Disney Stress

As a kid, I remember that one day at Disneyland was plenty of time to enjoy the Magic Kingdom (and I don't ever remember staying there after dark). Today, however, two days doesn't seem like enough time. The Kingdom has much less magic than I last remembered and I experienced some new Disney Stress.

The semi-Holiday weekend (Veterans Day, November 10th and 11th, 2003) made for large crowds and long waits. When I was a kid, I recall maybe one hour long wait in a day. Now even some of the second rate rides can easily top an hour. Interestingly the lines themselves weren't stressful. It was avoiding them that killed me.

If you haven't already experienced Disney's Fast Pass system, you should study up before your next trip. FastPass helps speed up your day by offering you an opportunity to take a shortcut periodically throughout the day to chop off huge portions of the line. I'm here to say that it works well and we avoided most lines but it took great amounts of planning and unnatural execution to pull off that created a new sensation that I call Disney Stress.

For those who haven't wrangled the system, here's how it works:

Major rides at both Disneyland and the new California Adventure have a separate area near the ride that distributes the Fast Pass. The Fast Pass allows anyone to return at a later hour and take the special path to the front of the queue.

The Fast Pass is typically a few hours from when you first receive it, but there is a second important time. The time at which you can get a second Fast Pass. The master Toon Town computer keeps track of you and won't let you get another Fast Pass too early. But the system encourages you not to delay because every delay means a delay in your ability to get a follow on pass.

Typically you can obtain a second Fast Pass before getting to use the first. If you manage it carefully, like we did, you can roughly alternate between major and minor attractions and minimize the line waiting.

Again, the system works and yet it required mapping out our day and our schedule to something on the order of a European train system timetable. "It's 11:40 for God's sake. We need to get across the park now for our next Fast Pass!"

On a couple of occasions one of the more durable in the party (me) was sent across the park with a synchronized watch to obtain the next ticket, while the family enjoyed an attraction or two. This required careful planning and freshly charged double A batteries in our walkie talkies (strategically set to Channel 17 since 17 is generally an under appreciated number).

Everything worked perfectly. We had to wonder why there were so many fools at the park who apparently opted to wait in horrendous lines as opposed to mastering the Fast Pass system. But then again, maybe they weren't quite as stressed as I was!

Disneyland Notebook

Disney's fireworks show is consistently the best I've seen.
Disney's snow experience (it snows after the fireworks) is made of soap bubbles. Many of us tried to catch flakes on our tongue only to realize it wasn't snow!
The Indiana Jones ride has my vote for the greatest Disneyland ride of all time. It has everything required for the perfect ride...story line, excitement, variety, humor, acceleration, and a good dose of "fear."
Tomorrow Land sucks. I love the "Honey I shrunk the audience" and the new Autopia is good, but after that, there is no there there.
Bring back the submarine ride or at least use that space for something else!
Bored to tears of It's a Small World (the rest of my family disagrees).
The "cast" (as every employee is called) is consistently well trained and certainly improve the experience, but no one has a sense of efficiency. No one moves too quickly nor makes an extra effort to move the lines more quickly...this was especially frustrating in food lines which moved painfully slow.

California Adventure Notebook

Suggest you visit a handful of cities in California and see the real thing. Sure, there's some fun to be had, but we found ourselves commenting that we've seen better at other amusement parks in California.
We loved the ride where you fly over California.
We had fun playing the fake Who Wants to be a Millionaire TV show. We didn't make it to the hot seat but I ultimately finished 5th.