Chapter 56
We Have Liftoff

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(Originally posted August 16, 2013)

Finishing up at Disneyland for now, we hopped over to DCA. As we wandered down Buena Vista Street, we noticed this sign for Julius Katz, and we liked the logo.

We started walking toward Paradise Pier, and ran into the Pixar Play Parade for the first time.

Now, we don’t typically sit and watch the parades (and this was no exception), but I still don’t have anything against them—unless they’re blocking my way. As we walked by this one, it was fun to get to see some of the floats for the first time.

Hey Roz…

We were actually en route to our dinner destination for the evening: Boardwalk Pizza and Pasta.

Though we had never been here before, we had read good reviews in a few places, so we were excited to try it out. I liked that you could go through cafeteria-style and grab your food quickly without waiting in line. When we were there (probably just after 5:00pm) there were literally no other customers in the whole place, so we wouldn’t have had to worry anyway.

We opted for the Portobello Mushroom and Spinach Flatbread (with Herbed Marinara, Mozzarella, Artichokes, Pesto, Ricotta Salata and Pecorino Romano).

The occasional downside about cafeteria-style restaurants is that the food doesn’t always taste quite as fresh, and that was true of this pizza. Still, it had some really good flavors to it, and we enjoyed it on the whole. The portion size wasn’t exactly huge, but when we are splitting, that’s always a risk we have to be willing to take. In the end, we decided that we liked this restaurant pretty well and would like to return sometime.

After eating, we circled around through the rest of Paradise Pier and went to check on the single rider line for Radiator Springs Racers. Unfortunately, it was pretty long, so we decided we’d come back later if we wanted to ride.

We kept walking through the park until we got to Carthay Circle. There, we decided to hop onboard a Red Car Trolley that was going in the direction of Hollywoodland.

We thought about riding all the way to the end of the line, but decided to get off in Hollywood so that we could go ride Monsters, Inc.: Mike and Sulley to the Rescue.

I’ll be honest—I had almost forgotten this ride existed, but I was glad it did once we decided to go. It has one of the best-themed queues in all of DCA.

When we got to the front, we were put in our cab and went off through Monstropolis. The ride is just another really fun dark ride in the spirit of the classics—much like Ariel’s Undersea Adventure—and I’m glad that it’s there.

After bidding farewell to our monster friends, we hopped back over to Disneyland because we were finally going to be able to ride Space Mountain! Since the ride had been closed during our Fastpass time earlier, we hoped we would have no problem getting on board, and luckily we were correct.

This was actually the first time we had ever ridden the “regular” version of Space Mountain, since it had been Halloween-time the last time we were here, and hence we had only done the Ghost Galaxy overlay. While we had enjoyed the spookiness of the overlay, the standard ride was pretty fantastic. We had so much fun blasting through space, and I’m so glad that the ride is tamer here than in Disney World because it had hurt my neck so badly there. Here, it’s just so smooth, and that’s part of what makes it fun and thrilling. We weren’t prepared for the camera this time, so here was our first ride picture.

Exiting from Space Mountain, we saw that Mickey happened to be doing a meet and greet in Tomorrowland—very random. Since we hadn’t met the main mouse yet, we decided to get in line. Unfortunately, since it was dark, the crowd for Mickey was extra disorganized, so we had people shoving in from all sides to meet Mickey (sometimes I do miss the character handlers from WDW). We were finally able to get to the front of the crowd.

Leaving Mickey’s mob behind us, we rushed over to Adventureland because we had Indiana Jones Fastpasses that were almost at the end of their window. While waiting for Indy, we realized that DCA was about to close, so we made a plan to rush over to try to get in line for Radiator Springs Racers. As soon as we returned from the Temple of the Forbidden Eye, we booked it out of Disneyland.

Passing through the DCA turnstiles with just about 10 minutes to spare, we made it to the back of Cars Land and found the single rider line was almost nonexistent. It was a little sad being split up from Tracy for the first time as we were sent to different cars. She actually made me jealous afterward because she got to go through the Luigi’s side for the first time while I repeated Ramone’s. We were spaced a few cars apart, so we didn’t get to race against each other, and I’m not sure who won either of our races.

Successful in our endeavor to ride several attractions in a relatively short amount of time, we officially closed DCA and went home.

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