Disneyland – Day Two

We were exhausted after day one at Disneyland, but after some good rest overnight, we were eager for our second day at the ‘most magical place on earth’. As our day started, we were greeted with some good news and some bad news. The bad news (I always want to hear that first) was that it was raining. Still after having been in California for seven months and in that time experienced only 5 days of rain, it was hard to grumble about having rain that day. The good news was that it kept a lot of people away, so the queues for rides were short.

One of the tricks that we learned from our first day at the park was the use of the FastPass. What we found out was that we could ‘book’ a time to jump on a ride by getting a FastPass in advance and by doing so, we limited our wait time for a particularly popular ride. All we had to do was insert our park passes into a FastPass machine,  and get a FastPass ticket which gave us a window of time where we could come back and move ahead of the queue for the ride. In the meantime, we do other things.

Our main objective for day two was to get on the rides that we didn’t have time to do on the previous day, then we would hit the rides that we enjoyed the most and do those again.  At the top of our list was the ‘California Screamin‘ at the Disneyland California Adventure Park but on our way there, we stopped off at ‘a bug’s land‘. ‘California Screamin’ is a 4-minute long, high-paced roller coaster ride and we did three rides in a row on that one (one of the advantages of enduring the wet weather). From there we did the the ‘Toy Story Mania‘ on our way to the ‘Hollywood Pictures Backlot’ which is Disneyland’s tribute to the classic age of film and where whole streets are built in replica early century architecture. This was very cool. While in the ‘Hollywood Pictures Backlot’, we did the ‘Hollywood Tower of Terror‘ ride which is set in an elevator of an old abandoned hotel and where the elevator (supposedly) plunges several storeys and then shoots back up again. This ride was a real buzz and we were especially proud of Maddy who is normally terrified of normal elevators, let alone one that plunges 13 floors in a ‘haunted’ hotel.

After the girls had their pictures taken with Mickey Mouse, Minnie and some of the other Disney characters, we did another ride on ‘Soarin Over California’ before heading back over to Disneyland Park where we repeated rides on ‘Star Tours’ and jumped on ‘It’s a Small World‘, ‘Autopia‘ and ‘Captain EO‘ before finishing the day by taking a ride on the famous Disney Monarail, touring the entire park on the Disney Railroad and wandering around Fantasyland and the Main Street USA.

In the end, we had a great two days at Disneyland, but it was just impossible to see everything in just two days (we did other rides that are not mentioned here). We hope to get back another time after they have finished construction of some new attractions and remodeling of others that were closed when we were there.