Touring Disneyland Part 2

Here are some more of my thoughts on touring Disneyland, including crowd levels, touring plans and navigating the park.

Crowd Levels

When I started planning my trip, Touring Plans was predicting low to moderate crowds for my travel dates. But in the weeks leading up to my trip the actual crowds were above predictions almost every single day, so I was a little bit worried. Thankfully crowds came much closer to predicted levels while I was actually there. Even when the crowd levels were off by a couple of points, that only made a difference of 5 minutes in most wait times, so it didn't cause any problems.

I'm glad the crowd levels weren't higher though, because even a crowd level of 5 or 6 felt really crowded in Disneyland because there just wasn't much room in the walkways. DCA seemed to handle the crowds a lot better. Also, because the Touring Plans crowd levels are based on wait times for rides, they did not reflect the number of people that spent hours camping out for Paint the Night and Disneyland Forever.

Ultimately I think having a good touring plan is much more important than crowd levels when it comes to how long you wait in line for rides. Crowds are more important when it comes to parades, fireworks, and just moving around the park, but the Touring Plans crowd calendar is not necessary the best indicator of this.

Touring Plans

While the crowd calendar from Touring Plans wasn't quite as helpful as I thought it would be, the actual touring plans were invaluable. I spent a lot of time putting together touring plans on their website. Although I did use the optimise function to order some sections of my plan, I couldn't use optimise on a whole day's plan because it didn't take into account that I could use Single Rider. So in the end my plan was mostly ordered manually and then evaluated. I always set my walking speed to the slowest possible setting, which gave me plenty of breathing space for contingencies (as well as time to stop for photos, bathroom breaks, etc.).

For the most part the predicted wait times were very accurate, with the exception of Peter Pan, which was very popular post-refurb. However, since I knew that the predictions for that ride had been consistently off ever since the ride re-opened I was able to plan around it.

Towards the end of my trip I hadn't planned things in advance, so I was able to quickly put a plan together using the Lines app. Unfortunately Disneyland doesn't have wifi available, so I wasn't able to use the Lines app in the parks. Instead I entered my plans into the Calendar app on my phone so that I was able to view them on my phone or on my Apple Watch (which was much easier than having to pull my phone out after every ride to check what was up next.

Navigating the Park

I found it a little hard to find my way around Disneyland Park, partly because it was often similar to but not the same as Magic Kingdom in Disney World, which I am more familiar with. Fantasyland in particular had a lot of different paths and I often seemed to pick the wrong one. It was also more difficult to navigate in Disneyland Park than it is in Magic Kingdom because the castle is so much shorter and therefore less visible. California Adventure seemed a little more straightforward to get around.

What made it particularly difficult to get around the parks was that many paths were completely blocked off before, during and after parades and fireworks (which in Disneyland Park meant large chunks of the evening). This often made it close to impossible to get to where I wanted to go, or meant that I got halfway to where I wanted to go and then had to backtrack and take a different path. In addition, many Fantasyland attractions were closed during the fireworks, and it was not well advertised what time they closed and re-opened.

The most common reason for me to have to pull out a map, though, was to find a restroom. Since it was hot, I often wanted to use the sink in the restroom to re-wet my cooling towel, or use the water fountains outside the restroom to refill my water bottle. So I was looking for a restroom every couple of hours, and there were never any signs until you were right outside the restroom. So I was forever pulling out a map to figure out whether there was a restroom on the way to the next attraction on my plan.

I'm expecting this to be my last blog post about Disneyland - I will move on to attractions in and around Boston next.