Happiest Place on Earth!

This past weekend was our three year anniversary, and we celebrated by going to Disneyland! And, like all good plans, this trip had a few hiccups. We planned to leave L.A. on Friday night right after Katie got off work at 7. Since Anaheim is only an hour away, we were going to have a nice dinner at Downtown Disney, then go back to the hotel and get up early to go to Disneyland all day Saturday. That's not quite the way it worked out.

As I have mentioned before, the Interstate system around here were designed to move lots of cars along at high rates of speed. More often that not, this is the case. The exception comes when you actually need to get somewhere on time. We drove from Los Angeles all the way to Anaheim at the blistering speed of about 30 MPH. No construction, no accidents, no real reason at all for the delay. I guess everyone decided that Friday evening was the perfect time for a leisurely drive along the highway. By the time we finally got to Anaheim it was so late and we were so hungry that we gave up on the nice dinner and decided to have a pizza delivered to the hotel room. The first half of our anniversary was celebrated with a pepperoni pizza and "The Pelican Brief" edited for television.

I wish I could say that Disneyland in Anaheim and the Magic Kingdom in Orlando are just two sides of the same coin; that they are equal but different, but that is not really the case. More accurately, the Magic Kingdom is the end product of seeing what was wrong with Disneyland and generally improving the flow and the feel of the park. Not to mention, Cinderella's castle makes Sleeping Beauty's castle look like a weekend chalet. Disneyland does have some stuff that Orlando lacks, most notably the Matterhorn, which is like a combination of Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain because the bobsleds shoot around inside and outside the mountain. It's a lot of fun, and I resent that no one saw it fitting to include it in the construction of the Magic Kingdom. Another neat thing was that they had completely redecorated The Haunted Mansion to tell the story of 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and they did an excellent job. We rode that twice because there was so much to see. They also have an Indiana Jones ride which is probably among the best non-roller coaster rides I've ever been on. Kudos to whoever designed that ride, they did an excellent job.

Disneyland happened to be open from until midnight, and we took that opportunity to ride everything of substance in the park. By the end of the night we even ended up riding It's A Small World because someone told us it was better than the one in Orlando. I just have a few things to say about that ride. When to comes to a boat ride with little robot puppets all singing the exact same song which is only two verses long, there is no possible way to make it "better." That's like saying they have discovered a way to make Chinese water torture better. And the point they are trying to convey is that it is a SMALL world. You do not achieve this by giving every country its own representative troupe of dancing stereotypes! By the time you get to western Europe, you start to think that it may not be a small work at all. The designers did take a short-cut through Africa by just making one room full of jungle animals and little dancing black puppets. I also think it would have been wise to hire a more creative song writer, or pay the one they had a little bit more to write a whole song, and not just a commercial jingle. I guess I had a lot to say about that ride.

Anyway, after drinking in all Disneyland could provide us and closed its doors at midnight, we stopped off at Denny's before heading home. Only then did we discover that CalTran has taken a leaf out of the I-4 construction manual that says the best time to close three out of four highway lanes is on a weekend night right outside a major theme park. Upon reaching home at 2:30 in the morning, Katie and I zonked out pretty quickly, thus concluding out third anniversary celebration. Much to my dismay, I woke up the next morning with "It's A Small World" still stuck in my head.