Chapter 161
Birthday Shenanigans

October 28, 2013

Tracy had taken my birthday off from work, so we allowed ourselves to sleep in a bit. Unfortunately, when we woke up and I rolled over to check my phone, we had a message from Disneyland. Since it had rained a little overnight and there was something like a 30-percent chance of rain this afternoon, Big Thunder Ranch Barbecue (where we had our dinner reservation) was going to be closed today. Weather will always be one of those things that it’s just impossible to control, and while it rarely comes into play in SoCal, you never know when it might throw off your plans.

In the voicemail, they had offered to set us up with a reservation at a different table service restaurant, but I figured that I’d rather wait until some other time when we could have my “birthday” dinner at Big Thunder rather than blowing the money on a different sit-down meal and not being able to justify paying for the barbecue later. Instead, we would just plan on having one of our favorite counter service restaurants for dinner tonight.

Getting up, it was time for presents (of course)! You’ll excuse the fact that it’s quite clear in these photos that I literally just rolled out of bed.

Actually, first, I’ll take you back in time to the previous night, when I opened a “birthday eve” present—a tradition we have adapted from Christmas—at about midnight.

It was a raccoon wall decal that Tracy had quite randomly found on Etsy! Now we could make it look like a mischievous raccoon was always peering around the corner of the kitchen.

Okay, now back to my actual birthday morning.

Duffy got the first present, in the form of a Sorcerer Mickey costume.

Continuing the Duffy theme, I also got his storybook.

Next was the Haunted Mansion coaster set.

This Harry Potter shirt literally gains me more compliments than probably anything else in my entire wardrobe whenever I wear it.

This Disneyland mousepad has a nice wrist pad in addition to featuring plenty of lovely Disney characters.

And last but not least, the Haunted Mansion throw is soft, warm, and beautifully designed.

It had been a good haul from Tracy.

Crooky was also there while I opened all my presents, but he was pretty disinterested.

He was mostly just glad when I was done ripping open wrapping paper and all the attention could once again be on him.

After going to In-N-Out for lunch, we drove over to Disneyland and parked at Mickey and Friends. Even from the moment we parked, it was clear just how different it was to be here when the crowds were light as opposed to all the busy weekends and party nights we’d gotten used to over the last few weeks.

There were no lines for us to enter Disneyland.

And Town Square looked wonderfully deserted.

They were filming a commercial today, so we saw the crew all set up on Main Street.

The Omnibus was ready and loading when we first got into the park.

But we decided we’d rather ride the Horse-Drawn Streetcar, so while we waited for it to pull up, we walked around Town Square and took a few pictures in the beautiful daytime light.

Finally, we heard a horse off in the distance.

There was also plenty of boisterous music emanating from the Main Street Straw Hatters.

The horse pulled up.

We asked if we could sit in the front row, which gave us a prime view of the horse’s… um… “rear gear.”

Before long, we were off.

I think that the Streetcar, like the Ombnibus, affords such unique views of the park.

The horse today was Finn, who was still practically new to the experience of working in the parks, so he was a little misbehaved.

Since this was the first time we’d really gotten an opportunity to take photos of the “snowy” castle, we took the time out to snap a few.

And we even had the Photopass photographer take one of us.

Walking into Fantasyland, we got a return time for Alice in Wonderland and then wandered around while we waited. It was nuts how much of a construction site this land resembled with both Dumbo and the Carrousel closed.

To this day, we’ve never gotten to meet Peter Pan in the park because he’s always so hard to pin down. When we saw him running around Fantasyland, we tried to chase after him to at least take a few pictures.

While we were killing time, we decided to go wait to see Merida because she was another of the few remaining characters we’d never met before.

The three brothers.

Finally it was our turn, but the cast member who took the photo on our camera did it while we were looking at the Photopass camera so we’re all focused somewhere vaguely to the left.

“it’s a small world” was also closed as they installed the overlay, but we could see that plenty of lights had already started to appear.

We also found these lovely new plushes in the shop at the Small World exit (little did we know that we’d actually find these majorly on sale from the Disney Store on Black Friday).