I'm an infrequent Disney traveler, my last trip was when my son just turned 3 (he's almost 6 now), and that was just before Galaxy's edge opened, my trip before that was before he was born(or conceived) , so when changes happen they do tend to stick out more as they are typically more than minor changes.
Reason
People need a reason to go? Well yeah... The reason for the trip was because my kid's school has Lunar New Year off, and the Monday as well making it a 4 day weekend, combined that with COVID making the use of our timeshare (Worldmark) very infrequent the past 2 years we had a lot of credits we had to use up before they expired, so why not Disneyland? Plus his height put him as being able to ride almost everything, only things he couldn't ride were Indiana Jones and the Incredicoaster. Our last trip was quite a bit more tame since he was smaller (Winnie the Pooh was our jam... 6 times in a row last time right after dinner before we left!) , but this trip he wanted to ride the bigger ones so wife and I were quite happy, because it made us feel a bit more value in the price of admission, even though he was no longer free it we got to ride some more exciting ones so it balanced out.
Kid's response
Now every kid is different, so by no means let my kid's reactions dictate what your kid should or shouldn't do, but we did try and prepare him by showing him some videos of the faster rides, the prior time the fastest thing we did was the Go Go Gadget Coaster which pushed the boundary of his comfort level (even though he said he wanted to ride it). So he did not like Space Mountain (we did that first as per his request) but mostly because it was dark (I know, the best part!), he didn't like Big Thunder when we did it at night the first night, but 3 days later we did it during the day and he was a fan. In fact the only rides he really didn't like was Guardians and Space Mountain, he even loved the Star Wars rides and other than some pajamas he has with characters he doesn't even know what Star Wars is. Do need to find better ways to keep him entertained though, we had snacks, but nothing to keep him busy really he didn't have meltdowns at all but his energy was redirected into poking, slapping, kicking, headbutting, my wife and I's stomach/hands/whatever was within reach quite a bit causing a bit of anger out of the two of us, it was understandable why he was doing it but as a parent sometimes you really want stop to mean STOP especially when your feet are hurting too
Scheduling
Until my kid gets to be a teenager, I think the idea of being there for rope drop is a thing of the pass. First it's a half-mile walk from the resort to the parking lot to take a bus over there, sure we could probably be there quicker if just walked straight there but a half mile less of walking (times two for round trip!) sure sounds like a nicer idea. Plus getting everything ready for the day, eating breakfast, packing bags with snacks, etc, ends up taking a lot more time than I anticipate, before having a child bringing anything to the park other than maybe a water bottle never crossed my mind, now it's a necessity! Now meals really didn't have any schedule, of course my kid would rather do rides than eat food, so lunch was in the 1:30 to 2:30 range but we did have said mentioned snacks so it's not like he was totally hungry, and while one of the Saturday did have the park open until midnight, much like rope drop the days of staying that late are long gone, and we basically left right at fireworks.
Change #1 - Crowds
The first big change it seemed is that slow days don't really exist any more, my wife and I used to go 2nd week of January (pre-child) with the idea that all kids were back in school and it seemed really dead at the time. The weekends I could understand being more crowded, and don't get me wrong I've been in the summer and it wasn't that level of crowded, but the Monday & Tuesday had a lot more people that I anticipated, and I'm pretty sure not many (anything other than San Francisco?) districts give time off for Lunar New Year. So unsure if that was just parents pulling their kids out of school, or maybe they were still home schooled due to COVID? either way, I did wish the crowds were more "everything is more or less a walk on" but they weren't. Now this is by no means a direct complaint, "why can't you people keep your kids in a proper school!" but it was definitely something that seemed to change.
Change #2 - Two new lands!
Galaxy's Edge and The Avengers Campus. Now Guardians existed the last time I was there, but due to my kid's age/size we didn't go on that, but I really like that ride and it seems like there's more scenes to it than before, I seem to recall the ToT was basically the lightning making the people disappear and that was it, plus going up and down always fun. We saw the Spiderman show (kid's a big fan of Spiderman) over the course of 2 days in DCA did Spiderman 3 times, but really didn't see any other of the shows there. Spiderman was a lot more enjoyable than I thought it would be, arm tiring though!, I did feel there wasn't enough time in the scenes to do everything though, although not sure if it's worth the wait at times (more on this later).
Rise of the Resistance was pretty fantastic of a ride, it was the first time I went on it, we got there at 9am on Tuesday it had a 50 minute listed wait but figured it wouldn't get any shorter than that. The external part of the queue was not in use at all, and for blood hell why did Disney take so long to realize that having some level of seating inside queues is a good thing!!! Granted it was the carved out mines and stuff but there were effectively benches everywhere! OMG total game changer... that they'll probably never do again. Anyways it was 30 minutes until the pre-show, I think that's where they would grab the red lanyard if you're handed one? But to the ride vehicles themselves it was exactly 50 minutes. Now never having been on this, and being really good to not watch youtube reviews of it I can say everything was new to me and yeah it was great fun. Will it be the same fun the second time? Who knows, but I was more than content to ride it just once this trip. The Millenium Falcon ride was great too, and on Tuesday when we explored the land it was a very short wait 15 minutes the first time, the second time it was literally a walk from the entrance through the long queue to the "ship", interactive version of Star Tours is where I'd place it, kiddo loved it although he didn't quite understand what to do, but whatever the score he had fun, we had fun, it's all good!
Change #3 - Lightning Lane
Now I'm not sure how this differed from the Fastpass system, other than cost obviously, I don't want to let nostalgia memory of incorrect things cloud my reasoning here but my gut wants to tell me that FP did not affect standby queue time as much as it did here. Ok so I'm going to complain a bit here, so feel free to skip this one if you wish, as I was on the otherside of LL (i.e. didn't pay for it), but I was honestly surprised as to how many people did have it in the park. I'm not sure if it was a bit more "in your face" than FP was as far as where the merge point is, but it definitely gave me a feel of the "haves and the have nots" which is not a feeling I believe Disney should be promoting in their park, it's one thing to have a VIP tour do effectively the same thing but those are so few and infrequent that you don't really notice. But FP seemed like something that was inclusive to all you just had to grab a ticket, this felt like a slap in the face that I didn't want to pay (effectively) 20% more for the park so that I could go on a few rides without waiting as long. But I'll stop there with the outright complaining, I know some people love it, so won't try to start any friction here.
Now some observations I made on a few rides, it seemed that they let approximately 3 LL riders for each standby rider, including holding up the SB line even if there were no LL people until the next part of the queue shortened up which often allowed more LL people to walk down the line. This could effectively quadruples the the lines if there was a constant stream of LL people, either way it does make it a bit more difficult to judge "true wait" time where as before it was fairly consistent to guess based on length (and probably amount of switch backs they were using). A couple examples, on Sunday we hopped in line at Radiator Racers first thing in the morning, wait time posted was 40 minutes, we were handed a red lanyard, 20 minutes later we were on the ride upon exiting the ride I look back and see the posted wait jumped to 60 minutes I glanced at the line and it basically was the same length as when we got in, not sure if this is due to a huge rush of LL people or some Disney-shenanigans artificially inflating times, but considering I had the infamous "this is how long it took" card for the ride to jump that much in time was odd (and I had no intentions of going back in line to see how long it would take). Spiderman had a posted wait of 50 minutes but there was "ride stoppage" which lasted 10 minutes from announcement to "all clear" announcement, but I did notice the LL queue was completely filled, and I think they gave everyone in that line priority and after a 90 minute wait we finally got on the ride, same ride at night, almost no LL people, SB queue the same length and it took 30 minutes to get on the ride
Bottom line, not a fan of the system, but again I'll leave it at that.
Change #4 - Food and the lines!
Now I don't mean normal restaurant/counter lines, because those were practically non-existent, but in DCA the length of lines for people who wanted to try sample sized portions of "Chinese" food that could be gotten from literally any Chinese restaurant in the area was kind of crazy, don't get me wrong I'm in no way complaining about the lines, or criticizing the quality of the food because I didn't get any, but looking at the menus I didn't see anything unique but the way people were lined up was like that food was never seen in the country. Just weird to me I guess.
But the places we went to get food that weren't stalls, like I said non-existent lines, we simply walked up ordered and got our food, a big thanks to allears.net who had every restaurant/stall in the park listed with menus in a very easy to access fashion that was super quick to navigate as it was sorted by area of the park, along with some pictures so we know what the food actually looks like, it made thinking about what to eat super simple compared to the Disney app which was fine for mobile ordering but just didn't seem to have menus anywhere unless it was mobile order. I've heard food prices going up, portion sizes going down, now I don't remember how big things were, but yeah I expect prices to go up, but every meal I ate was perfectly fine in size and none of the food we got was any more expensive than what we ate at Denny's one night after leaving the park, sure Denny's had bigger portion size but I don't need to eat that much food (infamous D23 talk!) My only wish was a churro update page or something, last time we went in May seemed like a bunch of carts had different flavored churros they even promoted it by giving a cheat sheet, this time only different ones I saw were Lemon Bar in the Grizzly Peak area (super yummy), some spicy ones at Senor Buzz Churros (didn't try), and the wife saw a cinnamon sugar one which was confusing since we thought that was what a churro was anyways but it had the higher price tag associated with it... as you can tell I like churros!
Overall
It was a fine trip, the negatives didn't outweigh the positives, having 4 days to spend in the parks was good, and given the how much I noticed LL (maybe this is by design?) I still think I'd rather opt for more days rather than paying for Genie+ & extra LL rides. Also not going to lie, my feet hurt like crazy at the end of every day, not sure if it's just me getting older, or the fact the past 2 years I've been working from home behind a desk most the day, or a combo of both but I'd love to hear some advice to help mitigate the foot pain (and honestly waiting in lines wouldn't be as bad if there was no pain). So who knows what will happen the next time we go what big changes will have happened, maybe they'll finally change up the AMC theater area along with the Rain Forest Cafe & ESPN zone and actually put something useful in there? Or maybe an extra ride in the Avengers campus? (I don't even know what the ultimate plans are for that). Either way, thanks for letting me share & vent, ciao.
Reason
People need a reason to go? Well yeah... The reason for the trip was because my kid's school has Lunar New Year off, and the Monday as well making it a 4 day weekend, combined that with COVID making the use of our timeshare (Worldmark) very infrequent the past 2 years we had a lot of credits we had to use up before they expired, so why not Disneyland? Plus his height put him as being able to ride almost everything, only things he couldn't ride were Indiana Jones and the Incredicoaster. Our last trip was quite a bit more tame since he was smaller (Winnie the Pooh was our jam... 6 times in a row last time right after dinner before we left!) , but this trip he wanted to ride the bigger ones so wife and I were quite happy, because it made us feel a bit more value in the price of admission, even though he was no longer free it we got to ride some more exciting ones so it balanced out.
Kid's response
Now every kid is different, so by no means let my kid's reactions dictate what your kid should or shouldn't do, but we did try and prepare him by showing him some videos of the faster rides, the prior time the fastest thing we did was the Go Go Gadget Coaster which pushed the boundary of his comfort level (even though he said he wanted to ride it). So he did not like Space Mountain (we did that first as per his request) but mostly because it was dark (I know, the best part!), he didn't like Big Thunder when we did it at night the first night, but 3 days later we did it during the day and he was a fan. In fact the only rides he really didn't like was Guardians and Space Mountain, he even loved the Star Wars rides and other than some pajamas he has with characters he doesn't even know what Star Wars is. Do need to find better ways to keep him entertained though, we had snacks, but nothing to keep him busy really he didn't have meltdowns at all but his energy was redirected into poking, slapping, kicking, headbutting, my wife and I's stomach/hands/whatever was within reach quite a bit causing a bit of anger out of the two of us, it was understandable why he was doing it but as a parent sometimes you really want stop to mean STOP especially when your feet are hurting too
Scheduling
Until my kid gets to be a teenager, I think the idea of being there for rope drop is a thing of the pass. First it's a half-mile walk from the resort to the parking lot to take a bus over there, sure we could probably be there quicker if just walked straight there but a half mile less of walking (times two for round trip!) sure sounds like a nicer idea. Plus getting everything ready for the day, eating breakfast, packing bags with snacks, etc, ends up taking a lot more time than I anticipate, before having a child bringing anything to the park other than maybe a water bottle never crossed my mind, now it's a necessity! Now meals really didn't have any schedule, of course my kid would rather do rides than eat food, so lunch was in the 1:30 to 2:30 range but we did have said mentioned snacks so it's not like he was totally hungry, and while one of the Saturday did have the park open until midnight, much like rope drop the days of staying that late are long gone, and we basically left right at fireworks.
Change #1 - Crowds
The first big change it seemed is that slow days don't really exist any more, my wife and I used to go 2nd week of January (pre-child) with the idea that all kids were back in school and it seemed really dead at the time. The weekends I could understand being more crowded, and don't get me wrong I've been in the summer and it wasn't that level of crowded, but the Monday & Tuesday had a lot more people that I anticipated, and I'm pretty sure not many (anything other than San Francisco?) districts give time off for Lunar New Year. So unsure if that was just parents pulling their kids out of school, or maybe they were still home schooled due to COVID? either way, I did wish the crowds were more "everything is more or less a walk on" but they weren't. Now this is by no means a direct complaint, "why can't you people keep your kids in a proper school!" but it was definitely something that seemed to change.
Change #2 - Two new lands!
Galaxy's Edge and The Avengers Campus. Now Guardians existed the last time I was there, but due to my kid's age/size we didn't go on that, but I really like that ride and it seems like there's more scenes to it than before, I seem to recall the ToT was basically the lightning making the people disappear and that was it, plus going up and down always fun. We saw the Spiderman show (kid's a big fan of Spiderman) over the course of 2 days in DCA did Spiderman 3 times, but really didn't see any other of the shows there. Spiderman was a lot more enjoyable than I thought it would be, arm tiring though!, I did feel there wasn't enough time in the scenes to do everything though, although not sure if it's worth the wait at times (more on this later).
Rise of the Resistance was pretty fantastic of a ride, it was the first time I went on it, we got there at 9am on Tuesday it had a 50 minute listed wait but figured it wouldn't get any shorter than that. The external part of the queue was not in use at all, and for blood hell why did Disney take so long to realize that having some level of seating inside queues is a good thing!!! Granted it was the carved out mines and stuff but there were effectively benches everywhere! OMG total game changer... that they'll probably never do again. Anyways it was 30 minutes until the pre-show, I think that's where they would grab the red lanyard if you're handed one? But to the ride vehicles themselves it was exactly 50 minutes. Now never having been on this, and being really good to not watch youtube reviews of it I can say everything was new to me and yeah it was great fun. Will it be the same fun the second time? Who knows, but I was more than content to ride it just once this trip. The Millenium Falcon ride was great too, and on Tuesday when we explored the land it was a very short wait 15 minutes the first time, the second time it was literally a walk from the entrance through the long queue to the "ship", interactive version of Star Tours is where I'd place it, kiddo loved it although he didn't quite understand what to do, but whatever the score he had fun, we had fun, it's all good!
Change #3 - Lightning Lane
Now I'm not sure how this differed from the Fastpass system, other than cost obviously, I don't want to let nostalgia memory of incorrect things cloud my reasoning here but my gut wants to tell me that FP did not affect standby queue time as much as it did here. Ok so I'm going to complain a bit here, so feel free to skip this one if you wish, as I was on the otherside of LL (i.e. didn't pay for it), but I was honestly surprised as to how many people did have it in the park. I'm not sure if it was a bit more "in your face" than FP was as far as where the merge point is, but it definitely gave me a feel of the "haves and the have nots" which is not a feeling I believe Disney should be promoting in their park, it's one thing to have a VIP tour do effectively the same thing but those are so few and infrequent that you don't really notice. But FP seemed like something that was inclusive to all you just had to grab a ticket, this felt like a slap in the face that I didn't want to pay (effectively) 20% more for the park so that I could go on a few rides without waiting as long. But I'll stop there with the outright complaining, I know some people love it, so won't try to start any friction here.
Now some observations I made on a few rides, it seemed that they let approximately 3 LL riders for each standby rider, including holding up the SB line even if there were no LL people until the next part of the queue shortened up which often allowed more LL people to walk down the line. This could effectively quadruples the the lines if there was a constant stream of LL people, either way it does make it a bit more difficult to judge "true wait" time where as before it was fairly consistent to guess based on length (and probably amount of switch backs they were using). A couple examples, on Sunday we hopped in line at Radiator Racers first thing in the morning, wait time posted was 40 minutes, we were handed a red lanyard, 20 minutes later we were on the ride upon exiting the ride I look back and see the posted wait jumped to 60 minutes I glanced at the line and it basically was the same length as when we got in, not sure if this is due to a huge rush of LL people or some Disney-shenanigans artificially inflating times, but considering I had the infamous "this is how long it took" card for the ride to jump that much in time was odd (and I had no intentions of going back in line to see how long it would take). Spiderman had a posted wait of 50 minutes but there was "ride stoppage" which lasted 10 minutes from announcement to "all clear" announcement, but I did notice the LL queue was completely filled, and I think they gave everyone in that line priority and after a 90 minute wait we finally got on the ride, same ride at night, almost no LL people, SB queue the same length and it took 30 minutes to get on the ride
Bottom line, not a fan of the system, but again I'll leave it at that.
Change #4 - Food and the lines!
Now I don't mean normal restaurant/counter lines, because those were practically non-existent, but in DCA the length of lines for people who wanted to try sample sized portions of "Chinese" food that could be gotten from literally any Chinese restaurant in the area was kind of crazy, don't get me wrong I'm in no way complaining about the lines, or criticizing the quality of the food because I didn't get any, but looking at the menus I didn't see anything unique but the way people were lined up was like that food was never seen in the country. Just weird to me I guess.
But the places we went to get food that weren't stalls, like I said non-existent lines, we simply walked up ordered and got our food, a big thanks to allears.net who had every restaurant/stall in the park listed with menus in a very easy to access fashion that was super quick to navigate as it was sorted by area of the park, along with some pictures so we know what the food actually looks like, it made thinking about what to eat super simple compared to the Disney app which was fine for mobile ordering but just didn't seem to have menus anywhere unless it was mobile order. I've heard food prices going up, portion sizes going down, now I don't remember how big things were, but yeah I expect prices to go up, but every meal I ate was perfectly fine in size and none of the food we got was any more expensive than what we ate at Denny's one night after leaving the park, sure Denny's had bigger portion size but I don't need to eat that much food (infamous D23 talk!) My only wish was a churro update page or something, last time we went in May seemed like a bunch of carts had different flavored churros they even promoted it by giving a cheat sheet, this time only different ones I saw were Lemon Bar in the Grizzly Peak area (super yummy), some spicy ones at Senor Buzz Churros (didn't try), and the wife saw a cinnamon sugar one which was confusing since we thought that was what a churro was anyways but it had the higher price tag associated with it... as you can tell I like churros!
Overall
It was a fine trip, the negatives didn't outweigh the positives, having 4 days to spend in the parks was good, and given the how much I noticed LL (maybe this is by design?) I still think I'd rather opt for more days rather than paying for Genie+ & extra LL rides. Also not going to lie, my feet hurt like crazy at the end of every day, not sure if it's just me getting older, or the fact the past 2 years I've been working from home behind a desk most the day, or a combo of both but I'd love to hear some advice to help mitigate the foot pain (and honestly waiting in lines wouldn't be as bad if there was no pain). So who knows what will happen the next time we go what big changes will have happened, maybe they'll finally change up the AMC theater area along with the Rain Forest Cafe & ESPN zone and actually put something useful in there? Or maybe an extra ride in the Avengers campus? (I don't even know what the ultimate plans are for that). Either way, thanks for letting me share & vent, ciao.
