A day at Disneyland

Last week, before I expected to get busy with graduate school, I spent the day at Disneyland.

It's been quite some time since I visited without being preoccupied by what our children would enjoy. So even though it might seem strange to visit an amusement park by oneself, I had a good time walking through the park, riding favorite attractions, exploring some new ones, and taking photos.

The park was definitely less busy on a late September Tuesday than most weekend or summer days. It felt like there were a decent number of people walking around, but most of the lines were fairly short.

The one exception was the recently refurbished Submarine Voyage, featuring characters from the Pixar film Finding Nemo. Since I enjoyed the submarine ride a lot as a child, I was curious about the enhancements supposedly supervised by Pixar's John Lasseter under his new role as head creative consultant to the Disney theme parks.

The underwater effects with characters like Dory, Marlin, and Nemo were really quite good, but the storyline from Finding Nemo has become the primary focus of the attraction. So I can't really recommend waiting in line for an hour or more unless you or your children are big fans of the movie.

I also got to see some newer attractions that I have not had the chance to visit. I had a lot of fun on the Buzz Lightyear ride in Tomorrowland, which opened with the park's 50th anniversary promotion a couple of years ago. It was like a video game crossed with a Disneyland ride, where one uses a video game controller to shoot at targets based on the movie Toy Story 2.

I also got to see the Johnny Depp "improvements" to the classic Pirates of Caribbean, where they have added the Jack Sparrow character into the storyline of the ride in three places (unnecessarily, in my opinion). Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer's Island in the middle of the lake ("river" for purists) in Frontierland has been renovated with a pirate theme, with themed play areas and caves for exploring, as well as a Johnny Depp-lookalike to have your photo taken with.

I also had not been inside the Haunted Mansion Holiday attraction, where the ride has been rethemed with the characters and story of the Tim Burton stop-motion film Nightmare Before Christmas (finally, a non-Pixar movie tie-in). The Haunted Mansion has been one of my favorite attractions since I was a child, and I am a fan of the Nightmare film, but I just didn't appreciate the reinvention of the classic ride. If you had never been on the original ride and were a fan of the movie, you undoubtedly love the updated attraction. But I felt the same way I did about the Finding Nemo submarine ride: the storyline of the movie becomes too central to the ride. If you have never seen the movie, you're not going to appreciate the ride.

The Halloween-theme of the Haunted Mansion attraction is a main feature of the park's Halloween Time promotion. There are also a lot of Halloween and fall harvest decorations throughout the park, but especially at the park entrance and in the Town Square area of Main Street.

Also, in the Big Thunder Ranch area between Fantasyland and Big Thunder Mountain, the entire area has been extensively decorated for Halloween, including pumpkin-headed figures, pumpkin carvings, and early twentieth-century era Halloween posters. Also, the Woody stage show featuring the cowboy characters from Toy Story 2 has a Halloween theme.

I was considering buying the lowest-level annual pass to have someplace to blow off some steam when my studies got too intense, but I got the Disneyland cravings out of my system by the end of the day. I couldn't justify spending the extra money without knowing I would visit a few more times during the next year.