August 15th, 2014
Chapter 8
Adventure Time
Friday arrived, and I hung back at the hotel to work again. I stayed in our room at the Fairfield for the whole morning, but then loaded up my backpack to venture out at lunchtime. It was another hot afternoon, and I didn’t really want to have to go all the way to Downtown Disney before eating, so I ended up just stopping at McDonald’s for a quick meal.
After lunch, I started walking again toward the gateway to the magic.
This time I went straight to the Grand Californian and found a comfortable seat in the lobby where I could work for the afternoon. At some point, I got hungry for a nosh, so I walked over to White Water Snacks and ordered a Mickey Pretzel with Cheese.
When I got sick of working, I took a break to wander the lobby. I’d never noticed this Hidden Mickey in the grandfather clock before.
Luckily, since it was Friday, neither Tracy nor I really worked until the typical end of the day. Instead, we met up back at our hotel and then made our way into the parks.
We noticed in one of the shop windows on Main Street that Duffy has so many outfits at this point. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to collect them all.
Our main mission before dinner this afternoon was to try out the new Adventure Trading Company game in Adventureland. We’d noticed plenty of people participating and collecting their Jujus over the last few days, but now we wanted to see what the fuss was all about for ourselves.
A section of the Indiana Jones Adventure Outpost had been overtaken by the Trading Company’s registration booth.
They really went all-out with theming, especially considering this was a temporary addition.
The cast member working the register explained to us how the different adventures worked and let us choose either based on the location or based on the Juju we wanted to earn. We chose the Jungle Cruise Skipper School adventure because we already had a DAS time for the attraction and it sounded like it would be fun.
Of course, it’s impossible to be a good Jungle Cruise Skipper on an empty stomach, so we got the new souvenir popcorn bucket—commemorating the Haunted Mansion’s 45th anniversary—as sustenance for our adventure.
I normally wouldn’t post about our mission so as not to spoil it for those of you who wanted to discover it for yourselves, but since the Adventure Trading Company is gone, I guess there’s no harm. Our little activities booklet had several lessons. The first one helped teach us the directions on a boat (e.g. top, bottom, front, back, steering wheel, etc). Our next lesson had us match up some of the Jungle Cruise flora and fauna with the jokes about them.
Lesson 3 was the trickiest. It required us to ride the Jungle Cruise and chart the attraction’s course. This one was my duty, so we hopped on the attraction and I started trying to draw everything we passed.
Here was my final map.
The final assessment (to make sure that we were ready to become skippers ourselves) required one of us to tell our favorite Jungle Cruise joke to the adjudicator. I chose the “psychics and mind-readers” joke, because it’s always one of my favorites. And lo and behold, we passed! We were presented with our Juju.
The other adventure we had signed up for at the outpost was the one that would eventually lead us to Trader Sam’s Enchanted Tiki Bar. Since we were going to the Disneyland Hotel for dinner, we thought that a trip to Trader Sam’s might be on the docket anyway. For this mission, the packet of clues was given to us for free (as opposed to the $5 you had to pay for the other missions). Since the point of the adventure was to find ingredients for a special drink, paying for the drink at the bar would be the monetary transaction for this mission.
We started off by reading the telegram that gave us information about our task.
Next, we had to go to several different locations around Adventureland to write down the ingredients we would need for our special drink.
They included Tiki Drool:
Back Side of Water:
And, of course, no drink is complete without Spider Eggs:
After writing down all the ingredients, it was time for us to start making our way out of Adventureland so we could get to our dinner reservation. We were really happy with our first experience with the Adventure Trading Company, though. It was a fun addition to one of the best-themed lands in the park, and we’d enjoyed our first mission-and-a-half.
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