Chapter 131
Koko Selga

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(Originally posted January 9, 2014)

August 11-16, 2013

On Sunday, we slept in. Late. I think we woke up just barely before noon. It felt so wonderful to stay in after the two busy days we’d just had—though we’d enjoyed every minute of the Expo—and I’ll admit to feeling a little bit of schadenfreude as we read through Twitter and saw people griping about getting up at the crack of dawn to head to the convention center again.

We’d made lunch plans with our friend Eddie because this would actually be one of our last chances to hang out with him. He was flying to Colorado for the coming week, and then we would be in Colorado for the better part of the next two weeks. When we got back, his summer vacation would already almost be over, and he would have to go back to New Jersey.

After dinner, it was time to head to Disneyland for the aforementioned Koko Selga Meet. We were so excited to meet this weird little creature after ogling her on Instagram for so long. After parking and taking the tram, we went to the agreed upon meeting place, the picnic area outside bag check. We thought we’d be the first ones there, but it turned out that Jen and Koko had already arrived.

We brought her a bag of Snausages, so she warmed up to us faster than most strangers (apparently).

Koko really liked getting her butt scratched.

Jen had even brought some mouse ears for her to try on.

After several minutes of being the only ones who had come to the meet, more people started arriving. Guy came over from the Expo along with a couple friends, and Dave from Arizona showed up after hearing about the meetup the previous night. We got to hear about the goings on from Expo Day 3, and we once again couldn’t really decide if we were sad to have missed it. It seemed like the Imagineering panels were interesting, but nothing HUGE went on.

While we were sitting back in the picnic area, we noticed a couple Disneyland Cats lurking in the bushes back there, and I got a picture of one of them.

The meetup eventually broke up after a little over an hour, and Tracy and I decided to head into Disneyland briefly.

For some reason, as we walked by Jolly Holiday, I noticed this awesome Mary Poppins weathervane for the first time.

Our main destination was Adventureland, where they had just gotten the Tiki Souvenir Sipper back in stock at the Tiki Juice Bar. These had been billed as a limited time piece of merchandise on the Tiki Room’s 50th birthday and had sold out in a matter of hours, but it seemed they had gotten a few more in stock, and we didn’t want to miss them again.

In reality, they’ve actually had these ever since this evening, so we didn’t really need to scramble to get one. Oh well, we like ours. We got it complete with Pineapple Juice.

It was actually a tasty “snack” for the evening. We decided since we were there anyway, we might as well enjoy our juice while watching the show in the Tiki Room.

This time we sat in the back row for the first time, and we enjoyed the show much more. No longer did we have to crane our necks quite as far, which was such a nice change.

After the show came to an end, we decided to head out, so we went home and went to bed.

I feel like most “normal” people would have taken at least one day off Disney after all the Expo overload, but we certainly aren’t normal. We actually didn’t plan to go to the parks on Monday, but then we started seeing pictures on Instagram indicating that the first vestiges of Halloween had started appearing already. We felt like we HAD to go check it out, so we ended up driving over after dinner.

We arrived and went straight to World of Disney, where we knew there was bound to be some of the Halloween merchandise. The first thing we saw was this year’s mug, and we knew we had to have it for two reasons: 1) it was awesome, and 2) it included Duffy!

We also liked a lot of the other merchandise scattered around in this new Halloween section.

Of course, when the merchandise came out, they also had to start putting up the rest of the decorations in the store.

You’ll recall that our first experience at Disneyland was at Halloweentime, and it’s when we fell in love with the parks, so we were REALLY excited for this holiday to be coming again (even if it was still more than two months away). In the end, we decided to come back for the mug at the end of the night so we wouldn’t have to carry it around, but Tracy bought these Halloween mouse ears to wear immediately.

Heading into the parks, we were disappointed to realize that summer crowds were still in full swing in spite of the Halloween merchandise making it feel like fall. Walking down Main Street, I thought it was fitting that we noticed this particular window/door.

We headed in to ride Pirates and discovered no wait, which made us quite happy.

Next, we rode the Haunted Mansion (possibly) one last time before it was slated to go down for the holiday overlay to be installed. We followed that up with a trip aboard the Disneyland Railroad around from New Orleans Square to the front of the park. We’d had enough of crowds in the short time we’d been here, so we decided this was enough park time for today. Heading back out, we bought our mug at World of Disney and went home.

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