Q: Hey Izzy Laskin,
your team just won the Valley Hockey League Peewee A National Central
Divisional Championship! What are you
going to do now?
A: I’m going to
DISNEYLAND!
Three of us are wildly excited about this part of our
vacation. The fourth member of our party
has been there and doesn’t quite share our enthusiasm. But he’s the only driver on the rental car so
he has to come along.
Here are some observations on going to Disneyland.
1.
In the marketing world they say don’t mess with
the Mouse because Disney will sue your ass off if you try to appropriate their
images in any way. Here in L.A., you
can’t escape the Mouse and once you get in the park, well, hello Mickey! He doesn’t actually appear until later in the
day and I almost go over and take a picture but then realize there is a
mile-long line of little people waiting patiently for their turn and I’d be
attacked like Kramer after a karate lesson if I jumped that line.
2.
There is a whole industry devoted to Managing Your Time at
Disney. Books, websites, apps, and god
knows what else have been created to provide the inside scoop on how navigate
through the crowds, negotiate hours-long waits for rides, what to do and what
to miss, and of course, what to eat. Our
research is pretty cursory but did get us to the app that helps you avoid lines
and those giant turkey legs.
3.
Everyone is unfailingly polite, nice without
being obsequious, and helpful. You need
me to show you how to use that app, even though there are a hundred people
behind you in line? No problem. Clean bathrooms, no lines? Yes.
Even all the other people – there is no pushing or grumping. There are child meltdowns toward the end of
the day, but that is not so surprising.
Given the vast scope of this enterprise, the positive vibe is
impressive. Maybe this really is the
happiest place on earth.
4.
Disney gear – t-shirts, backpacks, and ears,
ears, ears, EARS! – is sort of like turquoise jewelry in the Southwest. Entirely appropriate in situ, but you feel a
little silly wearing those sequined mouse ears anywhere else. Still, we are approximately the only family
not wearing some kind of Disney-alia.
And now . . . here’s what we did.
We rode rides:
- Pirates of the Caribbean (watery, lots of fire and cannons)
- The Haunted Mansion (through which you ride in a doom buggy ha ha).
- Space Mountain (almost causes vertigo, but was mercifully
short and actually kind of fun, except Peter does not like it because he takes
his glasses off so they don’t fly off his head in the dark and he gets kind of
disoriented. We all did, Peter, deal with
it.)
- Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters (thought I was hot stuff
with my 6500 points until I learned that this qualified me as a Space Cadet and
that Peter got like 100,000 and was a Junior Ranger or something. Why does he have to be so good at
everything?)
- It’s A Small World (iconic, and kitschy-kool design-wise
but also a little weird and not quite caught up to contemporary
geopolitics. Still, it’s big with the
nuns, and despite the endless repetition in many languages the song actually
does not become an earworm for the day because your life here at Disney already
has a soundtrack and it is whatever music is playing in whatever land you are
in – Dixieland jazz, Americana, bluegrass, toons, Star Wars. Yes, the Galaxy is part of the franchise now,
so rep’ing at D-land).
- A slow cruise on the Mark Twain, a 3/8 scale authentic
riverboat that takes us through the Great Rivers of America (which, shockingly,
does not include the Charles but does have an Indian chief saluting you from a
cliff top).
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of something is the best
ride, spine-jarringly bouncy with the good music and all the creepy stuff from
the movies (snakes, the giant ball, but no face melting).
- The Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster makes Bill
whoop with delight.
- The Jungle Cruise has a longer wait than you can see
(those ingenious Imagineers know how to hide all the less-than-pleasant bits)
but turns out to basically be a comedy show as your skipper narrates a sort of
generic jungle river with scary ruins, jungle-y animals (some of which might
attack, like those hippos over there!) and cannibalistic natives. I wanted to tip her afterwards, she was so
good.
- The D-land train isn’t a ride but it goes all the way
around the park so we thought it seemed like a good thing to do. But it took forever to come (as Bostonians,
we are no stranger to the failures of the commuter rail system in congested
urban areas), and was a little boring when it did, until the very end. That’s when you leave Tomorrowland Station
and go to . . . The Grand Canyon! And
then it becomes the canyon before time began, with big scary dinosaurs! Then you’re back at Main Street Station. It’s a little weird, but I guess they had to
fill that big tunnel somehow.
- We never made it to Splash Mountain (waits were too long
and who really wants to get soaked anyway) and we are sad that the Matterhorn
Bobsleds are closed. But then we see
Mary Poppins and Bert walking around and everything gets better.
We ate:
- Mickey-shaped beignets which are the only food
disappointment of the day, a little blah but they do have ears.
- They are not kidding when they say the Mickey-shaped ice
cream pops are hard frozen. I think we
lost half of it to shatter.
- Those giant turkey legs are OUTSTANDING.
- The chile-lime corn on the cob was no slouch either.
- Did I mention corn dogs?
The platonic ideal.
- Dole Whip, a soft-serve pineapple fro-yo, is a Disney
classic, and with good reason. It’s
delicious if you like pineapple, which three of us do.
- The churros are about a foot long and kind of a sugar bomb
but you need that while waiting for the damn train.
We remarked:
Bill: Does the
Disneyland Train go to Tomorrowland?
Peter: I feel that Star Wars has no place in
Tomorrowland because as everyone knows, those stories take place a long time
ago in a galaxy far far away, ie. not in the future.
We reveled:
You can watch the original Mickey Mouse cartoons in a
theater on Main Street U.S.A., which are fun and almost empty because other
than us no one wants to see that skinny little black and white dude when the
real deal is standing outside for a photo op.
Apparently we also failed by not staying for the parade and
fireworks. We were exhausted and slunk
back toward Studio City.
This was so much fun.
We all loved it.
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