October 21, 2014

Chapter 9
Who’s This Jackass?

Previous Post | Next Post
Table of Contents

I accompanied Tracy to work on Wednesday, and we were both a little exhausted from the Halloween Party the night before. On the way out of the hotel, I liked this Dumbo topiary (even if it was mostly wire mesh).

Even though we’d spent the previous evening entirely at Disneyland, we had been on a party schedule, so we headed back there after work to get the regular park-going experience.

Our favorite pumpkin-eating pumpkin didn’t get his little friend this year…

We wanted a snack right when we got to the park, so we opted for a Mickey Pretzel.

Halloween season was still several days from being over, but the castle had already gotten a dusting of snow on its center turrets overnight.

I love looking at the castle from this angle. It almost lets you forget about all the other people hanging around.

We made a beeline straight back to Big Thunder Ranch (which I guess is why you could say that we aren’t average theme park visitors…). We were excited to see everyone since the ranch had been closed when we arrived the previous day.

Our first thought when we walked up was “Oh look, Pocahontas and Pancho are both out today.” But after looking at them for a few seconds, Tracy realized these were two donkeys we’d never seen before! We immediately went up to a cast member and asked who the new residents were and what had happened to our old friends. The new donkeys are Dot and Daisy, she responded, and Pancho and Pocahontas had been retired. They went off to live on a farm (which we’re really hoping isn’t a euphemism…).

It was such a sad moment realizing that we wouldn’t get to see our buddies again, but we thought it was sort of fitting that they would get retired just a few months after we moved away from Disneyland.

Clarabelle was still around and hanging out in the back pen.

We went in to see our goat pals next, but neither Pongo nor Jane were anywhere to be seen either. We had to ask a cast member where they were today—and we were scared because of the answer we’d gotten regarding the donkeys—but she said that it was just their bath day so they would be back in the morning. (As a side note, Pongo and Jane have both been retired recently as well, but we did get to see them a few more times first).

We greeted the rest of our friends instead.

Everyone was looking so fetching with their Halloween bandanas on.

On the way out, we took a couple more pictures of the imposter donkeys.

It’s always our tradition to ride Pirates first on each trip, but we’d had other things to do the previous night. We got a DAS time for it right when we arrived this afternoon, however, and made sure that it was the first attraction of our day.

We had also pulled Fastpasses for Big Thunder Mountain, and it was already time to use those.

By the time we got done with these first attractions, the sun was already starting to set on the castle.

Since I had been feverishly working on my Disneyland guide, I had just recently written about the Disney family coat of arms above the castle archway, and I finally got a decent picture of it.