Coaster Community

The wife and I decided to spend New Years Eve in Los Angeles and after considering several actual New Years Eve events we went with Disneyland.  We had hoped that we were the only people smart enough to think of this option but alas, we were wrong.  This was my first Disney experience of any kind (outside of the movies of course) so this was also my first experience with a mega crowd.  For those of you not familiar with a mega crowd; imagine so many people that moving from ride to ride feels like waiting in a line.  I was truly amazed by the amount of people and since most of them were pushing strollers the entire park became a huge obstacle course.

The weather was another issue that was unexpected.  I lived in San Diego for several years and I don’t ever remember having to wear a winter coat or gloves.  Since I’m pretty much a yeti I decided to tough it out and live with the hooded sweat shirt option.  The wife isn’t what most people would consider tough, so we had to buy extra provisions for her (she suffers from female cold syndrome).  So after buying an expensive pair of Mickey gloves and a gallon of hot chocolate it was time to hit the rides. 

The lines for everything were at least a half hour and most of the big attractions topped 1 hour.  We made use of the fast pass as often as we could as we meandered our way through the park.  Since it was New Years Eve there seemed to be a lot of things to keep the parents distracted.  This may have kept the lines from being much worse because the walkways were as packed as they could get.  As midnight approached we hit some good luck.  The ride that supposedly had the longest line all night was Indiana Jones^TM Adventure, and just as we got back to that area of the park the celebrations began.  This left the line as empty as can be and we got right on the ride.  Due to the timing we had to make out just before our jeep took off, which was pretty nice since she had hot chocolate breath.

We were able to hit just about every ride on our list expect for Peter Pan’s Flight and Space Mountain (down for rehab, dang!).  We did not have a chance to ride anything more than one time though.