Day 5: Disneyland

We started the day off less than magically.  First, our shuttle bus was late.  Then, when we finally got to the park, we discovered we needed our full coupon book (not just the tickets I had torn out of it) so the kids and I waited while Adam walked back to the hotel and got it (a twenty minute walk each way). 

Inside the park is a fairytale kingdom populated almost entirely by overpriced souvenir stands and restaurants.  Each ride is a long line, followed by a short seizure-inducing acid trip loosely based on random Disney films.  Did we enjoy ourselves?  Oh yes.

My favourite ride is It's a Small World.  Cultural stereotyping at its finest.  Everywhere you look, animantronic children of various nationalities sing their hearts out under psychadelic black lighting.  A goofy Mountie with a totem pole represents Canada, but I can forgive them for that, since some other countries didn't do much better.  And of course some random characters were thrown in, Ariel from Little Mermaid, Lilo and Stitch, Woody from Toy Story.  A big bright yellow moon!  And ducks!  It was totally insane.

William's favourite was a Taxi ride based on Roger Rabbit.  He describes it as "the ride where you drive a taxi and the taxi goes into a scary tunnel with scary things in it."  Most of the rides were a little scary actually, but the kids seemed to like it anyway.

I'm not sure what Jadzia's favourite ride was.  She mostly enjoyed making friends with random strangers.  On the way home on the bus, the woman sitting behind us had a tattoo of a bird on her arm, which delighted my daughter as much as anything else we saw today.  Though she did enjoy the playground that we hung out in while Adam took William on the Goofy roller coaster.

By the end of the day, we were so exhausted that some of us were tantruming, and the rest of us felt like we would any second. We had dinner at the buffet across the street from Disney, then went back to the hotel for a relaxing dip in the pool.  Adam even juggled two swimming children a moment so I could go in the hot tub.  Ahhhhhhhh.