Disney Day 1 Recap: California Adventure

It’s me, guys! We got back from our trip to Socal/Disney and after pulling myself & my life back together last week (why is post vacation always such a struggle!?), I’m finally ready to share a recap of our time away!

Originally, this post was going to be divided into two parts – one part Socal/family time post and one part all things Disney. Well, unfortunately, the days that we were with family/friends (pre-Disney) I hardly ever pulled out my phone and have literally zero pictures for you. I think I barely even updated IG those days, too. It was sort of like I unofficially went off the grid and you know what? It was actually kind of nice! But what’s not nice is that I don’t really have anything to show for a post so instead I decided to split our Disney recap into two separate posts for you! Today’s post is part 1/day 1 which was our day at California Adventure Park.

So, to backtrack a bit – as everyone knows, Disneyland was closed for the majority of the pandemic. Once they reopened, it was with reduced capacity and all these new restrictions in place (masked, limited dining reservations available, no character visits, etc). I’ve heard from friends that the day Disney reopened their website to ticket purchases, it took people hours to just get into the website. If I’m honest, we took our kids to Disneyland for several days to ring in 2020 last year (RIGHT before the pandemic) so it’s not like we were dying for a Disney trip. I said mehh, good luck to my friends, and left it at that.

Then, as Hubby & I were planning our annual summer trip down to Socal to see friends & family, I thought … well, if we’re going to be down there why not just see if we can spend a day or two at Disneyland? It would be a fun kickoff-to-summer treat for the kids and J will have the time off from work anyway so why not? I checked out the website and even though it wasn’t THE VERY FIRST DAY OF REOPENING TICKET SALES I still had to wait roughly an hour before I could get into the website. Right now, their requirement is that guests need to be CA residents and in order to visit the parks, guests not only need valid tickets but they need a reservation to enter the park. I don’t know if it’s because we were planning to go over Memorial Day weekend which is a holiday already (and people had other plans?) but even though I was a little late to the game, I didn’t have any trouble getting tickets and reservations to the parks & days we wanted.

We settled with just doing two days – one day at each park (California Adventure and Disneyland) – and staying two nights at the Grand Californian Hotel inside the Disneyland resort. Before I go any further, I have to tell you THE GRAND CALIFORNIAN WAS SO WORTH IT. I don’t ever want to go to Disneyland again if we’re not going to stay at a hotel inside the park, I was SO SPOILED by the convenience this trip.

The first day, our nephews were able to join us! It was so sweet seeing the 5 cousins together .. they’re all super close in age and are really bonded with each other. It’s really sweet to watch 🥺

I think you can kind of tell but the weather while we were at Disney was PERFECT. It was overcast and low-mid 70s both days that we were there. Great for days spent waiting in lines and walking around with a mask on all day!

We rode a bunch of rides together … the classics like The Little Mermaid and Toy Story Mania. My kids finally got to ride on the Radiator Springs ride which was just as fun as everyone always said it was. The last time we went to Disney, we tried to ride it and the ride broke just as we were approaching the front. A was a huge trooper and did great walking around the entire day! We were a little unsure because this is our first time doing Disney without a stroller for any of our kids (or any of our bags) but whenever she needed a break, she just hopped onto J’s shoulders and it worked out. Having bigger kids is great, y’all 😉

The definite highlight on this first day was letting E & D experience their first “real” roller coaster … they rode the Incredicoaster and LOVED IT. D especially became especially enamored with it and rode it 4 times total that day…

I’d made dining reservations for lunch at the Lamplight Lounge for our family of 5 before I knew our nephews/brother & sister in law would be joining us and by the time they added to our party, I couldn’t switch the reservation party number so we ended up splitting off for lunch. The food was really good! I’m sure the fact that we were starving from walking around so much helped but all the kids gobbled their food up.

We also had a churro break later in the afternoon …

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of characters my kids got to meet! I thought that with all the COVID restrictions that there wouldn’t be any character interaction but actually there were characters EVERYWHERE! They just had it set up so that guests couldn’t get close (which .. if I’m that character performer, I might actually not be too mad about hahah).

There was lots of twirling done by this little one while the older kids rode rides that she couldn’t go on.

As well as lots of riding on daddy’s shoulders … and then falling asleep on daddy’s shoulders LOL.

We had a full day of riding rides and then came out of the park to eat dinner with my in-laws at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Dude, I thought we were starving at lunch but at dinnertime, we DEVOURED the food.

These spoiled kids with their grandparents 😂😍

After dinner, our nephews and their parents went home because it was close to bedtime for them. Our hotel was connected to Disney California Adventure like I’ve said so we also went back into the hotel room to drop off some stuff … and then decided why not just go back into the park and stay until closing!? D REALLLLLY wanted to ride the Incredicoaster one more time and E had been begging for ice cream all day long so with about an hour left before the park closed, we headed back in to knock those off the bucket list.