Prologue

It feels a little bizarre to be writing about a “trip” to Disneyland again after having lived there for more than a year-and-a-half. Tracy and I currently have a pretty awesome situation going on, however. Since she still works at CoolTech (which still has an Orange County office), and since I am still self-employed, we can essentially take a trip out to SoCal anytime we want AND have most of our expenses paid for.

We decided to take advantage of this new setup for the first time in mid-August. Our APs are still good until February, so the only thing we really had to pay for out-of-pocket up-front was my plane ticket—and I had more than enough miles for a free flight on Southwest, so that cost us a grand total of five dollars.

This trip would technically be a “working vacation,” but we would have every evening free to hit the parks—plus we planned to pay for an extra night at a hotel ourselves so that we could have the entire weekend for Disneylanding. The trip took place from August 12th-17th, 2014, and we would be trying out Good Neighbor hotels for the first time. I say HOTELS because we would be switching from the Fairfield Inn to the Camelot Inn and Suites for our final night (just because it was a little cheaper for us to pay for ourselves).

On Tuesday morning, we packed our bags and drove to the airport to fly out to Orange County. We’ve gotten very used to doing the flight from DEN to SNA over the last couple years, but it still was a little odd to be doing the trip in reverse this time. For instance, we had to park at the airport in Denver for the first time in I don’t know how long. Luckily, our flight was uneventful. Tracy worked and I read, and we’d landed before long.

John Wayne hadn’t changed a bit, though this was our first time renting a car here. We got our luggage and walked to the National lot—where we got to pick out our own car from about three different choices. We chose a white Nissan Altima (which we named Olaf) and were soon on our way. We didn’t go straight to the hotel (or Disneyland) even though we would have loved to. Instead, we headed to the new CoolTech office in Orange and worked for the rest of the afternoon.

Calling it quits around 4:00pm—okay, so we didn’t work all afternoon, per say—we took the very familiar route north on the 5 toward Disneyland. It was very exciting spotting the towering Matterhorn, Mickey’s Fun Wheel, the Tower of Terror, and other landmarks as we got close. It had been more than two months, after all, since our last visit.

We took Disney Way to Harbor and started looking for the Fairfield Inn. Unfortunately, we missed the entrance on our first drive-by and had to do a huge out-of-the-way loop to get back to it again because there are so many spots with no U-turns. (Pro-tip: if you are staying at the Fairfield Inn, the turn-in is abysmally marked, but it’s located immediately after the McDonald’s).

Finally, we made it back around and found the front of the hotel that would be our home for the next four nights.

After checking in, we found out that valet is included in the high cost of parking, so we sent the car on its way and went to check out our room.

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