Guest author (Handsome) Luke Ant… we don’t put full names on the Internet. So Luke Hasselhoff

Note: anything Italicized is written by me, Fallon. 

January 26th 2017 was but a wonderous day. Long known as the celebration of the birth of Canada’s greatest superstar – Wayne Gretzky. As well as star of Ellen’s Energy Adventure Eileen Degeneres, Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, one of the Legion of Doom guys… Animal I think. Plus Eddie Van Halen.  And me.  The Eddie Van Halen of being me.

Anyhoo… this year Fallon decided she wanted to celebrate my birthday at Disneyland. So I’m all sure – why not?!?! I mean – Disneyland for my birthday. Heck yeah.

That morning we awoke at the ungodly early hour of like 8AM.  *shudder* And trudged our way to Edmonton International Airport. Direct to LAX was in our future. Or so we thought. Because you know, that’s actually what happened.

*Once we got through customs at the YEG airport, we went for our old faithful at the US Terminal – Quiznos. Traditional on Rosemary Parmesan bread for me, and Mesquite Chicken on the same bread for Luke. Sorry, I only took a picture of mine. Also note – none of the disgusting things like onions are on it 🙂

We had tons of time before our flight left, so I grabbed a few magazines – wedding and hockey! It kept me entertained on the flight. 

I had pre-ordered and pre-paid for food on the flight – once again our old faithful of WestJet flights – the ham and swiss croissant. I’ve ate a lot of these in my day.

We get to LAX and in my pursuit of a Pepsi (you’re not truly celebrating America until you’ve had a soda made with high-fructose corn syrup) – we veered too far away from our SuperShuttle pickup point.  Whoops. BTW the bathroom trip that accompanied OperationCorn Pepsi Pursuit was glorious. I heard harps and shit. Literally.

Anyhoo, we get picked up in the shuttle by a guy who pretended it didn’t bother him that we weren’t at our proper pickup point because we pre-tipped and after picking up some other weary travellers were on our way to the Anaheim Ramada Maingate North. We get there and it’s definitely in the top 4 of Orange County Ramada hotels. I tell you what.  They let us check in early by a couple minutes. I could tell the clerk was all about throwing caution to the wind and playing by his own rules.

The room was nothing fancy, but it was fine – especially for the price we paid on Hotwire!

It’s time to get Fallon’s super-duper ultra-platinum pass that so few ask for the folks at the gate are all but guaranteed to drop a “Let me get my manager” when you ask about it.

So after choosing the worst line 2-3 times, we get to the counter and Fallon asks about this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious annual pass and the cast member is all “Uh… lemme get my manager.”

Medium story short – we get it. Fallon’s major credit card is super stoked about this endeavour.

Now we’re hangry af. Let’s get to Trader Sam’s.

It’s our first venture all the way through Downtown Disney. We get to the Disneyland Hotel. And don’t get me wrong. It’s not the value of the Ramada Maingate North  through h-o-t-w-i-r-e, hotwire.com.  But it is clearly amazing. I must stay there one day. Hopefully after some sort of benefactor finds this posts and offers to set us up there. Great Expectations style. Minus all the other shitty things about Great Expectations.

We saunter into Trader Sam’s and find a seat. A Table for 4.  There’s 2 of us. As Canadians – this puts us at quite an impasse. We know seats in this venue are at a premium and sitting outside is foolhardy.  Yeah I said it. Sorry for the salty language. So we take the seat. That’s right America. 2 Canucks took your 4 spots. Only because we rationalized it because we were about to order a bounty of pricy deliciousness.

Fallon wants to get into the specifics of the meal in another POST. I typed that in caps so she can hyperlink the shit out of it later. (*I’ve now hyperlinked the shit out of it, just click on the word POST up above).

So we have drinks. Then appies. Pupu style. Then Drinks. Then supper/lunch. Then slizzard. Then instead of staying there all night we realize we’re $120US deep so maybe it’s time to call an audible and change up the evening’s plans. Especially since we’re that level of tipsy where it’s sunshine and rainbows and if people stopped drinking here there’d be 87% less alcohol related dumbassness in the world.

So we head out, look at some shops, don’t buy kickass cool Star Wars socks because we just spent that money on Pupu, then Fallon’s all – wannu see movie?

Sure.  There’s an AMC in Downtown Disney. Let’s do that. We choose La La Land because we’d heard grumblings that it’s a critical darling so beloved that one day it may even win the Oscar for Best Picture for 2.75 minutes. We buy 2 tickets. It was like $29US or something (See tipsy). I’m all “This is what movies cost us in Canadian funds. What a racket?!”

We get a small popcorn and I demand an Icee because those aren’t available in Canada because our slushie drinks aren’t carbonated for some reason. It’s prolly the government’s fault. I choose blue raspberry. Because blue raspberries are definitely a thing that exist in real life. This was such a tiny little popcorn! And so expensive! It actually cost basically the same as it would in Canada, but once you factor in exchange rate – gross.

Before we take our seats, Fallon calls her grandmother because she wants to wish me a happy birthday. It was the last time we ever spoke. She passed away shortly after. There’s an unexpected bummer, right? It’s true. She was a remarkably sweet woman and I miss her.

So yeah… La La Land. The theatre was decent and thankfully the American cinema spares you of 11-14 actual commercials before the suble commercials/trailers kick in. We see it. It’s a delightful yarn. The stupid people behind us didn’t like the ending. But they were vapid and they can suck a butt.

After that we made our way back to the main entrance of Disneyland, summoned an Uber, headed home and hoped the “oh there’s a 12% chance I can get knifed in the parking lot of this hotel” had properly dissipated. It did. Neither of us got knifed. We partook in the background of some random musical number but hey – that’s what happens when you’ve gone back to Cali (Cali). It was a decent musical number. 6.5 out of 10.