Between Disney Trips

So today I've been working between trips to the Disneyland Resort.  Tomorrow, I'm spending all day at Disneyland itself.  But yesterday, I went down to California Adventure.  And the best part?  It was free.  (Or was it the fact that I got an afternoon off work?  I forget which.)

I took off work at noon, went home, and picked up my roommate Daniel.  It was his first trip to California Adventure, so it was fun getting to show him the park.

We actually got there around 2PM and couldn't get into the park until 4PM, so we hung around Downtown Disney for a while.

We were officially there for the elecTRONica show.  The Disney Parks Blog was hosting a meet up, and those of us were RSVP'd quickly enough got free tickets to get into the park at 4.  Then we got to stay to experience the elecTRONica stuff after the park had closed to the other guests.

So we had four hours to explore the park.  We really needed about another hour since I would have liked to do both the 3D shows.  But we did get in all the big, important rides plus the Farris wheel and the newly theme swings.

At 8, the park closed down and we got to experience the show.  It started with a dance show that was a bit cheesy.  They had 200 spots to get autographs from the authors of the new Tron sequel, and since Daniel and I got there early enough we got to do that.  We watched LasarMan, who does a pretty impressive show with a Lazar beam.  We got to see a few costumes from the movie.  They had a 3D preview of the new movie, including a scene from near the beginning.  I've got to tell you, this looks like a very fun movie.  Plus there was an arcade of video games from the 80's.  If there weren't people around all the games, I probably would have spent way too much money there.

They had put out a call earlier for Frisbee players for the show, and naturally that was announced to local area ultimate Frisbee players.  I thought they were part of a show, but instead the frisbee players are hosting an area where people try to throw a disc into a disc golf hole.  Two of the people working there last night are friends of mine from ultimate Frisbee.  That was a blast seeing them and talking to them at the park.

We left around 10:30 but didn't get home until midnight thanks to traffic.  They really should never shut down all but one lane of a freeway.  Traffic wasn't that heavy, I thought, until we had to go down to one lane.  Suddenly, we were hardly moving at 11:30 at night.  But we made it home.

All in all it was a fun day.  I didn't buy any pins, so all I spent money on was food and parking.  Can't complain too much about that.  (Of course, I did start making a list of the pins to buy tomorrow.  Must resist buying too much.)

They are starting to work on the new Cars themed land in California Adventure and have some huge walls up.  They've even taken down their big pin trading store, at least for now.  I'm really going to miss it.