My birthday was this past Monday, and in keeping with our new austerity plan, no huge elaborate celebration was planned. Instead, Chuck surprised me with a Segway tour of Newport Beach! This might not seem all that exciting to some people, but I was over the moon! Segways are SO MUCH fun! And SO easy to learn to ride. If only they were more affordable (oh, and we weren’t on that austerity plan I mentioned earlier), I’d want to buy one! I’m not the most coordinated person you’ll ever meet, and I had the whole navigation/steering thing down in less than five minutes and in the entire hour and a half we rode around crashed into nothing!
After our Segway fun, we headed over to Disneyland for a mellow afternoon of odds and ends. Things got off to a bumpy footing when we went to California Adventure to ride Soaring over California. In an example of really crappy customer service, all of the signage said the wait would be about 30 minutes – but it was well over an hour later before we finally got on the ride. At no point along the way did an employee come out to explain anything to those of us in line. Grrr!! Walt would NOT have been happy! We never did find out what the problem was, but the Fast Pass customers did get preferential treatment – when things began to move, they got on first. Again, people, a little explanation would have gone a long way to keep us all happy.
Shaking that bad experience off, we headed over to Main Street and watched Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years (we actually wanted to see the Mr. Lincoln presentation but that appears to be long gone) for which we had no wait (yay!), then we rode the Matterhorn (I haven’t been on that ride in years, and had forgotten how cool it is), then Pirates of the Caribbean (again, no wait at all), and one that I have never been on before: the Mark Twain Riverboat. I remember back in the old days (I’m dating myself here) that was an E ticket, and given the limited number of E tickets in a book I NEVER wanted to use one on such a lame non-thrilling ride. Well, who knew there was a backside to Tom Sawyer Island with pioneers and Indians! All in all, it was a great day to be in Disneyland: nice weather, manageable crowds (but I have a thought – what about once a month they have an adults only day where you have to be over 35 to get into the park?). We’re premium pass holders, so it cost us nothing (unless you figure in the cost of two deluxe passes). This is our last year for deluxe passes – we’ve managed to go a whopping twice this year, which makes the cost of the passes actually MORE than the cost of just buying tickets when we go to Disneyland.