Day one Part one, Tokyo DisneySea

Jet lag had both of us up around 3am this morning. We walked around the hotel for a bit then came up to the room and watched the park workers prep for opening.

Since we are staying at on of the Disney Hotels we get what they call “Happy 15” which is entry to the parks 15 minutes before everyone else. When I first heard of this perk I thought, “meh.” This morning it really paid off since it allowed us to race to two of our top ride priorities and walk right on without a wait.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Disneyland, Anaheim is of course divided into different lands; Adventure Land, Tommorow Land, etc. DisneySea is divided into Ports of Call: Port Discovery, American Waterfront, Lost River Delta, Mermaid Lagoon, Mediterranean Harbor and Mysterious Island.

Journey to the Center of the Earth located in a volcano in the Mysterious Island port of call.

“Journey” is a part dark ride and part racetrack ride. (At this point in the blog I realize I’m going to be using some ride comparisons to the USA Disney Parks and if you’re not familiar with those then some of this might not make sense. I’ll do my best.) Since you are in a volcano you enter a steampunk looking mining vehicle that supposed to take you to (wait for it) a journey to the Center of the Earth. At the beginning there are lots of colorful crystal formations and magma and everything seems to be going fine. Then you discover yourself in some sort of hatching chamber with large eggs (think Aliens the movie). Thank god the mother of all of these unhatched eggs isn’t around…she might be pissed you were here…oh wait…there she is.

The mother monster was huge. Like 20-30 feet tall huge and moved beautifully. After you are discovered by the monster you have to escape from (wait for it) the Center of the Earth so you rocket to the surface in a pretty thrilling 0 to 40mph launch up a hill with great airtime at the top and a great drop. The track they use for the vehicles is like the Radiator Springs Racers at DCA and the Test Track ride at Epcot. Loads of fun.

We fastpassed (a ticketing system that allows you to return to the ride later and wait in a much shorter line) “Journey” for another go and then headed over to…

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Also in the volcano, This ride is compareable to the submarine ride at Disneyland, Anaheim except that the ride vehicles (mini steampunk submarines) are hung from a track similar to the track in the Anaheim Peter Pan ride. The windows big curved portholes that are double paned and filled with water. This allows them to blow bubbles through the water in the windows to produce an underwater feel. This, along with the decent animatronics gave a great sense of being underwater at times. Each vehicle has 3 windows (all facing different directions) and seats 2 people per window. Just below the window there’s a joystick that allows you to control a spotlight so you can explore the deep. Needless to say there was lots of animatronic sea life , some weird alien/Atlantis/mermaid things (if I spoke Japanese I might have understood what was happening at this point in the ride) and the inevitable encounter with a giant squid. Spoiler alert: we electrocuted the squid. Fun ride. No hurry to do it again but if we have time we might take the dip.

After the subs we out fastpasses were valid for another (wait for it) Journey to the Center of the Earth. And then….

Breakfast

We split these yummy pastries for breakfast. Starting at the top left egg and bacon bun, chocolate croissant, little green men mochi, more little green men mochi, Mickey Custard bun and a sausage pastry. Each mochi were filled with either chocolate, vanilla or strawberry filling. Everything was yummy.

On of the longest lines we stood in was to get fastpasses for the brand new Nemo ride (opened on 5/12/17). It was either wait to get the fastpasses or wait in the standby line for three hours. Fastpasses in hand we leisurely meandered around several ports of call taking a DisneySea Transit boat between a few of them. We ended up in Mermaid Lagoon.

Imagine an entirely enclosed land themed like the Little Mermaid ride from DCA Anaheim but with a bunch of little kid rides (like Bugsland at DCA). The park was pretty crowded by this point and this area was especially bottlenecked so we escaped to the Arabian Coast.

Sinbad’s Storybook Voyage

Think Anaheim Pirates of the Caribbean meets It’s a Small World. Boats nearly identical to the Small World vehicles take you through the journey where you join Sinbad and his super cute tiger cub Chandu.

The song is pretty catchy. Mike and I were singing it the rest of the day.

We grabbed one more fastpass (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull) before heading back to the hotel for a much needed nap.