While visiting California my wife and I ventured with our daughter Zoe to Disneyland. At first I had my reservations about taking an infant to the park considering she’s just under 3 months of age, but after much thought we decided to take her and make the best of the experience. Afterall, theme parks were originally built to feed the imaginations of children around the world.
A great advantage of having a baby at Disneyland are the Switch Passes. These are similar to Fast Passes, the only difference being that they assume priority over Fast Passes and allow up to 2 people to enjoy the ride without the cumbersome lines. The theory is that your spouse or significant other will have to wait with the rest of the Disney population and upon returning from the ride they can ask for a Switch Pass to allow you to beat the long lines and scurry past the rest of the crowd.
My daughter enjoyed both Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion. It seemed like she found the Singing Statue heads to be the most fascinating aspect of the ride as her eyes were fixiated on this effect as the doom buggy continued on it’s trek in the mansion. When we reached the part where the buggy tilts backwards she smiled at the cawwing raven which only tells me that she will probably grow up enjoying Haunted Mansions and hayrides during Halloween.
Afterwards we journeyed to the Innovations building, which used to be Carousel of Progress back in the 1960’s. We were greeted by the animatronic robot Tom Morrow (voiced by the brilliant Nathan Lane) and found our way into the rotating building.
Inside the building there are a variety of hands-on technology including a modified Google engine which prevents access to any sites that aren’t linked to Disney (odd, huh?) and a Segway exhibit. The Segway exhibit showcased the ‘IT’ machine that appeared in 2002 as the “next big thing”. It allowed anyone after filling out Segway release forms to ride the machine with assistance from a park representative. I would have tried it out, however Disneyland only had two machines in use and the wait would have extended past 2 hours at least.
I’ll just wait until Amazon starts handing out Segways or the day when they depreciate to a more affordable price. Similar to those tiny scooters that were released a few years back at around $200 a pop and which now sell for $20.00 or less.
Nice format and story on Disneyland…still weird to me to hear you say ‘my daughter’…but what’s a Dad to do? I’m glad you had a great vacation….Come back soon ok?