d0naldduck123
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2015
Hello!
I got back from a week long trip to Disneyland/LA last week, and I thought I'd start this trip report to cope from post-Disney blues as well as to share some of my thoughts about the trip. To start off, let me introduce ourselves. My name is Lindsay, and our travel party consists of just me and my husband, Chris. We live on the east coast and have been to Disney World several times but we both have never been to LA or Disneyland. As far as how this trip came about...well, we went to WDW in Nov 2019 and when we got back we were planning a Disneyland trip for 2020. Then the pandemic happened and I don't know if you guys remember, but Disney announced that Disneyland would halt the sale of admission tickets soon. So when I heard the news, I got worried that we wouldn't be able to buy tickets later on, so we bought them right before they stopped selling them and we kind of assumed maybe the pandemic would be done by Fall2020. Obviously that didn't happen, but at least we still had tickets And then of course they started ticket sales again when they reopened, so I was worried for nothing Fast-forward to May2021, we both got vaccinated, I was feeling pretty down from not being able to travel and just staying home all the time, and vacation hours were piling up, so we thought it'd be a good time to take that Disneyland trip. Originally I've always wanted to see World of Color at Disneyland, but who knows how long it'd be before that returns, plus I really wanted to see the new Avengers Campus, so we went ahead and booked flights!
Pre-Trip Planning:
We planned a 6-night stay and had 4-day non-park hopper tickets so our plan was to do 4 days at Disneyland and 2 days touring LA. We booked the Residence Inn near the convention center. It's a bit of a longer walk to Disney then the hotels right across the street, but the hotel seemed nicer and it was a 1-br suite as opposed to just a standard hotel room. The walk to the security lines at Disneyland was just about 15 minutes, so not bad at all. I didn't want to do a split stay at LA because I just didn't want the hassle of re-packing and switching hotels, so we figured we'd just rent a car for the days we were planning to go to LA. Our flight was scheduled to arrive in the morning at LAX, so originally we wanted to rent a car and tour LA for the first part and finish off with Disney but the prices for renting a car from LAX were very expensive. Then I found there was an Alamo right across the street from our hotel and the price was much cheaper there, so we decided to take Uber from LAX to our hotel, do Disneyland for the first 4 days, then rent a car for the last two days at LA and return it at LAX before our flight home.
For planning the park days, since it was our first time I figured we'd just alternate between DL and DCA. Day1&3-DL and Day2&4-DCA. I made our park reservations as soon as we booked flights+hotel. It felt kind of weird that I really didn't need to "plan" anything like I used to do for WDW (ADRs and 3 Fastpasses). I just spent my time on here reading various threads to figure out which dining reservations I wanted to make. The dining reservations weren't released exactly on the 30-day mark for some days so that was kind of frustrating but it all worked out in the end. I was able to get reservations for Cafe Orleans dinner for our first day, Lamplight Lounge dinner for the second day, and Oga's for third day. Then a couple weeks later they announced that Storytellers Character breakfast was coming back, so I was able to get a breakfast reservation for our last day! Oh, and neither DH or I had watched Cars but his coworker recommended that we watch it before we go, so a week before we left, we both watched Cars and loved it! I liked it a lot more than I thought I would - it was such a cute movie! DH really liked Luigi and Guido. Other than that I wasn't sure what else I needed to be planning, and my job kept me pretty busy right up until our travel day so I just kind of studied the park maps to see where everything was and pretty soon it was travel day!
That's pretty much it for our pre-trip planning. I'll have lots of pictures of our trip starting from the next post so please follow along on my journey!
Day 1 (DL)
Part1 - Travel Day & Disneyland!
Part2 - More fun at Disneyland
Part3 - Cafe Orleans & Fireworks
Day 2 (DCA)
Part1 - Avengers Campus
Part2 - Cars Land & Pixar Pier
Part3 - Characters and Lamplight Lounge
Part4 - Nighttime at DCA
Day 3 (DL)
Part1 - Fantasyland & Star Wars Land
Part2 - DTD, Dinner, and Fireworks again
Day 4 (DCA)
Part1 - Last Day at Disney
Part2 - Goodbye Disneyland
Day 5 - LA
Day 6 - Joshua Tree National Park
I got back from a week long trip to Disneyland/LA last week, and I thought I'd start this trip report to cope from post-Disney blues as well as to share some of my thoughts about the trip. To start off, let me introduce ourselves. My name is Lindsay, and our travel party consists of just me and my husband, Chris. We live on the east coast and have been to Disney World several times but we both have never been to LA or Disneyland. As far as how this trip came about...well, we went to WDW in Nov 2019 and when we got back we were planning a Disneyland trip for 2020. Then the pandemic happened and I don't know if you guys remember, but Disney announced that Disneyland would halt the sale of admission tickets soon. So when I heard the news, I got worried that we wouldn't be able to buy tickets later on, so we bought them right before they stopped selling them and we kind of assumed maybe the pandemic would be done by Fall2020. Obviously that didn't happen, but at least we still had tickets And then of course they started ticket sales again when they reopened, so I was worried for nothing Fast-forward to May2021, we both got vaccinated, I was feeling pretty down from not being able to travel and just staying home all the time, and vacation hours were piling up, so we thought it'd be a good time to take that Disneyland trip. Originally I've always wanted to see World of Color at Disneyland, but who knows how long it'd be before that returns, plus I really wanted to see the new Avengers Campus, so we went ahead and booked flights!
Pre-Trip Planning:
We planned a 6-night stay and had 4-day non-park hopper tickets so our plan was to do 4 days at Disneyland and 2 days touring LA. We booked the Residence Inn near the convention center. It's a bit of a longer walk to Disney then the hotels right across the street, but the hotel seemed nicer and it was a 1-br suite as opposed to just a standard hotel room. The walk to the security lines at Disneyland was just about 15 minutes, so not bad at all. I didn't want to do a split stay at LA because I just didn't want the hassle of re-packing and switching hotels, so we figured we'd just rent a car for the days we were planning to go to LA. Our flight was scheduled to arrive in the morning at LAX, so originally we wanted to rent a car and tour LA for the first part and finish off with Disney but the prices for renting a car from LAX were very expensive. Then I found there was an Alamo right across the street from our hotel and the price was much cheaper there, so we decided to take Uber from LAX to our hotel, do Disneyland for the first 4 days, then rent a car for the last two days at LA and return it at LAX before our flight home.
For planning the park days, since it was our first time I figured we'd just alternate between DL and DCA. Day1&3-DL and Day2&4-DCA. I made our park reservations as soon as we booked flights+hotel. It felt kind of weird that I really didn't need to "plan" anything like I used to do for WDW (ADRs and 3 Fastpasses). I just spent my time on here reading various threads to figure out which dining reservations I wanted to make. The dining reservations weren't released exactly on the 30-day mark for some days so that was kind of frustrating but it all worked out in the end. I was able to get reservations for Cafe Orleans dinner for our first day, Lamplight Lounge dinner for the second day, and Oga's for third day. Then a couple weeks later they announced that Storytellers Character breakfast was coming back, so I was able to get a breakfast reservation for our last day! Oh, and neither DH or I had watched Cars but his coworker recommended that we watch it before we go, so a week before we left, we both watched Cars and loved it! I liked it a lot more than I thought I would - it was such a cute movie! DH really liked Luigi and Guido. Other than that I wasn't sure what else I needed to be planning, and my job kept me pretty busy right up until our travel day so I just kind of studied the park maps to see where everything was and pretty soon it was travel day!
That's pretty much it for our pre-trip planning. I'll have lots of pictures of our trip starting from the next post so please follow along on my journey!
Day 1 (DL)
Part1 - Travel Day & Disneyland!
Part2 - More fun at Disneyland
Part3 - Cafe Orleans & Fireworks
Day 2 (DCA)
Part1 - Avengers Campus
Part2 - Cars Land & Pixar Pier
Part3 - Characters and Lamplight Lounge
Part4 - Nighttime at DCA
Day 3 (DL)
Part1 - Fantasyland & Star Wars Land
Part2 - DTD, Dinner, and Fireworks again
Day 4 (DCA)
Part1 - Last Day at Disney
Part2 - Goodbye Disneyland
Day 5 - LA
Day 6 - Joshua Tree National Park
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