Chapter 145
One Last Farewell

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(Originally posted March 14, 2014)

We grabbed Soarin’ Fastpasses because the return time was the same length as the standby queue—I feel like that’s almost always the case, and yet people are STILL willing to wait standby… While we killed some time, we walked through Paradise Pier and also got GAC return passes for Toy Story Mania.

On the way back toward Soarin’, we stopped into the Duffy store, and Tracy became enamored with this new set of charms they were selling there. Her favorite was the Orange Bird.

We rode Soarin’ and were more than a little grossed out with how they had integrated the Planes characters into the preshow. This is one instance where Disney’s tendency toward synergy just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. After we were back on the ground, we went back around to Paradise Pier and rode Toy Story.

Not only did I get my highest score yet, but I also broke into the next class of prizes!! I bade farewell to the kitty and greeted the deer. I was pretty proud of my score.

After our ride was complete, we decided to head out, so we exited the park and walked back to Mickey and Friends via the Grand Californian and Downtown Disney. The tram route was still under construction, so we decided it would be best not to wait forever.

We arrived on Saturday after lunch to find Mickey and Friends closed. Whenever that happens and everyone gets redirected to Toy Story at once, it creates quite the mess. About a half-hour later, we were finally parked and making our way toward the entrance plaza via bus. As we arrived at the esplanade, the line into Disneyland was pretty impressive.

We still hadn’t gotten sick of seeing the pumpkins lining the main entrance yet, so I took some more pictures while we waited.

As we got into the park, I just noticed that all the fall colors seemed so bright today. It was all really pretty and very festive.

We saw that the Horse-Drawn Streetcar was pulling up as we stood in Town Square, but unfortunately we had just missed the last ride of the day.

I still took this opportunity to take some pictures of the festive tail and mane adornments that this fellow was sporting, however.

We decided to get our first drink from the new Starbucks, and we opted for a drink that was new to us as well—a Pumpkin Spice Crème Frappuccino.

The line definitely took a little while (as did the wait), but we got our drink eventually and it turned out quite well. We sat in the Book Rest and admired all the decorations and theming while we drank.

My favorite thing that we noticed is how at least 25 percent of the books they feature on these shelves happen to be War and Peace. I guess the owner of the Book Rest is a HUGE Tolstoy fan…?

In spite of the rumored closing dates earlier in the month, today was officially supposed to be the last day the Court of Angels was going to be open, so we decided to bring our drink over there to enjoy it after we had sat in Starbucks for a while. En route, we saw this interesting bird that always seems to be perched on the rock next to the Frontierland bridge.

The lovely sight was still there to welcome us one last time.

Everyone seemed to have cottoned on to the fact that this was going to be gone soon, so there were actually quite a few people in the area most of the time we were there. One of the guys who was milling about actually volunteered to take Tracy and my picture so that we would always have one to remember the place by.

Finally, we felt like we had mourned long enough, so we said our last goodbyes to this pretty area of the park and went back into New Orleans Square.

While back there, we met up with Jason and Brianne as well as their kids and their friend Bob Angelo from MouseChat. We talked to them for several minutes before going our separate ways.

We headed to the Haunted Mansion (pretty much a given during these first trips once the overlay had opened because Tracy loves it so much). After riding, I wanted to take a spin on the Mark Twain. It was another EXTREMELY hot afternoon, but we were luckily able to grab spots in the shade to ride the riverboat around.

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