Wow, what a week. This was going to be the first trip to Disneyland for my 2 younger boys, so my wife and I were pretty excited. We knew they would love it as we have in the past. I could almost taste the cotton candy as we were driving there.

I have never been to the "Magical Kingdom" on Christmas before, so I was a bit excited myself. After all, how many cool things can they do for every other holiday, just imagine what they would come up with for this. They have their own parade celebration even. We stayed at a decent hotel, not great and surely not the suite like the picture in the pamphlet showed (surprise surprse). We didn't really care though. We just wanted to get into the park and start having a good time.

So the first day we walked to the park from the hotel and it's only about 3/4 of a mile (long blocks, since the pamphlet also said 2 blocks from disneyland). We figured we were tough and the kids had a ton of energy, so who needs to wait for the shuttle to get to the park. So they check the bags at the entrance to the entrance of the park. Then we give our hopper passes to the less than enthusiastic ticket counter person. I guess they get tired of the magic after it becomes a job. I was then informed that when I left the park, if I was returning make sure I got my hand stamped so that I could get back in. No problem I thought. that's easy enough, besides they stand there with a stamp as you leave. So we get into the park, and it's basically a living wall of people. There had to be 10,000 people in the front waiting to get in, and that was a small piece of the crowd.

The kids are pulling us this way and that, because they are oblivous to everything except for the excitemenet of a new park, and the possibilities of what they might find. So we figure it'll calm down a bit, we were there at midday and it's usually pretty busy about that time. Day turns into night and guess what, it's busier still. Now we are being herded into these lines of traffic to keep the park "flowing", it felt like we were herded cattle. There were parades going on at the same time that they were doing special shows, and people were overwhelmed with choices of what to do so everybody seemed to be just running from here to there and hoping to catch a glimpse of one thing or the other, without really getting to catch all of anything.

The kids were sorta hungry so I figure we may as well get a little snack. I knew the food would be expensive but we planned for it, and were ready to give them an A+ experience. We find a little umbrella stand and get some burgers and fries (soda sold separately from the meal). 4 people cost $57.00 for a burger fries and a coke. One of those meals happened to be a kid's sized. So you can guess how much came with that.

So we tried to move around the park and get a few rides in, but every line was at least 60 minutes. eventually on day 1 I think we managed 2 rides, well three if you count the little fairyland boat ride. I was told that this was the quiet day and Christmas eve and Christmas would be much busier. Oh joy for me and mine, we were in for quite an adventure.

I have tons of pictures to share and I promise they will get posted in the next couple of days. For now I just wanted to share this little tidbit with all of you. If you are thinking of Disneyland for Christmas.....Don't...Bad idea, the park is gonna always be the same, but the amount of people they cram in there for the holidays is absolutely ridiculous. You are pushed around and stepped on, not to mention the "cast members" are for the most part rude and anti-social. Not the people in the shows or doing the survey, but most of the servers and a good portion of those handling the rides are just some really unhappy people.

Yeah, I'm sure I feel a good rant coming on about Disneyland. I have already started my letter to the place we got our package from to explain to them, what I thought of it ....

Well tomorrow is another day, and it will probably include at least a portion of all those wonderful pics we managed to take, because that is one great thing about DL. It's just pretty, no matter how you look at it, they originally did a great job on this place.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll let you guys know how wonderful legoland was too :)