Tokyo Disneyland

Our first full day in Tokyo was spent at Tokyo Disneyland.  It was about 30 minutes away by train, and not extremely difficult to figure out how to get there.  Thankfully the Disney website did a good job of providing directions from various neighborhoods in downtown Tokyo. 

Tokyo Disneyland is practically identical to Disneyland in California, which we had been to before, but we still wanted to check it out.  

They also have Tokyo DisneySea here, but we decided to start with Disneyland. 

Almost immediately we stumbled across one of my favorite rides.  I love Pirates of the Caribbean, so of course we started here.

Haha, it's Johnny Depp!

I always love just strolling around Disney.  You never know what you might see.

There is the castle in the distance.

Next up we headed to Big Thunder Mountain, another classic and favorite from my childhood.  But the wait was long, so we decided to try out the Fast Pass here.  If you haven't been to Disney recently, let me explain a little.  Basically you reserve a time to come back and jump the line.  You can only hold one fast pass ticket at a time.  You scan your ticket and get a little print out ride ticket that you show when you return at the scheduled time.  You get an hour slot in which you can return any time during that hour and skip to almost the front of the line.  Unfortunately, the times filled up quickly, so our return time was for 3 hours later and by the time we rode it and wanted to get another fast pass, the times were nearing closing time and it wasn't worth it.  We ended up only taking the fast pass for this and just waiting on all other rides, including Space Mountain, although that ended up working in our favor.  We gave up when the wait was 70 minutes and managed to come back later at a time where the wait was only 30 minutes, and then again when it was 45 minutes, so we lucked out and rode it twice.

While waiting to go back for Thunder Mountain we decided to go on the Haunted Mansion, another one of my favorites.  Can you tell I spent a lot of time at Disney World as a child?  Oh yes, I went once a year, religiously, as a child.

Here is another picture with the castle.

After the mansion we ended up catching the end of a parade.

Here we have It's a Small World.  Yes, as a result of spending a lot of time at Disney as a kid, I have had the unfortunate experience of being stuck inside this ride when it was broken down.  Yes, that song does get very annoying, very quickly.  But that didn't stop us from riding on it later in the day.

We also watched Captain EO while we waited to head back to Thunder Mountain.  Michael Jackson!  Good stuff!

Here I am out front of the famous Cinderella's Castle.

Here I am with Ryan.

After Thunder Mountain we found some lunch that included food I would eat.  Tokyo Disney has some fun and interesting food options.  I had the pizza meal.  Seafood pizza!  Not your everyday US Disney lunch option.  It had octopus on it!  Yum!

It came with a goopey jelled mango dessert.  I gave it a try, but it wasn't really my thing.

Later on Ryan tried out the shave ice with berries and soft serve. 

After that it was Space Mountain time.  As I said earlier, we love this ride, and we went on it twice.  But just in case you chicken out, there is always the escape pod option!

Again, you just gotta love the food options in Japan.  This was a bakery in the Main Street area.  Everything looked so good.

Here is a great picture of the castle with the statue of Walt and Mickey off to the left.

Here I am with Ryan.

Here we are in front of a Mickey statue.

Then we found the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland.

She seemed to really take a liking to Ryan!  I think he may have even gotten a kiss from her.

After this we decided to go on It's a Small World, even though there is a risk of it breaking down and us going insane from the song on repeat.  Thankfully we did not have any bad experiences.

It was hard to get clear pictures, but I did try!

Next to this ride was one dining facility and I was so impressed with their menu sign that I had to take a picture.  It is hard to see, but if you look closely you will notice that they have an option for a set menu that does not contain anything from the 5 main food allergens- wheat, buckwheat (this is their most common food allergy actually), eggs, dairy and peanuts.  I just liked that it was so clearly written on their menu and was happy to see that this was an option.

The last big ride for the day to hit up was Splash Mountain.  Not a bad wait time here either, so that was good news.

After this was the big parade of the day.  Here are some of the floats.

We finished the day up with a ride on Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Adventure, and then called it quits.

We had so much fun and the weather was perfect.  Just a quick ride back downtown and we were washed up and ready to head out for dinner.  I'll save that for my next post because there is not much to share about the next 24 hours after this.  Things were really low key as we prepped for the main reason we headed to Tokyo- to climb Mt. Fuji!  More on that to come!

QUESTIONS:  Have you ever been to Disney World or Disneyland?  What is your favorite amusement park?  What is your favorite Disney character?