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At the end of many of Disney’s beloved fairy tales, the phrase "And they all lived happily ever after ..." reigns supreme. After a Disney’s Fairy Tale Wedding of our own, Kathy and I have continued to live happily ever after, and to celebrate, we like to return to the place where it all began - the Disneyland Resort.
We have returned for a weekend’s stay each year since our 1999 wedding. For the first couple of years, we returned for a stay at the Disneyland Hotel since that is where our wedding took place. However, for this year’s anniversary, Kathy decided that it would be nice to stay at the Grand Californian Hotel since she enjoyed its accommodations so much when we stayed there for my birthday last December.
Below is a collection of photos taken during our special weekend with some commentary about what is happening in each.
The park-view room was nearly identical to the one we stayed in last December. Since we had a view of the Paradise Pier section of the park last time, we thought it would be nice if we had a view of Grizzly Peak this time. Our third-floor room actually looked out over the Condor Flats section as seen in the picture above. However, we did have a great view of Grizzly Peak when we stepped out onto the patio.
I am really fascinated by Grizzly Peak and always take a number of pictures of it whenever I go to Disney's California Adventure. From our room, we could actually see the rafts go by before making their descent down the climatic drop. I tried to take photos of Grizzly Peak at different times of the day, like this night shot from our patio. I wanted to get up at dawn to get some nice sunrise colors behind the mountain but I never woke up early enough to do so.
Our first night at the Disneyland Resort, we headed over to Disney's California Adventure to look around. While walking near the Pacific Wharf area of the park, Disney's Electrical Parade was going down the performance corridor. We hadn't seen the Electrical Parade at DCA before so it was nice to watch it go by. As you can tell by the blur of the Pete's Dragon float, the parade seemed to hum by and it was over seemingly as quick as it had begun.
Most of our weekend was occupied with the act of pinching pennies - literaly - and some quarters too. Going around the resort and getting these pressed coins was a big activity last anniversary and we decided to get the ones that we missed last year because of broken machines and also to get new ones they've added. Kathy is planning on doing a Kathy's Collectible Corner on the coin machines soon.
We noticed back at the room that the monorails seemed to stop coming by on Saturday; a trip to Tomorrowland showed why. Monorail Purple sat broken at the station with the tow car getting set to bring it backstage. I had never seen a monorail towed before so I snapped this picture. The other two monorails didn't resume service until hours later.
We didn't know when we booked our room that Disney was going to start a music series the same weekend with the Beach Boys appearing. Kathy and I weren't interested enough to wait for a space to watch the concert but we did head down to the Bay to see how it was going. The music sounded pretty good, pumped throughout the area on the speakers around Paradise Pier. It was fairly crowded but not packed. I'm not sure that DCA is going to do any better with this series. We had a message on our phone at the hotel Saturday night telling us about the Beach Boys' appearance on Sunday afternoon. Trying to stir up interest and attendance? I don't know.
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