Trip Report The “lets count the ways Land is greater than World” as seen through the eyes of the #noobsfromgeorgia.

Whelp, this may be a record start of a TR for me. I’m sitting in LAX right now waiting to board and doing my best to put off grading the 30 term papers I need to have done by Monday so why not start this report! There is no true PTR to reference for this trip other than the breadcrumbs I dropped over in the Deja Vu TR. The lowdown is as follows:
The crew: DW, DD, and Myself
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Lodging: 1 night at Paradise Pier and 4 nights at The Grand Californian.
The plan: 2 days at Disneyland and 2 days at California Adventure in the following order CS/DL/CA/DL

Despite the title, I promise this wont be a dump on WDW TR but it was hard to ignore the things that DL does so dang well. That said, lets do this.

This journey starts with a night at the Holiday Inn & Suites Atlanta Airport-North. We’ve stayed here once before for a Disney trip and had a great experience. What is nice about this place is you get to park your car for the length of the trip just for staying the night at the hotel and they shuttle you to and from the airport. This is especially nice when you have an early flight, which we did. The accommodations are nice enough and serve the purpose.
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We let yelp help us find dinner and found a fantastic taco stand located in a hole-in-the-wall in the bad side of town. Worth it!
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As I said before we had to fly out at 06:13 which meant we had to get up early. Andrew W.K woke us up at 04:10 so we could get down to the lobby for the 4:40 shuttle. This was still better than the 3:00 wakeup call we would have had to do if we drove straight from home!
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My naive mind had me thinking we would be the only folks at Atlanta’s Hartsfield–Action-Jackson- Atlanta International Airport and Spaceport. Yeah, it was hopping!
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We had a mild wait to get through security and were soon enjoying some bagels at our gate with 30ish minutes to spare.
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This was our first time flying American and I would absolutely fly them again! The complementary in-flight movies/TV on demand for laptops and iDevices was appreciated and every row had charges to plug your devise in! We got seated and I immediately had to embarrass the kid before watching The Avengers: Half Ya’ll Gonna Die.
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imahistorygeek

Well-Known Member
I'm not sure where I left off on this one, but I'll wrap it up with my thoughts.

We returned from WDW on Saturday, Jan 6 (I think). We were left with some different emotions regarding this trip. I'll let @lostpro9het talk about those in the new TR, but overall DLR>WDW.

Right now, DLR is superior to WDW. The rides, the atmosphere, the crowd level, the food, the location are all, IMO, superior. Sure, WDW is bigger and it has more to offer and there are just some things that DLR doesn't offer. You can't get the AK or EC experience at DLR.

I know we've only been once and it's partially a newness of it all, but we came to some realizations on the WDW trip, which in turn has altered our trip habits. We love WDW, but DLR gave it a run for its money.

What's next? New TR and three cruises booked instead of visiting the parks. We def want to head out to DLR again, but it will not be for a while. We've actually been throwing a Toyko Disney trip, but that is a post-retirement trip.

Thank you all for reading and hopefully enjoying our adventures.
 

CaliKris

Active Member
Looking forward to your NYE trip report! We were at WDW as well and spent NYE at Epcot for the first time. We were actually pleasantly surprised with the excellent crowd control and had a great time people watching at the various dance parties. I will say WDW was crazy crowded, of course. What surprised us was the number of overflowing trash cans and absolutely dirty bathrooms the whole week. It seems the custodial crew has been spread too thin. We were at DLR on Black Friday and saw CM's cleaning bathrooms every time we went in. Not so at WDW.

If you like DLR, you should absolutely save for a trip to Tokyo DL. It is SO clean, friendliest cast members ever and most respectful guests of any park. And attention to detail is over the top. TDL>DLR! The tickets are actually cheaper than WDW or DLR. For us, being from CA, if we can get a cheap flight, TDL can actually be cheaper than going to WDW.

Now, you have inspired us to save for a DCL trip!
 

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