Day 6 - Saturday 7th October 2006 - Part 2

We stayed at the hotel watching a Law and Order: SVU marathon until about 7:30 and then made our way back down to the park. There was no point in leaving earlier then this as the parade wouldn't finish long before 8 and we wouldn't be able to get in the front entrance. We were back in the park by 8pm and the place was packed. We expected it to be busy today, being a Saturday and all and we also knew that this weekend was the annual 'Gay Days' weekend which brings about an additional 6000 people into the park, all wearing red teeshirts. We skipped out of Disneyland this morning before 10am while things were realtively normal and over at DCA the crowds never got that bad. We fast passed onto everything and never had to wait more then 10 minutes for a ride, but for people not using fast pass the wait times for the major rides were consistently over an hour. Generally walking around though it didn't feel particualry crowed in DCA and other then the Student holiday Monday were the crowds were insane, the crowds the rest of the week had been very light and we hadn't used fast pass many times as there was no wait anyway.
Well I don't know what the crowds were like during the day here but they were insane tonight. Our plan was to watch Fantasmic at 9 and then stay in the same spot for the fireworks that start about 2 mins later. Fatasmic is done on the big river that they have there which is over one side of the park and the fireworks all revolve around the big castle in the centre of the park so its impossible to be in a good spot for both, but we figured we would see the fireworks proper on Sunday night.
We we made our way to the Rivers of America and the sea of humanity was overwhelming. People must have staked out spots for hours as there was really no where to stand to see the show and this was 45mins before show time. As there was going to be a later showing of Fantasmic at 10:30 and the fireworks were only going to be shown once, we decided we would get a good spot for the fireworks and come back later for Fantasmic after every other man, woman and child had seen it at the earlier session.
We used our fast passes that we got first thing this morning to ride Space Mountain and Buzz Lightyear again. I racked up an impressive 196k points compared to the girls measly 50k each. You would think that with the amount of times we have been on this ride that they would be getting better but they seem to get around the same score each time they ride.
By this time it was almost 9 so we moved to the central hub and found a spot where we could see the castle to watch the show. I'm not a big fan of fireworks generally but this show was amazing. It was set to a story about the history of Disneyland and many of the fireworks effects I had certainly not seen before. They were able to shoot fireworks that looked like shooting starts, with trailing fire behind them, and fireworks that exploded to look like hearts and other fireworks that would explode and then the bits from the explosion would zig-zag around randomly. There was also an effect where they let off giant fireballs. We were at least 150m away from them and we could feel the heat from where we were. Tinkerbell also flew around the castle which made the girls giddy with joy. The whole performance was so good I would watch it again.
We then made our way back to the Rivers of America for the second showing of Fantasmic. We took the long way around so we wouldn't run into the thriving masses hopefully exiting the area and heading for the gate to go home. We arrived back at the Rivers of America to find the same scene as from a couple of hours earlier, it looked like not a person had moved from the first performance! D'oh.
We were determined to see the show as during the off season they only show it Friday-Sunday nights and we didn't want to have to be in the park as late again tomorrow night. We finally found a spot where we could see everything and waited 30 mins for the show to start.
We certainly weren't disapointed. Its a really hard show to try and explain but it is basically a big special effects show loosely based around Mickey's Fantasia cartoon where Sorcerer Mickey's imagination goes nuts and his minions that he creates to clean for him almost kill him. In this version, all of the disney witches have a hand in casting a spell to take control of Mickey's imagination to destroy him. This plays out both through live action scences on an island in the middle of the 'lake' and also through cartoons that are projected onto a mist of water. There is lots of sound, music and special effects and in the finale Mickey battles a massive dragon. During the show there is a battle scence on a massive sailing ship between Captain hook and his pirates and Peter Pan, and another time a riverboat goes past carrying all the Disney Princesses and their partners. At the very end of the show riverboat floats past full of disney characters.
Even with so many people it was a wonderful show. By the time we escaped the thongs of people and made it back to our hotel it was almost midnight and we had spent over 12 hours today in the parks and there is still so much we haven't seen, let alone the stuff we want to see and do again.
At a pinch and if it wasn't overly busy and you weren't interested in getting pictures with characters you could deffinatly do DCA in a day, as long as you were smart with your Fastpasses. You would be absoultly dreaming if you thought you could do Disneyland itself though in under 3 days, even with the same conditions as above.
DCA is a good park and there are plenty of great things to do over there, but its just not the same as Disneyland (though certainly better the San Diego Seaworld). It is missing a lot of the subtlity of Disneyland, which even after being in for at least 4 days now, we still find little things hidden away or even right in front of us that we hadn't noticed before. Maybe its not fair to compare this 5 year old park with its 50 year old neighbour, but when its the same price to get into either (though you are better off with a park-hopper ticket like ours where you can go to both parks during the day) the comparisson has to be made and unless you had been to Disneyland plenty of time before (or for the previous few days), you would take disneyland everytime. Also comparing the sizes of the parks, DCA has only 3 'lands' compared to Disneyland's 7. If you are coming to Disneyland certainly factor in a day, preferably 2 for DCA but whatever time you budget for DCA you need to double to see Disneyland itself