Day 4: DISNEYLAND!

Day four – Disneyland!

Today we enjoyed our last free breakfast at Hostelling International Santa Monica. We managed to get up and ready pretty early compared to our usual standard, though the call of Disneyland was most likely the main drive behind our speediness! After evacuating our awesome private room, we checked out, left our bags with reception, then went on the prowl for some dollar notes and change, as the numerous bus trips from yesterday had left us with only larger currency. Along the way, we found this really cute store, Kitson, which we all might have fallen in love with a bit. Definitely a stop to be made at the New York Store!

We picked up our bags and rolled our way to the taxi rank, our huge suitcases in tow, ready to get to the Sheraton Hotel where our bus to Anaheim would pick us up. The first taxi driver in the rank seemed more than happy to help us until we told him our destination, at which he proceeded to tell us that it was within walking distance. He was not impressed when we insisted, and then offered to take us all the way to Anaheim, even when we informed him that we had already paid for the bus service. We politely declined.

Once we arrived at the Sheraton, we realised we were several minutes early, so spent some time chillaxing, about forty minutes of chillaxing in fact! It was a lovely sight when the bus came into view to pick us up. It was nice to see that the other two passengers in the mini-bus were fellow-Aussies, from Brisbane, also very excited to reach the world of Disney.

The bus trip took around an hour and dropped us right at our motel, so we checked in around 12:30, dropped our bags and headed straight for Disneyland, enjoying the glorious sunshine and heat!

Our plan was to grab fast passes for each ride, then go back to the beginning and then get to the straight of the ride for each line. However after grabbing one fast pass, a Space Mountain ride and a hotdog, we went to get another and discovered we could only hold one fast pass at a time. It was kinda dumb. So we waited in line for the and the Indiana Jones Ride (with a visit to Aladdin in between) before heading back to the Star Tours simultor ride, which Sohan immensely enjoyed, primarily because CP30 was a featuring character in the ride. We wanted to go to Splash Mountain, but the line was 90 minutes long! We decided to wait until Wednesday when we would be back in Disneyland again, so we waited in the Haunted House line for 25 minutes, which was cool but not as scary as we thought it would be. We then wandered back to the main street to wait for the parade at 6:30pm, and also found an ice-cream sandwhich each. 

The parade was so much fun! Starting with Mickey and Minnie (during which Rachel had an interesting fall off the railing she was perched on), we then saw Aladdin again with Genie and his crew, Ariel with her fish friends, Donald Duck, The Disney Princesses Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Rapunzel from Tangled, The Frog Princess, The Lion King (Marni's favourite), Peter Pan and Hook, of course Tinkerbell and Mary Poppins and Bert to finish. We were left wanting more!

On our way out, Rachel experienced a magical moment with Ariel, who was doing a meet and greet by the exit. Let's just say she was very excited!!

We headed back to the motel along the way, picking up a pepporoni pizza and some garlic bread to eat in our room, and once we had collected our bags and dumped the down, we sat on our beds watching TV, each with a slice of pepporoni in our hands! A classic American dinner, which was extremely yummy (and greasy).

Calafornia Adventure Land tomorrow!

MORE PHOTOS TO COME!