Well, that was a goofy idea!

[luckykaa]

Happy Birthday dear flickums ... Happy birthday to you.

Day 3 of Disney - we've done Disneyland so we went to the other park - Disney Studios. This place has a somewhat different feel - more overt about being a theme park rather than a sort of fantasy land.

We saw a queue to meet Goofy at the entrance. I wasn't that keen on queuing right away, and Flick decided it was because I have some sort of issue with Goofy. Also I wanted to solve yesterdays Waffle problem. Sadly the studios wafflarium was closed... Decided to deal with this problem later.

Went on a ride The slinky dog ride. It's about as intense as Flickums will do. Queued up to meet Olaf. Queues to meet characters are really frustrating. There's always a bunch of people who pay for advance tickets who skip the queue so it takes forever to get to the front. But we met him and he gave us each a warm hug.

Shows seemed to be difficult to get into so decided this time, we're going to queue jump. Booked priority tickets for Mickey and the Magician. I really enjoyed it. It's something of a compilation of the best parts of the Disney plays, so there's a Lion King segment with lots of puppeteered animals and Elsa performs Let it go for us! Also we got to sit down for 30 whole minutes!!!

Frozen show was opposite. No advance queuing and I didn't want to overspend anyway so we joined the queue. The queue was in the "Animation Celebration" room which was an interesting room in its own right and it seemed a pity it was just used as a queue holding area. They had a muti-plane animation device and various displays of early Disney animation. They also showed the Disney 100 year short.  Play itself was amusing

Flickums wouldn't let the not-seeing-Goofy thing go, so we went back to where he was going to appear and got some snaps with him. We were near the front of the queue as well!  After that Flick went souvenir shopping and I went on the scary ride. Tower of Terror!

It really is a great ride! It's based on The Twilight Zone. There's even a Rod Serling intro! The whole ride is designed to look like a derelict high rise hotel. The ride itself is basically a series of free falls. The last one starts right at the top - and you even get a view out of the tower. Lots of fun!

Caught up with Flick back in Disneyland. Finally bought some Mickey Waffles!!! Also decided to watch the parade we didn't bother with yesterday. Although they didn't seem to do the big dance number I saw a bit of. It seems that they do more of a show when it's not tipping down.

Long slow painful feet walk back to Studios park for dinner at Remy's, It's a fun restaurant where you're shrunk to rat size, so all the decor and furnishing are made from things like bottle tops. It was also a pretty decent meal! Starter wasn't weird. Main course wasn't overcooked. Sauce was tasty. Ratatouille was nice! Dessert was really good (although that didn't disappoint at the other places either).

Park is a lot quieter after 6, so we wrapped up the remaining rides. The Ratatouille (movie, not the dish) themed one was enjoyable. Zipping around as a mouse avoiding being trod on. Clever use of 3d glasses and moving cars. There was effectively no queue for a single rider for the Toy Story soldiers paradrop so I thought I'd give it a go. It was quite tame after Tower of terror. More of a "wheeeee!" than a "Waaaaaaah!!!!!". But worth the wait since there wasn't a wait.

Decided to wrap up the day with the Spiderman WEB adventure. This is basically a video game with 3D glasses and hand motion sensors. It's a nice gimmick but not the best ride. Also there was a bit of odd design where there's an into video with Peter Parker seeing everything go wrong, followed by... another queue. Queuing after the intro kind of ruins the flow a bit.

After that we decided to call it a day. Our final adventure was the "Getting the damn train" ride. There was an epic queue for tickets. The train was meant to be arriving in 9 minutes. 9 minutes later a train did indeed arrive. We got on and were told, in a rather shirty manner that we all had to get off. If you don't want people boarding your train, don't stop at a platform when people are expecting a train!

The next train arrived some time later and we duly waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually it decided to move.

Finally arrived at hotel and flumped.

So that was Disneyland! I think that is well and truly Disneyed!