Trip Report Loco goes west! A DLR trip 4 years in the making!

Now that the clothes are washed, the lawn mowed, and I’ve made my return to work(booooo!) it’s time for me to start another TR before I forget more details that I didn’t take note of!

Who: Myself and Mrs. Loco, A. I call her A because I’m too lazy to type her entire name.
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Where: Uhhhhh, Disneyland, with a few stops throughout Orange County.

When : September 14-19.

Why : Because we wanted to. It was also a celebration of both of our September birthdays.

Enough with the details though, you’re here to see pictures and to read my thoughts on Walt’s Disneyland right? Let’s get started!

Day one, travel day.

We originally had this trip planned for September of 2018. Unfortunately A’s father was nearing the end of his battle with cancer, and we decided we didn’t want to be out of town at that time. Our next trip to CA was planned for June of 2020, but we all know why we didn’t get to go on that trip. Needless to say, we were nervous some large life-altering event would happen before we were able to go on our trip. Thankfully this didn’t happen. Third time really is the charm I guess!
Sweating Flowers In The Dirt GIF by Paul McCartney


Our flight out of Dallas was at 10:30 am. We live a few hours from love field. I decided to stay at a hotel not far from the airport the night before, rather than getting up early and trying to fight through morning rush hour traffic to get to the airport. This turned out to be a wise idea. Even from our hotel it took 45 minutes with traffic to get to our parking spot!

Travel day selfie!
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Thankfully things weren’t nearly as hectic inside the airport and we made it through security and to our gate with plenty of time for some Whataburger breakfast!

Our steed for the trip out.
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Southwest sent us a dozen drink coupons about a month before our trip. It was a fun flight!
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Living Music Video GIF by Dierks Bentley


The flight itself was smooth and in three hours we were in sunny Southern California. Long Beach to be exact! This was a great little airport! Much closer to Anaheim than LAX, and much more affordable than John Wayne!
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Baggage claim was located outside(literally) the terminal. Our flight’s bags began unloading almost immediately, which is a nice change from Orlando or love field!
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The Uber pickup area is steps away from baggage claim, and soon we were on our way to Anaheim. This day was added on after our initial booking, so I ended up having a different hotel called the Cortona Inn and Suites. Unfortunately they were having some sort of plumbing issue and weren’t able to get us our room. Instead they comped us a night at the much nicer Hyatt next door!
Fuck Yeah Yes GIF


Up next : a super early dinner, and a short walk around downtown.
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day two continued.

Continuing further into Pixar Pier. We found a Pixar pal.
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A CM was nice enough to take our picture.
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Time for swinging gondolas of doom!
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Just look at these terrified faces!
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The view is nice from the top. I see you Matterhorn!
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We weren’t sad at all to see sadness!
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A trip to Bong Bong’s was next. He cries candy!
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The real reason for my trip to Bing Bongs. This little square of chocolate peanut butter perfection. I took this picture for @ajrwdwgirl
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So Good Fried Food GIF by Gangway Advertising
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day two continued.

We took a quick tour through cars land next.
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This land is definitely some of imagineering’s best work!
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Radiator Springs goes all out for Halloween.
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And Dia de Los Muertos!
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Luigi’s had no wait, so we hopped on for a quick spin.
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It was a cool use of the trackless tech. Maybe just a little too much spinning for me, but not too bad!
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We had friends who visited DL back in the spring who complained of having several poor interactions with CMs. Our experience couldn’t have been more opposite. Every single CM we spoke to was beyond friendly and helpful. The PPP in front of Flo’s was was absolutely top notch!
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He thought this pose was the greatest thing ever! 🤣 You can’t really tell in the pic but A has a steering wheel in front of her and I’m terrified of her driving. This CM gets a gold star from us! ⭐
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We had one more LL to use before we went to check in to our hotel. An old favorite.
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Why don’t they just play the original soarin over California here? I really miss the original.
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day two continued.

We utilized the toy story lot shuttles and were at our hotel quickly. We only had to move our luggage next door to the Clarion. I’d read mixed reviews of this hotel, and I can see both the positive and negative of it. It is dated, but it was clean. The location was convenient and it’s often one of the cheapest options in the area. The beds weren’t the best and there was an issue with plumbing later in our trip that was resolved quickly. I would definitely stay here again for the right price, but wouldn’t hesitate to look elsewhere.

We rested in our room and had Mexican food delivered from Iguana’s restaurant(A+) before heading back over to Disneyland for the evening.
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You’ll have to forgive my lack of pictures from the evening. We were so wrapped up in the magic that we hardly took any pictures!

It was a pleasant night on Main Street.
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Not pictured is a ride on Indiana Jones via LL. It was pretty much as good as I’d hoped.
Lying Season 3 GIF by The Office


Next up was pirates via one of our anytime LLs from earlier in the day!
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This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I didn’t think the DL version of pirates was just worlds better than WDW. The extra scenes are great, but I don’t know if it puts it on a whole different level that WDW. Also the rum smell was missing. If I had to chose between the two I’d definitely go DL, but it’s not as wide a margin as I thought it would be. Either way this is a can’t miss attraction that I wish we’d gotten to experience more.

Next up was something we haven’t done at WDW in many years now. The railroad, or as @Tuvalu and Woody call it, the MPB!
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It was a picture perfect evening.
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We took the grand circle tour before getting off back at New Orleans square station. We headed over to another favorite of ours, Walt Disneys Enchanted Tiki Room. It was mostly ruined by an annoying local who wanted everyone to know that he knew every line in the show.
Judge Judy Whatever GIF


After Tiki Room it was over to Jungle Cruise to use our other anytime LL. Our skipper was good not great.
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We made our way along the rivers of America for our final attraction.
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I remembered reading in someone’s TR that this version of splash gets people extremely wet, particularly in the front of the log. Id saved it for last so once we were soaked we could head out for the night. This might be the smartest thing I did all day. We didn’t just get wet, we got absolutely DRENCHED. Thanks for putting us in the front miss CM lady! You can see we have reluctantly accepted our soaking and are ready to be back at the hotel! I honestly don’t remember anything about the ride other than being wet. Give me the WDW version with its broken effects any day!
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Side note : Jake Gyllenhaal was on the log ahead of us. We recognized his face but couldn’t put a name to it, but the people behind us were really excited about it. There would be another celebrity spotting the next day.

We walked our soaked selves to the park exit, satisfied with our first day!
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Last edited:

fractal

Well-Known Member
Once you get used to the size of the Main Street buildings and the castle, it really grows on you. There is a certain charm and romance in DL, especially at night that makes it unique. You can almost feel it in your photos.

On occasion they do show Soarin' over California at DCA...

 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Once you get used to the size of the Main Street buildings and the castle, it really grows on you. There is a certain charm and romance in DL, especially at night that makes it unique. You can almost feel it in your photos.

On occasion they do show Soarin' over California at DCA...

I 100% agree about Main Street. I was hoping this would be the year they finally decided to just keep soarin over California, but it wasn’t meant to be. I guess we’ll just have to plan a trip during their F&W festival.

Wow! I wonder who you saw next??!!

Great photos, as always.
We saw some real Disney royalty.
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day three. September 16, 2022.

Our second park day. We still had no issue getting up in time for RD. This time at DCA!
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Our first stop inside was once again guest services. Turns out I did get charged three times the day before for two genie plus purchases. The CM here was very apologetic. I told him we often deal with Disney IT and it was no big deal if I could just get refunded. He got the extra $20 refunded to my card and offered to give us this day for free. I’d already purchased for this day, but he made a note on our files to get us genie plus on our final park day. A nice bonus since I hadn’t planned on buying it that last day!

The front entrance and Hollywood section give off some strong MGM/DHS vibes.
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Backside of grizzly peak where we waited for RD.
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About 10 minutes before park opening they made the announcement that Radiator Springs Racers would not be opening with the park. On to plan B. I’ll let you guess who had the high score here. Web Slinging is exhausting!
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Keeping with the Marvel theme for ride number two.
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What a ridiculously fun attraction! I’m a huge Tower of Terror fan and I hope they never change the original, but this works so well here! Our first song was “Give Up The Funk”.
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So much fun we did it again!
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“Born to be Wild” was our song for ride number two.
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After a quick restroom break I noticed RSR had just opened. We made it in line pretty quick and ended up waiting around 25 minutes. This might be my favorite attraction at DLR. We received the “paint job” scene.
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@ajrwdwgirl would be proud of the amount of time I spent in Radiator Springs with my Radiator Springs shirt on! Mater had his Halloween costume on.
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Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
View attachment 670183View attachment 670184
I’ve felt that pain. And the pain of the CM laughing at me as we then went to ride Pooh. I’m fairly confident @Tuvalu did not have the same problem.
Yep the look on your face perfectly sums up how we felt. I would not have been able to continue my day like that!

Side note - the top picture looks like there’s a green arm growing from your neck. Probably had too much flume water on it!
 

MinnieM123

Premium Member
Our first stop inside was once again guest services. Turns out I did get charged three times the day before for two genie plus purchases. The CM here was very apologetic. I told him we often deal with Disney IT and it was no big deal if I could just get refunded. He got the extra $20 refunded to my card and offered to give us this day for free. I’d already purchased for this day, but he made a note on our files to get us genie plus on our final park day. A nice bonus since I hadn’t planned on buying it that last day!
Sorry to hear you had the (overcharge) issue, resulting from genie plus. However, I am happy to read that the cast member efficiently dealt with the situation, and also offered to give you a free genie day. That was a good customer service CM. :)
 

Loco_driver

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Day three continued.

Time for a late breakfast/early lunch from cozy cone. Very tasty!
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Clown fire truck thing came by.
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I had to try the churro that everyone around us was raving about.
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Meh Unimpressed GIF


Goodbye for now cars land and clown fire truck.
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There were a few PPPs on our way to Pixar pier.
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Look at A pretending to be happy about this kiss! 🤣
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One more before we move on.
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Next up was another tried and true favorite of ours.
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Followed by a new favorite!
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Buzz was out saying hello to guests. This one was exceptionally toy-sized.
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