We were excited to get in an hour early on our second day visiting California Adventure. Even so, the line for the "Radiator Springs Racers" in Cars Land was an hour long. We made a decision to have Sean wait in line for the ride while I took the boys to see a Disney Junior live show. Turned out, we had enough time to ride the Monsters, Inc. ride twice and Sean was still in line in Cars Land. We finally joined up with him as he was getting close to the front of the line. About 5-10 minutes into our time waiting with him, the ride broke down & they weren't sure when it would be fixed. At that point, we decided to get out of line as Sean had already wasted two hours in a line and we knew it was our last day in the park with lots more to see and do.
The ride attendant advised me to go to Customer Service to see about a FastPass for the ride if we wanted to come back later. Well, that turned out to be the best thing I ever did! Long story short, Disney more than made up for Sean's wasted time in line by giving us not only a FastPass to walk on to the ride later (after it was fixed), but they also gave me FastPasses to four other popular rides and the World of Color nighttime show. PLUS, they gave me FREE Park-Hopper tickets for the next day (I was willing to pay for tickets but in the process of doing so they over-charged my credit card and it took quite a while to reverse the charges. So, they just upgraded my tickets and said "They're on Mickey!") and free snack coupons. I felt like it was my birthday or something. Honestly, I am kind of critical when it comes to customer service. I guess it comes from working in hotels and restaurants for so many years. I cannot say enough about how AMAZING the Disney customer service people were. They truly made my/our day by how they went above and beyond. But, enough about all that. Let's get to the photos:
Red!
Carter with the statue of Stanley, founder of Radiator Springs.
The broken-down ride. So close, yet so far...
The attention to detail in every part of the parks was amazing.
Davis driving the bumper bugs!
Carter LOVED the zip line in the Wilderness Explorers area.
Our birthday boy finally got his cupcake! We ate a wonderful dinner at the Storytellers Cafe, inside the Grand Californian hotel. I wish we could have afforded to stay in this place, but since we couldn't it was at least nice to eat dinner there and enjoy the scenery. Probably one of my favorite nights of our trip!
The boys fell asleep before/during World of Color, but Sean & I loved the show. It was so beautiful! Honestly the photos do not do it justice. The music, the lights, the color, the images in the water--so cool. The family next to us bought the special Mickey ears that light up in sync with the show. Pretty impressive!
It's hard to tell, but Aladdin and Jasmine are in the center water area.
