Disneyland and the 24-hour day

Nathan and I took advantage of the kids staying the night at Grandma and Papa’s house one Friday night in May by heading out to Disneyland on a date. Luckily it coincided with Disneyland’s 24-hour day of operation to celebrate the upcoming Monster’s University movie release. I thought it would be really fun to be a part of that. Of course, we didn’t actually stay the whole 24 hours, although I know there are die-hard fans out there who did. The park opened at 6am Friday morning and stayed open until 6am Saturday morning. We were there for 6 of the 24 hours, and I felt good about that. ;)

We got there and immediately got in line for the Tower of Terror, since that is my favorite ride at the park. As we had to spend over an hour in line, we were happy to not have kids with us! Not to mention they’d be terrified to go on the ride anyway.

It was really fun, we had a good set of drops! Afterwards, we decided to head to Disneyland park, as there was a grad night going on that same night and a lot of the California Adventure areas were going to be off-limits to us. So we headed to a ride that I actually had not ridden since I was about 8 years old – the Matterhorn! It’s so silly but I just hadn’t gotten around to riding it, since it had been under construction for a while and there is no way I could go on one of my solo trips with the kids because they’d refuse, so I just hadn’t had the chance to go yet. Luckily it was just as I remembered it and lots of fun!

(As you can tell by the horrible photo, apparently I was *really* excited to be on the ride at last!)

After the Matterhorn we decided to get some food so we headed over to the Bear Country restaurant and staked out a table way in the back, on the river.

We ordered funnel cakes along with dinner and enjoyed having a chance to be away from all the crowds. Because holy moly, it was CROWDED! I know the last 24-hour park day was not this crowded, but I think it’s because they were doing the grad night at the same time, which is crazy if you ask me.

But anyway, so we had this little table in the back to ourselves, right on the river, when the Fantasmic show started. Turns out where we were was a perfect spot to watch the fireworks, and we even got to see the Mark Twain riverboat loaded with characters that were through with their part of the show, but were slowly floating by us in complete darkness. The best part was that they knew people could still see them, so they kept in-character and waved to us as I snapped a few pictures. Of course, I only had my dinky point and shoot with me, so none of them really turned out, but here’s one that kind of shows you what it was like.

Kind of cool!

After eating, we moseyed around looking for things to do that weren’t terribly crowded or had really long lines. First we went on the Winnie the Pooh ride because I wanted to show Nathan the hidden Mickeys in there. Then we walked and walked and ended up stopping at the Tomorrowland Terrace to listen to a band that was playing there. We had a fun time rocking out for a while.

Once the band was done, Nathan was pretty much done for the night, so we headed out. But not without taking our photo in front of the Monstrous Summer banner so we can always remember we made it! Ha, too bad the photo turned out terrible! I hope the one the “pros” caught is better.

All in all, we definitely had a great time and I’m looking forward to going again with just Nathan during our anniversary in August!