Chapter 12
A Whale of a Tail

After making the hop to Disneyland, we started to head down Main Street toward our first destination. Since we were in that sweet spot between the 4th of July and Labor Day, the whole street was still decked out in its patriotic regalia.

Of course, one of our first stops had to be Fantasyland so that Tracy could pose with the Cheshire Cat. They just look so much alike in this picture that I can’t tell which is which.

We’d gotten a DAS time for Alice in Wonderland in honor the new tail as well, but when Tracy boarded the attraction the cast member said, “Ma’am, you’ll have to remove your backpack.”

Tracy made to start taking it off and murmured, “It’s a tail” under her breath.

He quipped back, “Okay… you’ll have to remove your tail.”

Alice done, we crossed the rest of Fantasyland to head toward Big Thunder Trail.

Arriving back at the Ranch, we laughed at the horse who was out for meet-and-greets (I feel ashamed that I still can’t tell the horses apart for the life of me). He was very tired, so he’d leaned his mouth against the fence to take a nap.

Pocahontas was back in the donkey pen, and we had no way of knowing that this would be one of the last times we’d EVER see her!

Walking through the merchandise shop in Frontierland, I liked how Meeko is immortalized on the front panels of the checkout counters.

I think we’d gotten Fastpasses for Splash Mountain at some point, because the next photo I have shows us riding. Luckily, we didn’t get TOO wet—we’d wanted to cool off, but we never want to be soaked in the parks.

As usual, we followed up a ride on Splash with a sweet treat from Pooh Corner. We couldn’t decide what to get right away, and as we were browsing, I took a picture of all the new Frozen snacks. Honestly, the couple months we had been gone from Disneyland seemed to be all the time the company needed to make sure that this film was absolutely EVERYWHERE in the parks.

In the end, we decided on a Peanut Butter Sandwich—because it’s impossible to go wrong with one of these sweet treats.

All the sugar had gotten us in the mood to hang out with the bear who loves honey, so we hopped in the short line for Winnie the Pooh next.

I snapped a few pictures while we waited.

Our next DAS time was for Big Thunder, so we went there next.

While we made our way through the queue, we heard inimitable British accents shouting “It’s the Cats of Disneyland” from the queue on the other side of the railing, and we realized that our new friends from Twitter were also waiting to ride.

 Big Thunder was awesome as always, and we got a time for Indiana Jones after riding. While we waited, however, we stopped for dinner at Harbour Galley.

I feel like our discovery of the BBQ Chicken Baked Potato happened sometime in the lost months of 2014, but I should say that this is always one of my favorite meals at Disneyland now. It’s cheap and it’s filling and it’s delicious.

While we ate, we noticed that this duck was hiding out in the bushes beneath us, so we threw her a few pieces of cabbage.

We decided to try one more Adventure Trading Company mission, and this time we chose based on the Juju we wanted to receive—the elephant! We were given our newspaper, The Daily Gnus, which would help us find all the clues we’d need.

I’m embarrassed to admit that we had never gotten the “they must be gnu” joke on the Jungle Cruise until we actually saw the word GNUS spelled out on the newspaper. We felt a little dumb.

The cast member who sold us our kit for this mission also gave us name tags because we hadn’t gotten them the night before.

I was Tangaroa Taylor.

We also had Tiki Tiki Tracy with her lovely tail.

We settled into a bench at the River Belle Terrace to read through the newspaper and complete all of our tasks because it was wonderfully air conditioned inside the restaurant and we felt like we were melting outside.

In the end, the mission led us to Westward Ho! (which we thought was funny because it had us leave Adventureland). We started to make our way over.

And here was the final clue we needed to claim our prize.

There was another group of people in there also trying to do our mission, but they seemed to be really confused about how the game worked and were still looking for more clues even after we’d all claimed our Jujus. I don’t think that’s how it works, champs…

Upon heading back outside, we noticed some of the first Halloween decorations that had gone up since the beginning of the week.

We were also interested in the Legends of Frontierland game that had taken over that area of the park, but it looked like everyone had already packed up for the day because night was getting ready to fall.

After taking a spin through the temple with Indiana Jones, we got our next time for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and started to make our way toward nowhere in particular—I mean… Fantasyland.

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