Tokyo Disney

The final days of our trip were spent doing random things in Tokyo proper and having our first family Disney experience.

We ended up staying about 20 minutes via subway from Disney so getting to and from was extremely convenient. We booked an evening pass with 5pm entry to Disneyland and a full day ticket to DisneySea - which is a Tokyo exclusive park themed around more of the water based characters and stories.

We quickly discovered that matching family Disney shirts is very much a uniquely American thing and we looked completely ridiculous on both days. For the most part only small children were dressed up and mostly everyone else was business casual or at least casual. We may have been the only silly adults in the park (and really just me because Josh quickly covered his shirt under a jacket both days).

Other than really looking out of place, the Friday night Disney experience was actually really nice. We used it as a “test run” to figure out how to use the app and how everything works.

We got a few rides in (carousel, it’s a small world, goofy’s paint and play house) a walk through Cinderella’s Castle and Maeve and I got a meet and greet experience with Minnie Mouse in her style studio while Josh rode the Star Wars adventure ride.

We had dinner in La Tavern de Gaston but the real highlight of the night was the the Enchanted Tale of Beauty and the Beast ride. This was the premiere ride of the park (I think, maybe just in my head because Belle is my favorite princess)

We skipped out on the parade and fireworks to get in line for this ride. The wait at the end of the night was an hour (way shorter than it had been all evening). Maeve did better than expected but it was hard being patient that long even though the line meandered through the outside and interior of the Beast’s castle.

The ride itself was neat. We rode through the castle seeing the story of Beauty and the Beast via spinning teacup. It was enchanting and enjoyable. But we learned that waiting in line for multiple hours for a ride was not going to be worth it for us.

On day two we arrived 30 minutes before the gates opened for DisneySea. We quickly discovered this was not nearly early enough as there were already thousands of people in line before us. It took around an hour and a half to actually get into the park.

You can’t book anything until you are actually inside the park and by then most of the free lightening pass tickets (or whatever they are called) were gone. All the shows were booked and all the sit-down restaurants were fully reserved.

We ended up paying extra for skip-the-line tickets for the Rapunzel’s Lantern  Festival ride and the Anna and Elsa’s Frozen Journey because these were the two most popular rides with multi-hour wait times and you had to have some kind of ticket to even get in line (the free ones were already fully booked).

We spent most of our time the in Arabian Coast (Princess Jasmine’s domain) and the Mermaid Lagoon (Princes Ariel’s home). We were able to ride the Caravan Carousel, Sinbad’s Storybook Voyage, Jumpin Jellyfish, Scuttle’s Scooters, see a 3D magic show in the Magic Lamp Theater and played on Ariel’s playground.

We happened upon a few character meet-and-greets with Jafar and then Timon and the monkeys from the Jungle Book and Thumper from Bambi. There was a subset of characters here called Duffy and Friends that we had never heard of. They were extremely cute and M ended up choosing a little dog with a chef hat named Cookie Ann as her toy. (I would say her one special treat of the day but there were ears and a balloon, too)

We also rode the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride which was pretty cool. After riding the Frozen ride we ordered ahead and ate lunch at the Royal Banquet of Arendelle to keep the theme going. This (and Ariel’s playground) were definitely the highlights for M.

We left - completely exhausted - around 6:30. Though we are far from sold on being a “Disney family”, I’m certainly glad M got to have this experience. And it made a nice way to fill our last day of the trip.