Disneyland Impressions!

Well, I can no longer say my last trip to Disneyland was over 50 years ago! In fact my last trip wasn't even 50 hours ago! Last week my daughter treated me to a four day trip (Tuesday through Friday) for my retirement gift! Yes, she IS the best daughter ever!

Now, I could write volumes on this trip, and I probably will write more, but I thought I'd do some "hot take" posts. That's what all the cool kid bloggers do! Actually, I'm going to break this down into four posts, as such as momentous occasion deserves more than one wimpy post. So we begin with....

Day 1- Arrival and Downtown Disney.

We arrived a little before noon. 

The red carpet was rolled out at our hotel! Ok, so it was a blue carpet, but it was still exciting. I've wanted to stay in the Disneyland Hotel for a long time. We were in the Adventure Tower.

We were greeted by our TV when we got to our room on the 7th floor, overlooking Downtown Disney.

In fact, this was our view!

We settled in and made our way down to find FOOD! We were hungry after our trip. It was a beautiful, sun shine filled day and people were enjoying the pool!

I had a Hawaiian Burger at the Tangaroa Terrace. I usually don't care for pineapple, but the roasted slice on this burger was wonderful!

A view of our lunch stop!

We then went into Downtown Disney. The thing that really stunned me is how close everything is together! I knew it was, of course, but until you actually see it, it's hard to imagine. Especially having been a Walt Disney World guy for so long. It's very easy to walk from Downtown to Disneyland to California Adventure. Very. Very. Easy.

See?

A bit of Disney leaf magic.

In case you forgot where you were. Actually, it would be pretty impossible to forget that you were in Disney Ground Zero, since even the molecules in the place are Mickey shaped.

After we walked around a bit (and, yes, shopped) we took a very nice warm soak in the pool's hot tub. It's amazing how that will restore your energy!

Jess (my daughter) wanted to check out the Pixar Place Hotel since it was it's first day to be open, so we walked over. Again, it was very nice to be able to walk from place to place!

Here we are!!!

The first thing you see in the lobby...

These stained glass mobiles hang over the lobby as well. They were pretty neat. They were all Pixar, of course!

Then we went back to the hotel and checked out this huge model of Big Thunder that one of our buddies from Gorillas Don't Blog did tons of work on! Mike C. does great work!

And then we back to our room and sacked out for 12 hours. For real. You see, tomorrow we head for Disneyland!!!

So stay tuned for next week! It'll be a big one!!!