When you have been planning a Disney trip for months and you have put all your money into one day of tickets and you then give your kids only 4 hours of sleep before heading off to a huge amusement park without a stroller of any kind and only packing teddy grahams in your snack bag, you are kind of rolling the dice that the day might turn out to be an incredibly costly disappointment.
For somebody who does not like crowds, I entered the park thinking that I was just going to have to relax and not charge into my Bull mode. This causes me to walk very fast to get through crowds and get a little annoyed when people can't keep up. I would like to congratulate myself on not acting like that as it tends to spoil the moment. It might have helped (a lot) that the park is laid out so nicely. We completely understood why Disney can charge the amount they do. The park is clean, the walkways are wide, the employees really are paying attention to what they are doing, lines are always moving and there are actually good places to eat!
Radiator Springs was the first stop on our list as the boys couldn't have cared less about the rest of the park, they wanted Lighting McQueen and Mater. On our way to that area we passed a loooong line. We saw signs for the Cars characters and finally asked somebody what they were standing in line for. The fast passes for the Cars area. Great. Because we didn't know if the kids would even like the rides, we were not going to spend extra money on a fast pass, so we went on. There are 3 rides in Radiator Springs and we went for the most popular first, it was closed for maintenance so we went and rode on Luigi's tires, a ride where you are basically riding around in tires on a giant air hockey table and had to wait for a grand total of 15 minutes. This seemed to pump the kids up and we went back to the Radiator Racers which had just opened. We got in line, waited for 20 minutes, scored with our car as it was actually Lightning McQueen and zoomed around on what could be called the boy's first real roller coaster ride. When we got off the ride the line was already at a 1.5 hour wait and the workers said it would average a 2 hour wait to get on, so we called the experience good and went on to the rest. The boy's favorite ride was Mater's Junkyard Jamboree where you are swung around in the back of a tractor and we rode this no less than 4 times.
The rest of the park was empty, we waited maybe 5 minutes for any other ride and got to walk the entire California Adventure side as we only paid for the one park for the day. When the kids played the games, they were the only two at the stand so of course they were going to win a stuffed animal. We paid $20 for them to play games which got them 4 games each. On the last, a fishing game where everybody wins each time Austin won the "big" prize and Oliver picked a small prize. The Disneyland attendant congratulated Oliver on his "big" prize too and handed him the other big stuffed animal. Little things like that made the day and we walked away with two incredibly happy kids.
We headed back to the hotel at 4:30PM for a little rest and then brought a sleeping Oliver back to the park around 6:30. Night rides were fun and there was a show that I thought we'd like. The kids looked at us around 8:30 and said they wanted to go, we called it a night and a job well done.
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