Chapter 61
DISers in Real Life

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(Originally posted September 5, 2013)

Saturday afternoon, we arrived at the resort after lunch. We parked and headed over to DCA. Getting through the entrance, we saw a Red Car Trolley waiting for us, and we decided to take a ride.

Tracy was trying to stay incognito.

Getting off the trolley in Hollywood Land, we went into the Animation Building to take our first Animation Academy class since getting our passes. We learned to draw Winnie the Pooh. Here’s my drawing.

And here’s Tracy’s.

In case you couldn’t tell from the first picture of me, I was wearing my Duffy shirt today, so of course we had to go meet our favorite Disney bear. I know we joke about how WDW Duffy wasn’t really “ecstatic” about Tracy’s ears when we met him in Epcot, but this Duffy really was ECSTATIC about my shirt.

I can all but guarantee I was the first person to ever meet him wearing a Duffy shirt, so it must have been quite the experience. The cast members couldn’t believe such a shirt existed, so I had to explain that it was from Etsy.

Following our meeting with Duffy, we looked inside his store for a while, and we liked his display.

Next, we walked over to Pacific Wharf and got what I like to describe as the “free snack trifecta.” Of course, this means we got a free sample from the bakery tour, a chocolate square from Ghirardelli, and free cups of water from the Pacific Wharf Café.

Heading over to Toy Story Mania, I was blown out of the water by Tracy as she got her best score ever.

She was the first one of the two of us to ever move beyond the beaver prize to get a kitty.

Next, we hopped over to Disneyland, and while walking through the Esplanade, I happened to look down at one of the bricks we passed. I did a double-take before realizing it was, in fact, from THE Hanks family.

At Disneyland, we walked straight back to Big Thunder Ranch to see if Pancho was out. Unfortunately, both he and Pocahontas were in the cage where you can’t pet them (we refer to it as “jail”).

We said hi to the goats.

And we decided to meet Jessie because she was out with no line.

Soon after this point, we made a decision that we THOUGHT sounded like a smart idea. Since we only live about 10 minutes away, we thought that we could go home for dinner, save a few bucks, and then come back to enjoy the evening in the parks. What ended up happening, though, was that we went home and made our dinner, and then by the time we got back well over two hours had passed. Our plan to save money had cost us a lot of time (and probably hadn’t even saved us that much money, once you consider the price of gas). We decided in the future, therefore, that we would either stay and pay for a Disney meal or just call it a day when we went home to eat.

Once we got back to Disneyland, we rode “it’s a small world” again. One of the hula girls was still missing, but some of the other animatronics that had been gone on the first day were back already.

We also enjoyed a grand circle tour aboard the Disneyland Railroad before calling it a night.

Sunday morning was set to have an early start for Tracy. First, we’ll play a little catch-up on things that were going on outside of Disneyland. Tracy’s brother Steve had been working for a company in L.A., but he was very unhappy with his job. He had been looking for a new job for several months, but he finally had to concede that his search was going to have to take him out of California. We got the news toward the end of February, therefore, that Steve had gotten his dream job with a great company. The catch was that he was going to have to move to St. Louis. The situation was great for him, but we were sad to be losing our only family member in our immediate vicinity.

Steve was going to be moving in just a few weeks, and he wanted to take one last trip to Disneyland before he went. On a scale of 1-10 among Disney-lovers, Steve is probably a 4 or a 5. He definitely likes the parks and has a huge amount of respect for them, but he’s not anywhere near as obsessed as we are. When he moved to L.A. about 4 years ago, he came to Disneyland a handful of times, but he hadn’t been since the DCA expansion was complete. He decided that he wanted to check out everything new at DCA and ride his favorites at Disneyland before leaving.

Tracy and I are always gung ho to visit the parks with anyone, but in this scenario, I didn’t think I would be the best travel companion. Since Steve was most interested in riding Radiator Springs Racers, he wanted to hit rope drop, and he was looking to be done with the visit by early afternoon. Obviously, that schedule doesn’t match up very well with my health issues, so I had to bow out of the trip.

Tracy and Steve headed to Disneyland early on Sunday morning to tour commando-style, and I slept in. While they were there, Tracy was coerced into riding California Screamin’ for the first time (we had been avoiding it since I reacted badly to Expedition Everest at WDW and didn’t know how I’d do). Though she’s not really a fan of the launch at the beginning of these coasters, Tracy still claims she really enjoyed it! They also hit Radiator Springs Racers, Toy Story Mania, The Little Mermaid, Indiana Jones, the Matterhorn, Space Mountain, The Haunted Mansion and the Monorail all before a late lunch. They then headed to Downtown Disney for lunch at Earl of Sandwich. They had to wait for almost an hour and a half between the length of the line out the doors and the wait to get their food, but Tracy said her Holiday Sandwich was almost worth the wait. Almost.

After they got back from Disneyland and recounted their adventures, Steve went home, but we made plans to see him one more time before he left the California sunshine for the terrible Missouri weather.

Feeling a little jealous of Tracy’s exciting morning in the parks, I convinced her to return back to Disneyland for a little while with me that afternoon. We decided to mostly take it easy because Tracy was feeling a little exhausted after doing such hardcore touring earlier. One of our main goals was pin trading because we had just bought a new lot off of eBay.

We started in DCA and went back to the Grizzly Peak area. We had never been into the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail, so we started off our afternoon by looking around in there.

It’s a really neat area of the park, so we decided we’d have to go back and visit in earnest sometime soon.

After trading pins all along the way back to Paradise Pier, we stopped at Corn Dog Castle for another of those delicious Hot Link Corn Dogs.

Our first one was actually really burnt on the outside so we brought it back up to the counter and asked to exchange it. The second one was delicious.

We didn’t really know what we wanted to do with the rest of the evening, but we DID know that we wanted to facilitate our first ever DIS meet! Rachel (OhioStateBuckeye) and her boyfriend Brian were on the last day of their trip to Disneyland. After seeing us across the way at DCA one day, she had left a comment on my trip report, and we had exchanged numbers to plan on meeting up.

Tracy and I had just finished riding Soarin’ Over California when I got a text from Rachel saying they had just made it into DCA. We waited at a bench outside the attraction and met up with them after they finished using their Fastpasses for the same ride. It was great getting to meet up with and chat with our very first readers (I’ll admit, we felt super famous), and Rachel and Brian couldn’t have been nicer. Since it was their last day here, they admitted they were EXHAUSTED, but they had reservations for the Fantasmic Dessert Party that they needed to go check in for. After a quick conversation, they headed off to Disneyland and we headed home (taking a quick ride on the Red Car Trolley before exiting). It just felt so nice to have one of our DISboards interactions get to hop off the computer screen and take place in real life, so I was glad we got to have our little meet. You can read Rachel’s side of the story on her great trip report (which included trips all over SoCal).

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