The Disneyland Traveler Runs Out of Gas

When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. After wandering the grounds of Disneyland and Disney California Adventure Parks for 4 straight days, often without a plan, rhyme, or reason, Mrs. DisneylandTraveler and I were literally beginning to feel the pain. We ain't as young as we used to be and there are limits to everything - including having fun. Admitting we were just too flat out beat down to endure the countless lines, we did another necessary Disney task - we shopped. Or rather I should say Mrs. DLT shopped as I followed. The one label I never want to have put on me is that of being a shopper.

But the family back home needed their souvenirs and Mrs. DLT insisted that I needed something though what she picked out and what I would have picked out are completely different. She thought I needed a new set of Mickey Mouse lounge wear and a hat. I had my eye on that wooden Tiki Room statue with its $95 priced tag (about the cost of my pajamas and hat).

Anyway, we returned back to the hotel room last night quite early with bags and bags of stuff, the same as everyone else who visits here. Hopefully a good nights sleep will refuel our gas tanks and we will be ready for a full day of activity. This is our last day here after all. It can't go to waste.

Coffee At The House on Pooh Corner

Take 1: I'm not a huge Kenny Loggins fan but I saw him in concert several years ago. He played one of the sweetest pop songs I have ever heard - House on Pooh Corner. Yes, it is an homage to the Winnie the Pooh stories. The song is in no way associated with Disney. If you are not familiar with the song, I would encourage any Pooh fan to go out and find it somewhere. I would embed it here but apparently Google makes embedding mp3 files difficult in their blogging tool.

Take 2: We had the inside of our house painted last year including the interior of kitchen cabinets. Everything had to be boxed and taken out to the garage including a collection of Disney coffee mugs that we had picked up on a few of our trips. A lot of the stuff that was crammed into the cabinets never made it back into the house. It's still in boxes out in the garage. Of the Disney coffee mugs, the only drinking vessels that made it back into the house are 3 mugs featuring Pooh characters (mostly Eeyore). I know there are other Disney mugs out in the garage but its been so long now that I have forgotten what they are.

Take 3: I write most of these blog posts on weekend mornings over a cup of coffee that I am drinking from a Pooh mug. It came to me. "Wait a minute, Pooh is sweet, but I'm not really a Pooh kind of guy. Where's my Pirates mug, my Haunted Mansion mug, my Star Tours mug......". As mentioned many times before, I'm not really a Disney shopper but on my next trip I need to make it a point to get a few "guy" type Disney mugs. I should probably save the Pooh mugs for when I'm listening to Kenny Loggins.

...But I Don't Want To Wear Mouse Ears

Glow With The Show Mouse Ears
About $25

Does not wanting to wear Mickey Mouse Ears make me a bad person? My refusal to wear mouse ears came up this morning over coffee with Mrs. DisneylandTraveler. She used the word "fuddy-duddy". This came up right after I told her I didn't think too much about the 10 minute version of Sweet Caroline that Neil Diamond sang when we saw him in concert this past Monday. A fuddy-duddy.

The mouse ears topic came up when I told her that Disney held a special annual passholder "Glow with the Show" Fantasmic performance a week or so ago. You can take a look at a little bit of video Disney shot for the event and posted on Disney Parks Blog.

Now I have to admit, it looks pretty cool. Those that were there for the event said that the "glow with the show" ears showed off better for Fantasmic than they did with World of Color (mostly because Fantasmic is a better show). But mouse ears? Mouse ears that cost around $25? (Disney didn't supply the lighted mouse ears for Fantasmic like they did for the special World Color Glow with the Show performances - you had to bring your own.) 

I have written about My Disney Bucket List in this blog. One thing that will never appear on the bucket list is "Wear a Pair of Mouse Ears (of any kind)". I can't do it. I'm a grown-up. When Mrs. DLT used the word "fuddy-duddy" this morning to describe me and my disdain for the ears,  I came back with "at last I'm not a sheep". Disney tells several thousand people to come to a special show where you have to wear $25 blinking lights on your noggin. Sounds like sheep being led by a shepherd to me (a shepherd that is pocketing a lot of profit on these things). Or lemmings. No, I am not going to do it. 

The guy below has a pair of mouse ears in his hand. Notice they are not actually on his head. Nor do I imagine they were ever on his head. For those of us, males in particular, who have a few decades under our belts, mouse ears on the head - just not cool. Sorry. Just a fuddy-duddy.

How Much Is That Picture In The Window?

Pieces of Eight Store Window 2008 - Pirates of the Caribbean - Disneyland

I may have written about this before...I don't know...I've written about so many things in this blog over the last 10 months that it is hard to remember or keep track.  Anyway, I saw this picture in my collection again this morning and reminded me of the story and an incredibly good idea that I have yet to follow up on.

Mrs. DisneylandTraveler and I had just gotten off Pirates of the Caribbean and glanced in the window of the conveniently placed Pieces of Eight souvenir store at the exit of the ride. This picture immediately caught Mrs. DLT's attention as a souvenir artwork to put up on if not one of our walls then The Boy would love it on his. She immediately ran inside to ask about it. "Where is that framed Pirates picture that you have in the window?" she asked the cast member. The CM looked at her like she was speaking Greek.  "We don't have any framed Pirates pictures in here" he answered back with a confused look on his face.

"Yes.... the picture, like the one that is in the display window" Mrs. DLT shot back. So the CM, Mrs. DLT, and I all headed back outside to look at the picture in the window. "That picture!" she said pointing to the window.  The CM kind of chuckled and said that wasn't really for sale, "It's a window decoration, the decorators take one our T-shirts, stretch it on a canvas backing, that put a frame around it. It's really just a framed T-shirt". Well, for Mrs. DLT and I, our jaws dropped. Sure enough, when we went back inside the store, we found the very same T-shirt. 

We thought a lot about that picture/T-shirt throughout the day. We even thought about buying shirts ourselves, mounting them, framing them, and selling them on eBay. That was years ago now, and we've yet to do one for ourselves let alone sell them on eBay and there are plenty of Disneyland T-Shirts around here that aren't worn and would be put to better use displayed on wall rather than hanging in the back of a closet. It's still a great idea. Maybe someday. Famous last words.

At Last, A Disney T-Shirt I Would Actually Wear

The Churro and Dole Whip T-Shirts - A Disney Parks Blog Photo

Despite her best efforts to change me, Mrs. DisneylandTraveler cannot get me to wear anything Disney related outside of the parks other than baseball hats.  I just don't like Disney clothing in my everyday life.  Well today, Disney Parks Blog posted an entry that showed off some new T-Shirts available for sale (link) at the parks this summer.  Forget about the one on the left, the infamous churro, but the one on the right, the one that features the Dole Whip, sign me up for that one (even though I prefer the Floats).

The Christmas Spirit - Disneyland Style

I think it was 2008 - Mrs. DisneylandTraveler and I made the trip down to Disneyland the week before Thanksgiving. I think it may have been one of our best trips ever. We love November at Disneyland - after the decorations go up but before the holiday crowds arrive. And maybe we have been lucky, the November weather at Disneyland for our trips that time of year has been very cooperative with warm days and cool nights, just as it should be. Anyway, we usually made our November trips with other family members but in 2008, it was just me and Mrs. DLT. It was perfect, we arrived on a Sunday afternoon, checked into our hotel, and headed over to Disneyland just before 3:00pm. We walked in right before the start of A Christmas Fantasy Parade and we were able to grap a great spot on the upper level of the train station. Could there be a better way to kick off your holiday season than to see A Christmas Fantasy Parade right when entering the park?

The whole trip was great that way and even though it was before Thanksgiving, everything was filled with the holiday spirit and so were we. I don't even remember us having the usual knock-down-drag-out argument over something stupid like we do on most of our Disneyland trips. The Christmas spirit abounded in so many ways that week.

We had such a good time that when we returned home, settled back, and took a look around at the situation we decided we had the time, the opportunity, and the finances to go back in December as well. We had annual passes, a very great rate was available from one of our favorite places to stay, and everything just seemed to point to going back and continuing our Disney Christmas journey. And so we did - we went back around mid-December before the start of Christmas week.

But we made one fatal error in our Disneyland Christmas Spirit thinking. In November, we went down early, with no real expectations, and the magic of Disneyland at Christmas just overtook in wondrous ways. When we went down a few weeks later in December, we carried the ill-advised plan of "why don't we do our Christmas shopping while down at Disneyland?". Most everyone is our family is some kind of Disney nut so picking up some gifts should be no problem, right? Here is my cautionary tale.

Disneyland is a great way to enhance the Christmas experience and if you let its magical arms wrap around you and carry you way Christmas nirvana. If you walk in there with a list of names, and a Christmas budget, and trudge from store to store looking at everything from top to bottom and checking price tags on everything, a lot of that magic is taken away by the shear commercialism of it all. It became a little unsettling for me. Not that we didn't have a good time but the fact that one of the reasons I was there was to shop, took away a bit from my Christmas Spirit. 

Did I also mention that the weather from the November trip a few week earlier and December trip took a 180 degree turn and turned rainy, cold, and miserable? Well, we could put up with that to a certain extent but its holding up some item in a store and debating for 10 minutes as to whether this would be a good gift for so and so proved be the trips downing moments. 

As it turned out, everyone loved their gifts. Mrs DLT and I had got so frustrated that at the end of the trip we ended up getting all kid's toys on our list at the now defunct Engine-Ears-Toys in DCA in about 30 minutes after spending hours on previous days trying to pick out the elusive perfect gift but it all worked out in the end. One of my new rules for Disneyland at Christmas is if you see something someone may like on a trip through a store - get it but do not make the purpose of a trip to Disneyland to Christmas shop - you'll be sorry. I was.

Shopping (and Bench Sitting) at Disneyland

In one of the stores on Main St., Mrs. DisneylandTraveler took a look at a Mickey Mouse watch she thought she might want to have. You could see the look of temptation in her eyes - "Should I do it? Should I ask if I should do it? Is there money in the shopping budget to do it?" Yep, she was wondering if she should pull the trigger (or charge card in this case). I'm looking at her and thinking of the line attributed to NBA star Charles Barkley "A watch? Why do you need a new watch when there is a perfectly good clock on the stove in the kitchen back home".

You see, unlike Mrs. DisneylandTraveler or almost anyone else who accompanies us in our trips to Disneyland, I'm not much of a shopper. She sees opportunities for cuteness and expanding her Disneyland universe. I see dollar signs and thinking where are we going put this junk or outside of this park, she's never going to wear that. And so it's a test of wills. I can spend about 3 minutes in a store and that's about it unless it is one of the rare occasions where I really do need something (I have a habit of losing baseball hats on rides).

So after about 3 minutes, I try to politely excuse myself, and go outside and find the nearest empty bench to rest and people watch - two things I really love to do at Disneyland and it doesn't cost a dime (minus the armed robbery it costs to get in). In fact, on one of our trips, I took a picture of all the benches I plopped my rear end on while Mrs. DisneylandTraveler and my sister took their sweet time and browsed through the stores.

There's some bench winners - around the flagpole is a prime spot, so pleasant, so historic. The Main St. Hub is a good place providing you get can a bench in the shade. I really like the benches adjacent to the Golden Horseshoe facing Rancho del Zocalo - not usually a very high traffic area there and the bougainvillea vines covering parts of the restaurant are just beautiful certain times of the year. Of course, there are a few bench losers too, the cement slabs outside Star Trader are not meant for prolonged sitting, or any sitting area formed from cement for that matter.

It should be noted that the the bench and chair (shown below) on the front of one of the Main St. building facades look inviting but they are terribly uncomfortable. Sit, take a picture, and move on. I think that is the intent.

I'm not all negative when it comes to shopping. I like Off The Page in DCA. I like the Five and Dime Gag Factory in ToonTown. And I like Star Traders just to look at the Star Wars stuff and look forward to seeing the X-Wing fighter because I haven't seen it since it has been re-displayed inside the store. The stores I like, I'm good for about 10 minutes in there and then it's off to another bench.