Chapter 172
Towin’ in a Winter Wonderland

Season’s speedings! It’s time for Christmas in Radiator Springs.

I’m always interested in this snowman car they’ve created. I wonder what his story is.

The decorations down the main strip in Cars Land were really pretty.

And I always appreciate small touches like this Santa hat Mater is wearing.

Tires, tires everywhere.

Sarge just really goes all out for the holidays. How patriotic of him.

I love the look of the Cozy Cone with all its decorations.

And don’t forget the cone tree!

Our favorite detail that we actually didn’t notice until this year is that all the cords are “plugged” into one giant car battery behind the cone tree. Because how else would a bunch of cars power anything?

Lovely (tacky) decorations outside the curios shop.

And honestly, Flo’s doesn’t need any decorations to be stunning at night. But I like the few they do add.

Here’s the big tire tree outside Luigi’s.

And here is Ramone’s all illuminated as well.

Santa Mater started coming down the street as we went around taking pictures.

Gotta love Stanley and his hubcap tree.

And here’s a fun shot looking back down the street at all the overhanging decorations.

Now that we’d slowly taken in all the decorations around the land, we went to Radiator Springs Racers to use our DAS time.

The standby line was the shortest I’d ever seen it. There was no one wrapped around all the switchbacks in the oil bottle house.

Our ride was decent, even though we got Ramone’s side and lost our race.

We decided to ride Luigi’s next because there was no wait. I stopped beneath the “tree” first, though, to take a picture.

Since we usually get a DAS time for Luigi’s, we rarely get to see the inside queue, but it’s so well-themed.

When we got onto the ride, our tire was a dud and wouldn’t really move for us. Luckily, since there was practically no one else waiting to get on, we asked if we could switch tires and stay on for a second go-round, and the cast member had no problem with that.

The second ride was much more fun—in part because our tire was in better shape, but in part because we discovered a new riding technique. We saw a guy in one of the tires near ours who was really getting into leaning. He put his arms up in the air and flung his entire body around whenever he wanted to switch directions, but he was moving quite well. After laughing at him for a while, we decided to follow suit and were soon flying across the floor even more than usual.

Honestly, I think if everyone somehow had the opportunity to practice and improve with the tires, the attraction wouldn’t be facing imminent closure. Tracy and I still always have so much fun when we ride it, and we’ll definitely miss it when it’s gone.

After our tire experiences, we went back to Cozy Cone to check out the gingerbread house in the lobby, per advice from DISBoards reader/moderator Sherry E.

We thought this was just so cute and extremely well-done.

It’s a little frustrating to be kept so far away by the glass, but I zoomed in as much as possible to get a few close-ups.

I also took a few pictures of some of our favorite photos from the walls inside this lobby. They’re there year-round, but it’s one of those details I don’t notice often enough.

The fireworks had just started exploding over Disneyland, and I’m always amazed how decent the view is from several different parts of DCA.

Tracy decided to ride Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree. Now, I’ve gotten pretty good about riding rough attractions—I even frequent the Matterhorn at this point—but this is one that my neck just can’t handle.

I waited in line with Tracy, though, and planned to just take the chicken exit when I got to the front.

One advantage of sitting to the side is that I was able to get a rare photo of Tracy on an attraction from far away.

I tried to keep photographing her as she got flung around more and more.

I don’t know if I’ll ever attempt this attraction again, which is a bummer because it always looks so fun from the side. Even Tracy had decided that it would be a very long time before she subjected herself to the whiplash again, however.

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