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.

As soon as the bus dropped us off at Hospiltality House at Old Key West, we headed in to check-in. As Canadians, we can’t by-pass this step as Disney is unable to mail Magicbands outside the country. Check-in was extremely easy, we didn’t even need to wait in line (there was no line!). The cast member helping us was named Caleb I think? Carter maybe? It definitely started with a C, and he was very friendly! I feel bad for him, Luke and I hadn’t ate in hours by this point (and hadn’t ate much all day to be honest), and we were getting nervous we’d miss the ADR we had booked for tonight, so we were a little snappy with each other. I swear, we rarely, if ever, fight, but we were both more than a little hangry haha. We were both friendly to Caleb/Carter though – we’re not that type of people! He could clearly tell we were a little stressed out, so after giving us a map of the resort, our room number and our magicbands (purple for me, yellow for Luke), he helped us out by carrying some of our luggage to bell services. It was really appreciated! We actually stopped by the check-in area a few times over the next few days, hoping to see him working so we could apologize for how short we were being with each other, but he was never there

Once we arrived at bell services, we asked about our Garden Grocer order. One of the cast members got our names, and was back out with our order almost immediately. He then told us to follow him to one of the golf carts, loaded our groceries and luggage in and then drove us directly to our room! So awesome! I joked to Luke that we were on our first ride of the trip, he was taking some of the corners pretty quick in that golf cart and I thought I might fall out a few times haha. He helped us carry everything inside, and we tipped him and thanked him. We didn’t even have time to check out our room, we had to get moving! I grabbed my Dooney & Bourke Haunted Mansion purse I had treated myself to a few months back, and we headed out to the bus stop. We ended up being extremely lucky – we ended up with a room on the first floor in building 35, and the Turtle Pond bus stop was just across the road. It took us less than a minute to get there each day This was already a huge improvement over the All-Stars!

We didn’t wait long before a bus to Disney Springs pulled up – I think we waited maybe 5 minutes? We were both a little nervous as we sat on the bus – we were both really looking forward to our ADR, but we weren’t sure if we were going to make it on time! Luckily, Turtle Pond was one of the last stops on the Old Key West bus loop, so we were exiting the resort very quickly after a brief stop at Hospitality House. I knew OKW was close to the Springs, but I had no idea just how close! In less than 10 minutes, we were getting off the bus at the newly designed Disney Springs Of course, as soon as we stepped off the bus, we realized we had no idea where to go or how to get to our ADR…thank goodness for the MDE App!

We set off walking, and within a few minutes we saw this beautiful sign:

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As I walked up to the check-in booth, I checked on the time – we were still 5 minutes early for our reservation! Go us! All that worrying for nothing

The actual review of the food can be found here – but just know we LOVED it.

After eating, we decided to check out the Springs. When you first get off the bus, it definitely has an outdoor mall feel to it, but it’s still very nice. There’s so many new stores and restaurants since we were there in January 2016 as well!

We ended up at Uniqlo for quite awhile. There were so many great clothes to look at, and everything was reasonably priced! I told Luke I would buy him a present, and to pick out any shirt he wanted. He couldn’t decide between two of them, so I just bought both of them for him. They were just under $15 each – not bad at all! I also bought myself two new shirts there, but I can’t find a picture of one of them online (and it’s currently somewhere in the abyss that is my closet…).

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I wish Uniqlo would ship to Canada, there were so many things I wanted from there! The only stores in Canada are in Toronto, which is quite far from where I live. Oh well, now I know to save extra money for Uniqlo shopping next January when we go back to Florida!

We stopped and purchased a FuelRod for our trip from the photo store – that was $30 well spent! I know when these were introduced last year, there was a lot of complaints about it, that you can buy phone chargers much cheaper than that. For us, we were immediately sold on the fact that you can exchange it for fresh ones as many times as you’d like from a simple vending machine type thing located inside the parks. If we didn’t drain it during the day, we would take it back and charge it in our room at night, but it was so convenient! The day we got engaged, I believe we swapped it out for fully charged FuelRods at least twice (so many people to call/text to let them know because we were so excited!). We only required one, and just shared it as needed. We brought it home with us, and used it for our Disneyland trip as well (they also have the vending machine swap stations around the parks).

I knew I wanted a few new Christmas ornaments – one with the year on it and and for each resort we would be staying at. I decided to get this done on our first night, since we were already in Disney Springs.

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Sorry those pictures are all different sizes, I just took them from Google searches. The actual ornaments I bought are wrapped in tissue paper and put away with all of my other Christmas decorations. The 2017 ornament is awesome, it lights up and has the tree and the TOT on the back of the ears (so all 4 parks are represented).

After paying for our ornaments, we decided to head back to Old Key West and call it a night.

Up next: runDisney Expo and the first park of the trip!