California Trip, Day 4

6:45 AM - I'm up, as usual, at an unGodly hour......so I head out to let the wifey sleep a little more. What a different experience it is walking around the grounds before much opens. The hustle and bustle of Downtown Disney is replaced by a calmness that you rarely find here; it's quite tranquil and relaxing. Walking by the pool I notice a gardener planting some new flowers, and workers inside the pool gates scrubbing down the pool deck, in anticipation of another hot, and therefore busy, pool day.

8:15 AM - Back up into the room and Tracey is awake and up, starting "the process" as she calls it. We have breakfast reservations at 10AM and we should just be able to make it :-)

9:45 AM - Down to the Storyteller's Cafe for our Breakfast with Chip N Dale breakfast buffet. It's a character breakfast but we come to this one for the food. It's what a breakfast buffet should be. We've all been to breakfast buffets where the waffles and pancakes sit under a heat lamp and get crunchy? No problem here, as they bring you pancakes and "Mickey" waffles to order so they are always fresh. The characters are always critters; chipmunks, baboons, bears and gorillas. I've said it before and I'll say it again; this restaurant has a varmint problem.

10:30 AM - Done with breakfast and off to Disneyland! After our last trip here, between Xmas and New Year's, where we shared the park with most of the free world, today's lineups are a very pleasant change. Tracey says to me "I can deal with these crowds!". Amen, sister. Amen.

It's busy, sort of.....Disneyland is ALWAYS busy, but there are no crowds to push through, no long lineups to deal with. We get through Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Big Thunder Mountain, Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters, and get pictures with Jack Skellington and Sally in about an hour and a half!

We get Fastpasses for Space Mountain, which has also been "Halloween-ed" and renamed "Ghost Galaxy" which is a new thing...at least, it's new to us. We do some shopping and then head back for the ride, which isn't much different than the regular Space Mountain except that there is a really ugly creature trying to get you while you are on the ride.

2:30 PM - Off to the Big Thunder BBQ for lunch. They bring us absurd amounts of chicken and cow, beans, coleslaw and cornbread. It's all you can eat, but we don't go too crazy and try not to make complete pigs of ourselves. Not sure if we succeeded or not.

4:50 PM - Done with the park today. A little more shopping and back to the room to relax for a few minutes before Monday Night Football.

5:00 PM - Down to the lounge, and we get seats at the bar so we can watch the football game while enjoying a drink or two (or six). Game is not going particularly well, so we leave at halftime to get a different kind of treat.....

7:30 PM - Haagen Daaz, bitches!!! Tracey gets some ice cream and I get a Mint Chip Dazzler, the first of about 8 of those sonsofbitches that I plan on having this trip. MMMMMMM that is some seriously good shite.

7:55 PM - Back to the room to watch the rest of the football game and get a good night's sleep, tomorrow we are going to take advantage of "early entry" to get into DCA before the riff raff (in other words, the general public) and try to see as much of Cars Land as we can before the crowds hit.