, and could only get a glimpse of Zero. Since the fireworks are really designed to be viewed from Main Street, it's not so obvious how many different places they are shot off from - they just appear to be at different depths. But when viewed from the side they appear side-by-side rather than front-to-back.

The next morning we were able to participate in the morning Power Walk around DCA. This is something they offer several mornings a week to guests at the Grand Californian, but we'd never been able to do it before because we were doing Magic Morning instead. But since this was Monday, there wasn't a Magic Morning. We had signed up a couple of days earlier - there's no charge, you just have to be a hotel guest. At the time they said we would do 2 miles in 30 minutes - which I don't consider a power walk pace. :-)

There were only Lee and I and one other female guest, plus the instructor. Because we were going into the park before it was open we all had to sign waivers. Once the security person let us in the DCA gate we did a little stretching, and then started walking. And since we were a small group who could all walk fast, we really did do a power walk, so I was happy. There was maintenance going on in the park so we had to avoid a few obstacles. We walked all the way around Paradise Pier, around "a bug's land", then all the way around the Hollywood Studios area, went past Soarin', and ended up at the rapids again. Normally they stop there, but we still had time because we'd been walking so fast, so we went once more around past Grizzly Rapids, the Golden Vine Winery, and Soarin'. We still only did 1.8 miles, though - I had my GPS watch on. After we stretched for a while longer we walked out of the park. It was really a nice way to start the morning! In addition to the Power Walks, they also offer Pilates classes several days a week. Our instructor said they hope to expand the program and offer some additional stretching and aerobic programs next year.

It was Columbus Day and Disneyland was busy, though not quite as horrible as I'd expected. Deb, Lisa and I took Cathy to Toontown and showed her some of the fun stuff there is to do there.

We met Lee and we all had a really nice lunch, and then Lee and I said goodbye and headed back home.

It was a really fun weekend. It's always really nice to be staying there and be able to head back to the room in the afternoon, and even better to go back to the room late at night instead of driving home!

I said I would talk more about the new Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy, so here goes. First a bit of general background, and then some spoilers - I will put in a warning before the spoilers!

Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy was initially done for Hong Kong Disneyland two years ago, and fortunately for us they decided to bring it to California this year! I found that quite a surprise - since it's not like Space Mountain is an overlooked attraction that people are no longer interested in riding. :-)

The signs outside the attraction warn that it may be too intense for some children (and even some adults!). I'd recommend heeding those warnings - there are some aspects that could be quite scary, but I'll go into more specifics later. For the most part I don't think the visuals are any worse than what you see on the signs, but seeing them pop up unexpectedly can still be surprising. The music is also pretty eerie.

One thing that we thought was very cool is the way the outside of Space Mountain "comes alive" at night, with sound and lighting effects. It's definitely worth spending some time standing around Tomorrowland (we found the view pretty good from the area just behind the water ball) just watching and listening. If there's a band playing at the Tomorrowland Terrace it's a little harder to hear the sound effects, though - and for some of the effects you really need the audio cues to get the full impact.

The new attraction has been VERY popular - on weekends Fastpasses for the entire day are long gone by noon and the standby line is over an hour.

Here's a video from disneylandnews that shows a little bit of the outside and the inside - not too many spoilers in this.

SPOILERS AHEAD

READY?

ARE YOU SURE?

Ok. On the first night while we were watching the show on Space Mountain's exterior there was a man behind us who was also watching and taking pictures. We started chatting and discovered that he was one of the Imagineers who had worked on the Ghost Galaxy overlay! So we asked him about something that had puzzled us, which was why there really wasn't any "story" in the attraction to explain what was going on. He told us there's a script for the background chatter that would offer some more information to those who listen to it, but it hasn't gotten into the attraction - maybe next year.

But here's the idea (to the best of our recollection): Space Station 77 has been pushing deeper and deeper into space, and has gotten into a new area which, unbeknownst to them, is inhabited by a "space ghost", who doesn't take kindly to these "space invaders." Strange things start happening, like mysterious energy fluctuations. If you watch the big screen in the launch bay you can see that that it reports a power surge or a loss of signal from time to time and goes to a blue screen - and we all know that seeing a blue screen is never a Good Thing. :-)

Apparently unmanned probes have also gone missing. So they are seeking volunteers to go on a manned mission to explore this area of space and find out what's out there, and that's where all those of us in line come in. At this point we are woefully uninformed volunteers! :-)

He also told us that the images came from the Hubble Space Telescope, though they have been edited, and elements of them combined to form the ghost - his face might be a nebula, while his eye is a completely different galaxy.

There are a couple of effects they were able to do here that they did not do in Hong Kong, like having the ghost appear just before the drop, and adding a couple of sections where the ghost appears to move alongside and chase your rocket.

There were 5 different exterior sequences when the attraction first opened, but he told us there were plans for several more - and sure enough, there were three more this past weekend. They go off about every three minutes.

Here's a new video that Lee put together of the exterior show, which includes a couple of the new effects as well as better quality footage of some of the ones we saw before. My favorite starts at 3:44 and ends about 20 seconds later as Space Mountain appears to collapse!

Our experience was that the best place to ride was in rows 4-6 rather than row 1 - the timing on some of the effects didn't work as well for row 1 - we were past most of them before we could really see them. And you also want to sit on the left side of the rocket - you don't really see some of the images very well from the right side.

We think it's a great ride - I wouldn't want it to be this way all the time, but it's a very different and interesting variation.

Today was the first AllEars meet at Disneyland! We had quite a few people who came by our little oasis at the Carnation Plaza Gardens. It was fun meeting those of you that I had the chance to meet, and I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to talk to everyone.

Deb posted a picture to twitter: http://twitpic.com/l69u1

The big surprise for me was re-connecting with Mike, who was my computer lab partner back in college - I hadn't seen him since I graduated back in 1982. So yes, you can all say: "it's a small world after all!" :-)

Lee and several others were having an interesting discussion about how other Disneyland attractions could be "Halloween-ized" - making the dark rides in Fantasyland even scarier was one suggestion, or putting holographic ghostly miners in Big Thunder Mountain. And I believe the idea of a zombie it's a small world was very popular...

After the meet a group of us went to lunch at Rancho del Zocalo, where we had a good lunch and a nice chat.

Thanks to everyone who came by!

One thing I forgot to put in my blog yesterday about the one bedroom villas at the Grand Caifornian...see this? Looks like a nice cabinet under the TV, right?

Ahhh...but you see it transforms into a Magical Murphy bed! (But it's not a magical MAGICAL bed, since it only transforms one way and not six...all of you old-time RADP readers will understand that one.) So the one bedroom villas can sleep five people instead of four (though that 5th person had better be pretty short!).

So back to Disney's Halloween Time...I never got back to talking about some of the other aspects of Halloween Time after our visit two weeks ago.

Because of the Celebration Roundup and BBQ back at Big Thunder Ranch, there are some changes in the Halloween decorations there this year. The area is Big Thunder Ranch Halloween Roundup rather than Woody's Halloween Round-Up this year, though they still do some Halloween-themed show items on the stage at the BBQ. But that's not accessible to all park guests like it has been in the past - only those dining there.

The crafts area is still there, but it's much smaller, and there's no cookie decorating this year.

Scaredy-crow Shack is still decorated with all of the pumpkin-headed scarecrows - it's quite festive.

The animals in the petting corral even get some Halloween-themed attire - when we were there a couple weeks ago we watched one of the animal handlers putting bandanas around the necks of the animals - including the turkey! Who was not happy about that, and attempted to peck at her. I was surprised the goats didn't nibble at them, but apparently they are well-fed enough to not need additional fiber in their diets. :-)

But my favorite part of Big Thunder Ranch at Halloween is the pumpkin carvers. They do some really amazing things - I could do a whole photo gallery just on the different pumpkins. But I won't bore you with all of them, so here's a few of my favorites:

There's also some special Halloween treats and desserts. There was supposed to be a Zero's Ghostly Ghoulash served at The French Market, but that hasn't shown up yet for some reason. But there are desserts at several restaurants - Lee and I tried the red-velvet madeleines that are served up in a coffin. That is available at Rancho del Zocalo and The French Market. It was really good.

There's also this Jack Skellington cheesecake:

They also have various kinds of seasonal caramel apples, pumpkin fudge, crispie treats and cookies, and a decorated pumpkin spice muffin.

Another new thing this year is something called a "demitasse". This is a small dessert that's served in a ceramic Mickey pumpkin - it's pretty cute. Inside is a small apple-raisin muffin topped with a sweet caramel mousse. It's served at Rancho del Zocalo, Plaza Inn, Cafe Orleans, Blue Bayou, and Baker's Field Bakery, and perhaps other locations. The price is $6.99.

The Disneyland Band even has special Halloween uniforms! In addition to the orange plume on their hats, the braid on their uniforms is actually a spider web pattern! I haven't heard them play any spooky music, though.

By the way...the parks are VERY crowded this weekend - they added a third Fantasmic! show Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, and by 10:30 a.m. or so they were already parking people in the overflow lots today (Sunday). Fastpasses for Ghost Galaxy were gone for the day by 11:00 this morning.

I'll have more on Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy next time. And I still have to say that Halloween Screams ROCKS!!!!

Lee and I visited Disneyland Friday and Saturday for the start of Halloween Time. I still have several hundred photos to go through, and Lee is still working on video, but wanted to at least get a few things posted.

The fun starts at the Main Entrance, where a very large pumpkin patch containing some familiar-looking faces "grows" above the turnstiles.

The Main Street Pumpkin Festival is back, with all of the pumpkins and other decorations.

And the Dia de Los Muertos display has returned to Zocalo Plaza.

The Halloweentown gang has once again taken over the Haunted Mansion, transforming it into Haunted Mansion Holiday. This year's gingerbread creation in the ballroom is a carousel featuring Zero and several skeletal reindeer.

Over in Disney's California Adventure, Goofy has again been hard at work growing all kinds of delicious candy corn varieties, as Candy Corn Acres returns to Sunshine Plaza.

Candy corn even hangs on the Golden Gate Bridge!

There were a couple of new things this year, including a new holiday overlay to Space Mountain, called Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy.

We'll have more to say about this later, but here's a teaser. We first rode it during the day, but when we went back at night we got an extra surprise - a light and sound and special effects show on the roof of the building. I'm not sure I want to know what's in there trying to get out! :-)

Saving the best for last - for the first time Disneyland gets its own Halloween-themed fireworks show: Halloween Screams - A Villainous Surprise in the Skies. This was amazing. Lee produced this video (two minutes cut out to keep it under youtube's 10-minute limit) that will give you an idea of what it looked like. (Yes, he still needs to get a wide-angle lens for the video camera. :-) ) I loved the music, loved the flying Zero, loved the effects, loved the fireworks. It blew me away, and I can't wait to see it again!

I have to say that Halloween Time is back - and better than ever!

Disney's Halloween Time returns to the Disneyland Resort from September 25 - November 1. It's festive and frightfully good fun! My friend Kristin really loved this last year - she thought it was better than the Christmas holidays!

There are a couple of new things this year:

Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy - the Space Mountain attraction gets its own Halloween makeover this year - with a new soundtrack, sinister sound effects, and spooky new visual effects. "Escape the clutches of creepy cosmic creatures lurking around every corner. Sounds like great fun to me!

Halloween Screams Fireworks - Yes! Disneyland gets its own new Halloween-themed fireworks show, which will be shown every night during Halloween Time. The fireworks are hosted by Jack Skellington, Master of "Scare-omonies". Villains such as Ursula, Maleficent, and Oogie Boogie are scheduled to appear, and Jack's dog Zero will make his flying debut over Sleeping Beauty Castle.

And of course it wouldn't be Halloween at Disneyland without the return of Haunted Mansion Holiday and the Main Street Pumpkin Festival, with over 300 uniquely carved pumpkins decorating the shops on Main Street.

Big Thunder Ranch Halloween Roundup replaces Woody's Halloween Roundup, but Jessie and Woody will still be making appearances and there will be crafts for the kids. The Celebration Roundup and Barbecue will still be in operation, and Miss Chris and the gang will add some Halloween-themed songs to their repertoire.

Goofy's Candy Corn Acres returns to Disney's California Adventure, where Goofy has planted all kinds of candy corn in Sunshine Plaza - everything from candy corn grapes to candy corn tomatoes and pumpkins and carrots! This display is whimsical and fun and always makes me smile.

Mickey's Trick-or-Treat Party returns to DCA for 12 nights in October. Guests can dress in costume and go trick-or-treating at over 20 locations within the park. More information on the party is available on our Mickey's Trick-or-Treat Party page.