Author: puppetartg

We spent our last park day in Japan at DisneySea leisurely strolling around, occasionally hitting a ride but mostly just savoring our last bit of time here. 

We did have two “todo’s” that we hadn’t yet done; The Venetian Gondolas and touring the SS Columbia.

The SS Columbia offered some wonderful views, and some views beyond the park.

​

​
Clearly DisneySea is our favorite park of the two. It’s not a contest. But if it was,
Mikey and Art’s Golden Mickey Ear Awards for Outstanding Achievements 

• Best overall rides, DisneySea
• Best overall food, Disneyland Tokyo
• Best overall park design, DisneySea
• Best full meal, Magellan’s, DisneySea
• Best Snack (Savory category) Pork Rice Roll, Disneyland Tokyo
• Best Snack (sweet category) Gelato at Mediterranean Harbor (Little Green Men Mochi, runner up. It’s an honor just to be nominated.) DisneySea
• Best quick service lunch, Waffle Sandwich, Disneyland Tokyo
• Best Dark Ride, Pooh’s Hunny Hunt Disneyland Tokyo
• Best Water ride, (slow category) Sindbad’s Storybook Journey DisneySea
• Best Water Ride (big drop category) Splash Mountain Disneyland Tokyo
• Best Coaster, Journey to the Center of the Earth DisneySea. (Just had a 15 minute discussion with Mike on whether or not this was a coaster or a dark ride. It got tense. We take these awards very seriously.)
• Best overall Land or Port of Call, Split decision, Mike: Arabian Coast, Art: Mysterious Island. Both DisneySea
• Best interaction with people on a ride: the stranger sitting next to me on Tower of Terror grabbed my leg out of fright. This happened on two separate occasions. They were very apologetic in a charmingly Japanese way. DisneySea 
• Special Award for being incredibly pleasant, gracious and friendly, all of the guests at the parks. Both Parks.
• Best Cast Member Interaction, Security Woman checking my backpack points at the little octopus hanging from my bag and says with a huge smile, “Hank!” Disneyland Tokyo
• Best Visual Effect, disappearing  idol, Tower of Terror DisneySea 
• Most Magical Moment, getting our own boat on the Sindbad ride
• Biggest Rookie Moment, we kept forgetting to have dinner early and nearly all the food carts and restaurants shut down around 8pm. 

And the Golden Mickey Ear Award for Best Overall Park goes to: DisneySea 

Toilet Talk

I’ve hesitated to write about the toilets because, well, it’s toilets. Butt these really deserve a shoutout. Our hotel has a high tech (high tech for American Standards) toilet. These were also in the parks. 

These were intimidating at first. Mike and I were squeezed into our little toilet area in our hotel room looking at the controls, trying to get it to work. No luck. We even used the Google Translate app to try and decipher the buttons.

We tried every single button. Even the Ass and Things button. We could not get the damned thing to work. Finally nature called and I tried the buttons while sitting down on the toilet. “Hey Mike! Hey Mike!! You have to be sitting down!!” Thank god you have to be seated for it to work. Otherwise Mike and I would have been squirted in the face while trying to figure it out.  

Ok. Toilet talk over. Here’s some more pictures of our last day at DisneySea. And a video clips from Sindbad.

​

​

Having done everything we wanted at the park we were able to really just ease through the day without feeling rushed. This made for a relaxing and enjoyable day.

The only ride we hadn’t gone on was The Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. We’d heard there were some slight design differences but didn’t notice anything significant. Mike beat my score by 40k. 

Easter Eggs

For some reason both parks have Easter decorations up. Still. As odd as this seems to us the Easter Egg Disney Characters are fun to find and well designed.

We were a bit sad that this was our last day at this park but felt like we’d had enough time to really drink it in. We got to ride Pooh’s Hunny Hunt  (our favorite at this park) three times. Here’s a video. It doesn’t do the ride justice but you can get a sense of it.​

​​

​

Food!

Morning demanded a Mickey Waffle break.

This is a pork rice roll. Thin sliced pork marinated in teriyaki sauce, wrapped around sushi rice and baked. I’m sure they serve these in heaven.

We ate a yummy dinner at Queen of Hearts Banquet Hall. Fried seafood and a yummy salad with some sort of miso dressing.

Tokyo Disneyland Summary

We both thoroughly enjoyed this park. Dispite the similarities in rides the layout is very different than the Anaheim Disneyland (unlike Bizzaro Disneyland aka Orlando Magic Kingdom where the layout is just similar enough and different enough to make you feel like you should know your way around but you don’t) but a half a day in and we were able to easily navigate the park. 

My top five attractions for this park:

1. Pooh’s Hunny Hunt
2. The Jungle Cruise 
3. Splash Mountain 
4. Mickey’s Philharmagic
5. Thunder Mountain (at night.)

Here’s a few more pictures and videos.

​​​​​​

After a great nap we fastpassed Indy Jones and then headed to The Arabian Coast with intentions of riding Sinbad again. We were just trying to burn some time hoping the park would clear out so we could have short wait times. We detoured to a part of the Arabian Coast we hadn’t visited before and landed in The Magic Lamp Theater. There we saw a really fun magic show. There’s kind of a convoluted story that leads you to the show but the long and the short of it is a less than scrupulous magician kidnaps the Genie from the Aladdin movie and uses him to perform a magic show. The magician’s assistant sets the Genie free and chaos ensues. Live actors played the magician and assistant. The full size stage was split horizontally so the actors were on the lower half and a 3D screen was on the upper half. Clever interactions with the 3D animation of the Genie with the live actors made for an enjoyable show. 

The Arabian Coast was pretty.  Mike rocking the Casbah

We’d fastpassed Nemo before our nap so around 7:30pm we headed there. We looked at each other a few seconds into the ride and asked, “is this different than last time?” It turns out that, like the new and improved Star Tours, the Nemo Searider ride had multiple variations featuring different beginnings, middles and ends. This upped my opinion of this ride and explains why the standby line is always so long! 

We didn’t notice Hank on our first day. He’s my favorite from the Finding Dory movie.

Crazy cute otters hanging out in the tide pool next to the Nemo ride.

What’s the name of the bird from the Dory movie?

Another round on Indy with screaming Japanese school girls. Priceless. 

We then headed over to Fortress Explorations which is essentially just a walk around und of a Italian Fort and a cool Ship all with great views of the park. And cannons you can fire.

Then to ride Sinbad and head to Mermaid’s Lagoon to see King Triton’s Concert. We had no intention of watching this show but we had time on our hands so, what the hell. We are so glad we did! The theater (symphony hall) was amazing. It probably seats around 300-400 people in a “theater in the round” configuration and has a super high ceiling. A huge 15-20′ tall animatronic King Triton with large scale puppet versions of Sebastian and Flounder and amazing projections and sets would have been enough to make this show great. That addition of Ariel the Mermaid (live actor) and an incredible fly system that allowed her to swoop and fly (technically swim) all over the theater was frosting on the cake. I’m so glad we saw this show!

From there we grabbed a potato churro (weird savory churro) and went on Jasmine’s Flying Carpets (Dumbo ride with carpets instead of Dumbos) and then another go on Sinbad. We once again had a boat all to ourselves since by this time the park was starting to clear out. We freakin’ love that ride.

The only major ride we hadn’t gone on was Raging Spirits. It was nearly closing time, the wait was only 10 minutes and we were right next to Raging Spirits so on we go. The short coaster has the only loop in the park. We rode it’s sister ride in Paris and were unimpressed. This was a similar experience. Not awful, a fun loop where you go upside down, but super short. Not worth waiting more than 10 minutes to ride.

So after Raging Spirits we heard the announcement that the park was closing. This was a great relaxing day of fun rides, great views and wonderful shows. Plus I won this at an Arabian game of chance.

One more thing. Every time housekeeping comes through we get a new oragami wash cloth. 

We decided to spend our day back at DisneySea picking up the last few attractions we missed on our first day and re-experiencing the ones we really enjoyed. 

A remarkably good night’s sleep gave us plenty of energy to jump right in so we raced to the back of the park to fastpass Toy Story Mania and then jump on Tower of Terror. 

Tower of Terror

Unlike the DCA and Orlando Tower of Terrors where it’s a Twilight Zone Themed story, TokyoSea TOT has a different tale: Harrison Hightower III’s is a collector of odd antiquities who has bizarrely disappeared and you are on a tour of his mansion. The tour starts with a guide telling you about an evil statue/idol thingy that Hightower has received as a gift. There’s a great scene in a room with a stained glass window of Hightower holding the statue, and, next to the window on a pedestal sits the 3′ tall statue. The lights dim, the window comes to life and the statue does too, in a really creepy way. Special effects lighting and the statue has disappeared. (This was a really cool illusion. I mean really cool.) You are then led through what is kind of like a big basement stuffed with antiquities until you are split off in to one of 8 different tours. The first time we rode this we were put in the “tour” that was full of portraits where a large portrait opens to reveal the entrance to the actual ride. (Everything I’ve mentioned so far has been part of the cue.) The second time we rode we were taken to the weapons “tour” where a case full of swords, maces and other antique weaponry opens to reveal the entrance to the ride. The ride itself is similar to the DCA ride in the fact that you on on an elevator but instead of the elevator taking you on a journey to the Twilight Zone the evil statue is the one jerking you around by making the elevator rise and drop.

We both loved the different take on the Tokyo version!

Toy Story Mania was very similar to the DCA ride except the cue theming was much better and the ride takes place completely under Andy’s bed where the toys have set up a carnival. Better theming but same ride overall. 

It’s difficult to describe how perfectly laid out this park is. It is designed in such a way that you almost always have a spectacular view of something. Here’s some pictures that hopefully illustrate this. 

Inside the volcano (Mysterious Island)

Various locations around DisneySea

The rest of our morning was spent repeating our favorite rides. By this point we had a better sense of the park layout and could easily navigate without referring to the map. After repeats of Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues, Tower of Terror and Sinbad we were ready for lunch and a nap.

Fried rice, spring rolls and fried chicken with a soy vinegar sauce. The drink is Kirin Lemon soda, which I love. Imagine 7up with not nearly all the sweetness and more of a lemon kick. Delicious. 

Nap time. (Here’s a video of us strolling through parts of The American Waterfront port of call, a mashup of Turn of the century New York, Long Beach and Cape Cod.)​

​

Lunch was amazing. 

Chicken Waffle Sandwich with a Kirin Lemon soda.

And it put us right next door to Thunder Mountain so we fastpassed Thunder and headed over to Splash Mountain to do Single Rider. (Single rider allows you to jump he line and hop on a boat with an empty seat.) I was hoping to experience the ride with a bunch of Japanese people but ended up on a boat with three big gay hairy bears from Luxembourg. 

The universe has a sense of humor.

We then hit The Disneyland Railway (which just circles Western Land  and Adventure Land), Star Tours and Peter Pan’s Flight. All fun but not too different from their Anaheim counterparts.

Pooh’s Honey Hunt

Our expectations were very high for this ride. We were not disappointed. This ride features a trackless ride system where the honey pot vehicle glide along the floor in a seemingly random way. When you take off you are with three other cars and you are whisked through an incredibly designed dark ride in the universe of Winnie the Pooh. Each of the three cars goes in different areas of each section of the ride and then dance around each other to visit other areas. At times the ride vehicles group together in front of a large video screen to watch and move to an animation. The animations along with some incredible animatronics enhanced each other nicely. And since each car is doing its own thing you have no idea where you are headed next. This makes for an incredibly satisfying ride. I’ll try and grab some video the next time we ride so I can share it here, though I doubt the video will do justice to the experience. 

By this time is was around 4:30pm and I was done. I just can’t survive on 5 hours of sleep and enjoy myself. A monorail ride back to the hotel and an hour and a half nap and I was up for a bite of dinner and a little bit of shopping at DisneySea. Then I was in bed by 8:30pm while Mikey walked throughout DisneySea to get some amazing pictures of the park at night. 

We woke up early again though I think we are nearly adjusted to the time change. We ordered room service breakfast since Disneyland opens at 9am (8:45am for us thanks to the “Happy 15”). We hopped on the monorail that goes from our hotel to a railway station linking the Disney resort to the rest of Tokyo then to the Disneyland Hotel and theme park. 

Unless you are big Disney geeks like Mike and me you may be wondering why we would travel all the way to Japan to visit Disneyland when there’s one just an hour’s flight away from us at home. First, there’s a few rides we don’t have at the Anaheim Disneyland like Monsters Inc Ride and Go Seek and Pooh’s Honey Hunt. Second, many of the rides that are duplicates of Anaheim rides have differences that are fun to experience. Also, it’s fun to have this experience in an entirely different culture.

Mike had a solid plan for our start but it rapidly fell apart due to rides breaking down and other weird circumstances so we winged it most of the morning. We got a fastpass for the Monsters Inc ride and then jumped on Pinocchio’s Journey and Mickey’s Phiharmagic. 

 We’d experienced Phiharmagic when we’d gone to Orlando’s Disneyworld and loved it. It’s a fun 3D theater experience where Donald Duck gets a hold of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice hat. Needless to say, chaos ensues. The Goofy voice over in Japanese cracked me up and hearing Donald Duck speak in Japanese was also great. Not sure how old this ride is but the 3D tech is a bit dated cosidering what they’re doing with it these days.

By this time our fastpasses for Monsters were valid so we headed over to Tommorow Land. Disneyland Tokyo is divided into the same lands as Disneyland Anaheim (Tommorow, Fantasy, Adventure, Toon Town, Critter Country) except that Frontier Land is Western Land in Tokyo and Main Street USA is called World Bazaar. 

Monsters Inc. Ride and Go Seek​

​​​​​​As I think you can see from the picture and video, there are three cars that are connected and travel together throughout the ride. Each person has a “flashlight” that they can point at the Monsters Inc hard hats scatters throughout the ride which activates an effect. Monsters appearing or disappearing, eyes blinking, etc. We were seated in the last car so we were at a bit of a disadvantage since the two cars in front of us could activate effects and most of the time they didn’t have time to reset before we could hit them with our flashlights. Still, the design, while similar to the Anaheim  DCA Monsters ride was pretty fun. I had higher hopes for the ride but still give it a thumbs up. It will be interesting to experience it again with adjusted expectations.

We grabbed a fastpass for Pooh’s Honey Hunt (which had been broken down since 9am) and decided to hit a bunch of duplicates. 

Pirates 

Pirates of the Caribbean was very similar to the Anaheim ride and was mostly in English. Go figure. If you are familiar with Pirates Anaheim you’ll remember the lift hill that your boat travels up to exit the main part of the ride. In the Japanese version you exit before the boat returns to the loading area. This seems very logical to us. 

Jungle Cruise

This was my second or third favorite ride today. 

Experiencing this with a Japanese Guide was a treat. Having been on the Anaheim counterpart countless times we could tell most of the time what joke the Guide was telling. His goofiness was delightful. There’s been many times where we’ve been on the Anaheim ride with a boat full of Japanese tourists and I’ve always wondered what their experience was like. Now I know. Feel free to skip the videos if you’re not a fan of the Jungle Cruise. ​

​​​​ ​​​

Tiki Room

Since it was next door to the Jungle Cruise, why not? 
This was the Stitch version where the alien from Lilo and Stitch takes over the show. I prefer the kitschy classic (which Mike and I call the clicky clicky, clicky clicky room due to the racket the animatronics make.)

​

Mike made reservations at Magellan’s Resturant for my birthday so after a glorious jet lag fueled nap we headed back into the park for an early dinner.

After a wonderful dinner we headed out to use our fastpasses. First stop…

This Indy ride is very similar to the Anaheim ride but the Eye of Mara is replaced by The Crystal Skull. 

An hour to kill before our Nemo fastpass took us to Aquatopia.

This was a pretty silly ride. These trackless cars “float” on the water (they actually only drive on a surface of water an inch or two deep but it kinda looks like it’s floating?) spinning you around with close encounters with a whirlpool, a waterfall and other ride vehicles. Decent time killer. 

Imagine Star Tours only quadruple the ride vehicle size and put it in the universe of Little Nemo. Although all in Japanese we are able to figure out that we along with our submersible vehicle were shrunk down to the size of tropical fish. There we met Nemo and friends as we rode through the ocean encountering many trials and tribulations along the way. This was a fun ride and it was neat to go on it just two weeks after it’s opening. Great ride mechanics with wonderful Pixar animation. 

A quick ride on the DisneySea Electric Railway and a walk around areas of the park we hadn’t yet explored and we were nearly at park closing time. We decided one more ride on Sinbad’s Storybook Voyage would be the perfect way to end the day. 

We got a boat all to ourselves! Perfect way to end a great day at 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. 

Mount Prometheus caught erupting during one of it’s many daily eruptions.

“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. 

Exterior shot of Mermaid Lagoon

Inside 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

Poster of Sinbad and his adorable sidekick Chandu.

Here’s the plot of the ride in mural format

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.  

Our flight landed about 20 minutes late due to some delays out of SFO. We left May 27th at noon PST and arrived May 28th at 2:20pm JST. We flew through customs and made it to our hotel by 3:30pm.

MiraCosta Hotel

Front entrance to the MiraCosta

Our room has a view of the DisneySea park. You can see the SS Columbia Steam Ship, the Venetian gondolas and if you lean out the window you can see the volcano Prometheus. In the distance is the Sea of Japan.

The porter insisted he take a picture of us. Sweet kid.

View from our room. The pool below, Sea of Japan in the distance.

Lobby of the hotel.

We unpacked and explored the hotel which has three pricey restaurants and a large gift shop. We found the “hotel guests only” entrance to DisneySea which we will be using regularly both to go to he park and to come back for naps!

Speaking of naps, we hit a wall around 6pm (2am back home) but were determined to stay up as late as we could to battle jet lag. We ordered room service for dinner and we’re in bed and asleep by 8pm. I’m writing this at 3:30am so we’re a little thrown off time-wise but not horribly so. Either way I see a nap happening today…but in the mean time…

Oh yeah. It’s my birthday today. I’m incredibly grateful to be spending here with the sweetest man in the world. Except that he made me take this picture. 

Finally. We’ve been counting down the months, the weeks, then the days. We are finally counting down the minutes! 

We stayed the night at a little Holiday Inn Express a few blocks from SFO airport. Comfy bed, quiet enough room, decent night’s sleep. We did Park and Fly so my car will vacation at the Holiday Inn parking lot until we get back.

We flew through security and are hanging out in the United Lounge (thanks united miles upgrade!) enjoying coffee and a simple continental breakfast.

The Flight Aware app says we should expect our flight to be around 10 hours and 40 minutes. No jet stream today. 😦

Here’s our plane! 787-900. We’re in seat 2a and 2b (or not to be. Mike is in for a long flight with these jokes.)

This cabin is beautiful! The windows are bigger than most planes and have a dimmer instead of the pull down shade.

Preflight chocolate? Yes, please!