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"It's a logistical pyhfgreshpx!"
I have never been to Disneyland before.
Okay[Footnote 1], that's not entirely true. I have been to Disneyland before. It was 1975. I was slightly more than five years old. My screaming brother almost failed to turn one year old on that trip. In the grand scheme of my amusement park experience, for all intents and purposes I have never been there. On this trip, we got a late start (is that a theme for this vacation, or what?) because Mom and Dad simply were not ready to go. Getting to the park was also an object lesson, as we sat in traffic for more than three hours on US-101 and IR-5. I found myself wondering how anybody could stand to put up with this kind of traffic on a daily basis. When we arrived in Anaheim, Dad demonstrated his usual inate ability to completely fail to navigate by means of the posted signs. Ultimately he turned too early and ended up on Harbor Blvd. instead of going up the entrance ramp into the parking garage. In his defense, the signs are not very good, and he did what we told him to do, he just did it when we told him to prepare to do it, instead of waiting for the correct intersection. With considerable difficulty, we finally found a driveway for "Disneyland Parking". We pulled in, waited in a long line, and finally came to a toll booth where a lone toll-taker was collecting $10 parking fees from the right-hand side. I've talked about this asinine procedure before: If only one lane for a parking lot is open, that booth should be collecting tolls from the LEFT HAND side, where the driver is sitting. But here, the situation got even worse. We paid our $10 and followed the cones and signs...which promptly directed us out of the parking lot and onto a public street. At this point, Dad was livid. Mom and I made comments about having to park in Grumpy. As it turned out, a total absence of signs completely failed to direct us across the street and into the parking garage we had failed to enter before. Of course that brought us to another toll booth where we angrily commented about having already paid to park. We were then directed up and into the garage, were we were directed into the parking area at the diametrically opposite corner of the garage from the parking lot tram stop. Not that we would ever know this, given that there are no directional signs on this level pointing to the tram station. We hiked through the garage, down the driving lane which was really the only open space available. At the end of the garage, we hiked on down to the escalator and rode down to the tram stop, caught a waiting tram and rode it to the park entry plaza. It turns out that our parking space isn't that far from the park, but the various fences and hedges make a tram ride pretty much mandatory.
The tram took us to the tram stop located adjacent to the Downtown Disney shopping area and across from the entry plaza. We stopped at a ticket booth and bought two-day tickets, then went through the security tent where our bags were glanced at. Finally we arrived at the park gate, and made our way inside. Dad pointed out that we had already waited in line to get into the first parking area, waited in line to get into the second parking area, waited in line for the tram, waited in line for the ticket booth, waited in line for the security checkpoint, and waited in line to actually enter the park. Six times we had waited in line, and we weren't even into the park yet. Inside the park, we had to wait again, this time for a parade to get clear of the end of Main Street. I took the opportunity to visit City Hall and tell them what a mess their parking arrangements are. Instead of making us pay the parking fee and then shunting us through the lot and out to the street, why didn't they simply close that toll booth, still direct us through the lot to the garage, and collect the parking fee there, from the left-hand side of the lane? Better still, why didn't they put up a sign in the lot: "Park in garage across the street." Or even better, "Follow arrows to park in garage across the street" along with a few arrows to point the way? My previous experience with Disney was that they were good at moving people. At their Florida parks, even if you arrive late in the day, you are often directed into a parking space with a tram waiting at the end of the road to take you directly to the park entrance. The parking arrangements at Disneyland are actually less competently managed than the ones at Six Flags Magic Mountain, which I complained about a couple of trips ago. I was surprised at this.
We walked along Main Street, and took a left at the hub. As the parade had just ended, there was a sea of people in all directions. The park was jammed with people. Knowing that our trip would involve both Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, and knowing that we were using a Friday and a Saturday, we had discussed our options, and decided that Disneyland on a Saturday was something none of us really wanted to see. So we planned to visit Disneyland on Friday, then California Adventure and Knott's Berry Farm on Saturday. This was probably a good thing. Friday was crowded enough! Before long, we arrived at the entrance for the Indiana Jones attraction, where I got a first-hand look at all the things that make Disney's FastPass program truly evil. The FastPass distribution for Indy had ended for the day, and everyone was crowded into a crowded outdoor queue space. The wait was about 40 minutes, and the truly awful part of it was that when we arrived at the building entrance, we were delayed for several minutes to make room for any FastPass people who might consider showing up. Then we entered the building and all but ran through an elaborate indoor queue space full of neat little attractions. So we missed out on the elaborate, decorated, indoor queue so that we could wait in the outdoor overflow queue which had all of the appeal of a Cedar Point queue, just to enable a FastPass merge point at the queue entrance. We were also caused to move in very short intervals instead of almost continuously, again to support the FastPass merge point. This was almost intolerable for a continuous loading ride! The ride itself was excellent. Although it is the same ride system, possibly even the same layout, as Dinosaur at Animal Kingdom, it differs from that later ride in an important point: Indy is actually quite a good ride, whereas Dinosaur is not. They did something quite unusual with this one, in that throughout the ride you can often see the other ride vehicles going through their trials. Normally, dark ride systems 'prefer' to create individual experiences, where it is all about *your* experience. On this ride, you get to share your ride experience with other travelers in other parts of the ride system. It's unusual, and it's kind of neat. It's obvious that this is the ride that this ride system was built for, and it works remarkably well.
When we exited Indy we met up with our cousins at the end of the path in New Orleans Square. There we took rides on both the Haunted Mansion and on the newly refurbished Pirates of the Carribbean. On Pirates the park's history as a pay-per-ride park shows through a bit as the queue in the building is ridiculously short. It is rather neat, though, that the boats coming through from the end of the ride actually float through a restaurant and around a keyhole turn next to the queue and right up next to the midway. The line for the ride, though, extended out of the building, around and down into the plaza in front of the building, and in general took up a good portion of New Orleans Square. It was a longer line than Indy but it was also a faster moving line, with no FastPass, resulting in a significantly shorter wait and continuous movement in the queue. Our group (now consisting of five people) took up the back of a boat.
The ride begins with a trip through a restaurant, in a beautifully done outdoor preshow. This is followed by two drops into the ride's show building. The ride has been refurbished to include scenes inspired by the new movie. This is an interesting case of the franchise coming full circle, as the original movie was in many ways based on the ride (I still think there should have been strategically placed EXIT signs hidden in certain places in the movie...). Since the movie was so successful that it has yielded a sequel or two, material from the new movie is being put back into the ride. Mostly this consists of some audio changes and the addition of a few animatronic Captain Jack Sparrow characters in key locations. For instance, the gentleman in the barrel has been suffering the indignity of a forced dunking ever since the ride opened; we now know that he is being interrogated as to the location of Capt. Sparrow, who is now visible just off-stage. A particularly effective new gag is a waterfall screen dropped right over the trough and used as a rear-projection screen for the appearance of a new computer animated character from the new movie. Nobody was quite sure what to make of the waterfall, and we all expected to either get a little wet, or for the screen to shut off as we went below it. Instead, we went right through the screen, which turned out to be such a fine mist as to be completly opaque, but utterly insubstantial, a mist so fine that it didn't even condense on my glasses (and that's a pretty neat trick). The one thing that they were not able to deal with in the extensive rehab of this classic ride was access for disabled riders. We got an unusually long ride, because once we got into about the second scene, our boat crashed into the boat ahead of us, and for the rest of the ride we were 'bumper to bumper' all the way to the lift conveyor at the end of the ride. I know the ride isn't supposed to operate like this, even at peak capacity, but the reason for the tight spacing, which resulted in the boats bumping and creeping through the ride, frequently stopping to wait for the conveyor, apparently had something to do with the large number of wheelchairs stacked up on the unloading platform. A couple of delayed unloads on the unloading platform is enough to back the whole ride up.
We hiked around the river and into whatever part of the park it is that has Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain. Our target was Big Thunder Mountain, and Mom and Dad and I were able to ride it with about a 20 minute wait. It's a decent ride, but in spite of its age (or rather its lack thereof) it seems to spend an awful lot of time going up lift hills. It's almost as though once you've gone up a lift you're only entitled to one big drop before you go up another lift. Partly it's just conservative design, but mostly I think it's a preference of lift hills to block brakes for putting an insane number of blocks on this thing. Oh, and I noticed it in Florida, but this is where it started: Locoboy is absolutely right. The 1-1-0 configuration of the lead car just looks stupid.
By this time it was time to get some dinner, and we spent some time milling about the unbelievably crowded New Orleans Square looking for a suitable restaurant. We found one right across from the Rivers of America, right below the train station. I don't remember the name of the place, but I remember that it was provided by Stouffer's, and I recall making some joke a the time about them serving TV dinners. In fact I went for the clam chowder, which was served in a bread bowl, and was decent, though I've had better. As we sat on the patio eating, I observed that although this location was set up as a grab joint with restaurant style seating, much like the "restaurants" at Kings Island or the cafeteria at Kennywood, there were no trash receptacles anywhere in sight. Actually it was Mom who pointed out this little detail, presumably because she was the one who hadn't noticed that this particular location uses ceramic dishes and metal utensils, all of which Disney would probably prefer not to have to constantly fish out of the trash. This patio also featured a performance stage, where a technician was busily covering up and packing up instruments as we ate. When he finished, he stepped clear and the entire stage dropped out of sight into an underground vault. I had seen the exact same setup used a couple of years ago when I visited Adventureland Park outside of Des Moines. We finished up our dinners, and my telephone rang as the rest of the group decided what to do next.
We made for the train station as I was talking with one of my co-workers, who related to me the unpleasant details of a surprise round of staff reductions that had happened the day before. I'd already found out about it via email, and I knew that I was fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to still have a job to go home to. But it was good that someone had thought to call me and bring me up to date on what I had missed. Suddenly I was very glad that I was in California instead of Ohio this week. My (surviving) co-worker apologized for interrupting my vacation, but to be honest, I was glad he called. As I hung up the phone, the train arrived. It runs in my mind that one of the locomotives they are running now at Disneyland actually came recently from Cedar Point, but I don't remember which one, so naturally I don't know whether we were riding behind it or not. Disneyland's train has an interesting configuration. As at the Magic Kingdom, the train runs a clockwise loop around the park. The train is set up so that the passengers sit on tiered seats facing the inside of the loop...that is, to the right-hand side of the train. I guess the idea is that since there is nothing to see outside the berm that surrounds the park, and since the train runs on top of the berm, there is no reason anybody would want to look to the left.
After some discussion, I jumped ship at the next station while the rest of the family rode on around the park. This put me on the border between Fantasyland and Mickey's Toontown. I immediately made a wrong turn, doubled back and went under the bridge into Mickey's Toontown. The area was about to close, but I was quick enough to get back to Gadget's Go Coaster, a heavily decorated Vekoma 700J Roller Skater. Hey, it's a Roller Skater. What can I say about it?
I doubled back through Toontown, past Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin, under the railroad track and past it's a small world where I looked over the fence at the unique trough design. Due to time constraints I didn't get to ride, but I saw how the trough was built, so that there is a slot down the middle for the guide tires under the boats. Instead of riding, I headed for the middle of the park for a ride on the Matterhorn. It's the grand-daddy of all the modern steel roller coasters, and it also belied the park's pay-per-ride roots. There are two coasters in the mountain, with outdoor loading platforms that face each other so that the rides can go up parallel lift hills inside the mountain. Each ride has a very short queue space, and a row of chains and poles marks out an overflow queue that wraps around the mountain on both sides. I waited in the left-hand line, but as I approached the station I noticed that the right-hand station was nearly empty, so I bailed past the (disused) ticket booth and into the right-hand station. That saved me a few minutes' wait. I boarded one of the long, narrow Runaway Train cars. The ride has a rather primitive layout, borrowed in part from a Wild Mouse coaster. The lift hill runs through the mountain, and the coaster alternately wraps around and zig-zags through the mountain, with a few encounters with a mysterious Yeti. It isn't Expedition Everest by any means. I say the layout is 'primitive' because when the ride was built, the engineers at Arrow hadn't yet figured out how their track system and their trains with their polyurethane wheels were going to work. So the ride is almost entirely downhill from the peak of the lift. That is, it doesn't start with the long drop and rise that is normally associated with so many coasters, instead the ride is more bobsled-like (well, I guess that was kind of the point...) with the speed building more gradually as the cars come down the mountain. There are block brakes all over to allow for a ton of simultaneous vehicles, and the ride also uses governor wheels to maintain speeds. All of this is detailed in Arrow's patent on the "Bobsled Amusement Ride" and it was neat to be able to finally see the thing in person.
By this time it was nearly time for the nightly fireworks, a 9:25pm extravaganza fired off over the castle. Which reminds me, where is that darned castle, anyway? I've been in the park for nearly five hours and haven't even seen it...isn't it supposed to be a landmark? Anyway, I circled the mountain and went around the side of the castle and through the cleared path through the hub thoughtfully left by the Disney staff. Every square inch of space within the hub and along Main St. was filled with people milling about and waiting for the fireworks to start. There is a fine line between genius and insanity, and I am not sure which side of that line Disneyland comes down on. Their Massive Outdoor Spectacular Nighttime Show program is either a marvel or a nightmare of logistics and crowd control. It begins with the first show of Fantasmic! at 9:00 pm, followed almost immediately by the fireworks at 9:25, then another showing of Fantasmic! at 10:30. The fireworks are shot over the castle at the center of the park, while the Fantasmic! show takes place in the lagoon in Frontventure Square Country. What that means is that when the first Fantasmic! show ends, a huge mob rushes the hub to see the fireworks show, then tries to get out. Meanwhile, anybody who just watched the fireworks and hadn't seen the other show yet tries to get over to NewAdvFroCrit CoSquLand. Yipe! If that isn't bad enough, through all of it, people are trying to stand, sit, kneel, and otherwise occupy every horizontal surface in the front half of the park. Disney attempts to impose some kind of order onto this madness by employing an army of flashlight-waving stormtroopersushers and a whole lot of nylon rope. The rope is strung up along the paths to create areas for people to walk through, and the flashlight-wavers enforce the "walking" and "standing" areas with a degree of flexibility that makes Cedar Point seem positively anarchic by comparison. I positioned myself in a highly visible location (as in, a location that could easily be spotted from anywhere within a couple hundred feet) and stepped aside, calling my Dad to find out where to meet the rest of the group. I might have been able to meet up with them sooner had the Flashlight Dude not kept interrupting. Of course, I really made him mad when I finally figured out that I had to cross the walkway, go ten feet upstream, turn right, advance three paces and say, "Hi, Mom!" It was the "ten feet upstream" that made Flashlight Man go ballistic. Is this really a Disney operation?
Having already witnessed the fireworks on the midway, I said hello to the rest of the group, and a few minutes later the fireworks started above the castle. One of the first things I noticed was that either the castle is a whole lot shorter than it looks in the pictures, or it has been dramatically cut down. It's like Disney is preparing for the new television age, chopping the castle down so that instead of filling a 4:3 frame it looks better in 16:9. No wonder I didn't see it from all over the park! It does open up more sky for the fireworks, but it really looks weird. What princess in her right mind would want a castle like this one? Even if she IS sound asleep! The next thing I noticed was that the fireworks show itself is, in fact, a re-tooled version of the "Wishes" show that I saw at the Magic Kingdom.
After the fireworks, we adjourned to a patio in Frontierland. Getting there was a bit of a chore, as we got halfway there, then the Flashlight Gestapo decided to suddenly convert the path to a one-way path, in opposition to the dominant traffic flow. Apparently adherance to the Approved Action Plan is more important than, say, letting people go where they want to go. So instead of doubling back, we ducked into and cruised through an ice cream shop which we noted (accurately) was about to become extremely crowded as the crowd found it as an alternative to the now-blocked midway path. When Dad decided to go and get us all some drinks, I have no idea how he managed to get between the food joint and its designated seating area, past the Flashlight Brigade. We settled in to watch the show.
Fantasmic! is a neat show, making large-scale use of the same kind of water screens we saw in the Pirates update. It also involves characters dancing on the decks of the two big riverboats, film clips, lighting and fire effects. I don't remember a thing about the storyline, but the presentation was phenomenal, and it looked and sounded great, something that isn't easy to accomplish with an outdoor show.
After the show, we still had some time before the park closed. That gaved us time to go over to Tomorrowland for rides on Star Tours, which seems to be identical to the one in Florida, and on Space Mountain, the rebuilt, rehabbed and refurbished indoor roller coaster. The ride has a bunch of really neat features now, including a unique pusher system for advancing trains through the station, and a storage track and transfer table in the station to accommodate a special train for *ahem* people who need a little extra time for loading. Just what they needed on Pirates. The music on the train is a nice touch, and the ride is smooth and fast in ways that the Florida ride is not. I never got to ride the old version, but this version of Space Mountain is a surprisingly good coaster, and a nice way to finish off the night.
Unfortunately we had one more ride we had to ride. Once we got outside and across the entry plaza, we got into the mob for the parking garage tram that doesn't actually go to the garage. I call it a "mob" because that is exactly what it was. A mob of tired, cranky people waiting to ride a clearly inadequate number of parking garage trams. How difficult can it be? There is one stop at the entry plaza, and there is one stop at the parking garage. The trams run in single loop, and there are no published alternate methods for getting from the park to the garage. One of the problems is that there are two boarding areas at the entry plaza, with two mobs of tired, cranky people waiting for trams, and nobody directing traffic to insure that both boarding areas actually got served. When the tram serving our boarding area pulled out, followed closely by the tram serving the other boarding area, we naturally assumed that the next tram would pull up to our boarding area. When the next two pulled up to the other boarding area, leaving our zone unserved, the crowd started to get ugly. The next tram pulled up to our boarding area (it turns out it had been across the tram circle loading a wheelchair, in what seems to be a very difficult and time consuming process) and was immediately swarmed by people with no regard for any kind of order. It was, in short, total chaos. Dad tossed me his keys as I squeezed aboard, and Mom found a seat behind me. When we got to the garage, we hiked the full length and width of the garage to get to the car, and I drove around to the top of the escalator to wait for Dad. He had managed...just barely...to elbow his way aboard the next tram, and indicated that after our tram left, the crowd got even uglier. He also pointed out the four empty trams parked along the tram circle. We had made arrangements to stay at a local (non-Disney) hotel, which we called for directions as we pulled out of the parking garage.
The next morning, we slept in a little just because it had taken so long to get out of the park and into the hotel the night before. The park had closed at 11:00pm, and we were staying about eight minutes away. Check-in took all of five minutes, and we got into our room at about 1:30am. In the morning, Mom and Dad wanted breakfast, but I was interested in seeing a little more of Disneyland, so I asked Dad to do the unthinkable. We returned to Disneyland and began circling the property in search of any location where we could get close enough to either the tram stop or the entry plaza to drop me off. After circling the park twice, getting inaccurate directions from a parking lot attendant, and making more U-turns[Footnote2] than I care to count, we finally got to some kind of passenger drop-off point. I got out and returned to Disneyland, with the agreement that Dad would call me when they finished breakfast.
I started my day with a near walk-on ride on the other side of the Matterhorn so that I could say I rode both sides. It's still a neat ride, even in the daylight, but rather than riding it again, I continued my high-speed visit to the park by heading over to Big Thunder Mountain and riding it again. As I entered the queue I was handed a card with the current time on it and instructed to turn it in on the platform. It took about 20 minutes. Their system for measuring the lines is to use these cards, on which the time is marked using the customer's watch. In other words I was chosen not for my coaster shirt (grin) but because I was quite obviously wearing a digital watch[Footnote 3].
I was taking a whirlwind tour of the park, and I did manage to get through the entire park, not riding much, but at least seeing bits and pieces of the whole place. I somehow managed to ride the Pinocchio ride, but not it's a small world. I did try to ride on Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin but it broke down just as I approached. I finally ended up in the queue for the Jungle Cruise but still about twenty minutes from the platform when the phone rang. Mom and Dad had apparently had enough of Disneyland the day before, so we agreed to meet at the entrance plaza and go over to California Adventure. I bailed out of the queue to make the meeting.
Disneyland is a nice park, it has a lot of neat stuff in it, and I really want to go back and spend a whole lot more time there. Getting out of the house on time and not sitting in traffic for three hours on IR-5 would probably do the trick. My first visit to Disneyland was a lot like my first visit to the Magic Kingdom, in that while I got to ride all the stuff I really wanted to ride, I rushed through it and really did not get a chance to enjoy the park in the way it is meant to be enjoyed.
But as nice of a place as Disneyland is, the overall impression I got from the experience is quite frankly unbroadcastable. The lasting impression I get from the place is one of a massive logistical Charlie-Foxtrot. From the traffic patterns leading from the Interstate to the parking facility, to the apparent incompetence surrounding the design and operation of the parking facility, to the basic problem of handling people in the #1 most heavily attended amusement park in the country, including parade routing and scheduling, midway design, shop layout, crowd control, attraction queue control, nighttime show logistics and parking lot transportation, it is all a series of massive screw-ups. I use the unbroadcastable expression quite specifically because this is not a disaster, this is not a series of mistakes, in fact this is more of a SNAFU. The logistics at Disneyland are "AFU" not because something went wrong, but because they are "AFU" by design. That is, the Situation is Normal and still All Fouled Up. It's unexpected and very strange. The Florida parks are amazing, even legendary, in their ability to move people. Not just their ability to move people, but their ability to move people in a seamless, highly efficient manner. Getting from your car to the park is an almost effortless process, even though it may involve three different forms of transportation. Disneyland has a much simpler infrastructure but all the pieces are in place, they simply choose not to use it appropriately. It's the same story with the ride queues. The midways at Disneyland are far too small and far too crowded to waste any space on attraction queueing, but that's exactly what they do in order to accommodate their FastPass system...I caught them doing it with both Indiana Jones and with Space Mountain, and had the crowd been a little bigger they would have had the same problem with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. It is amazing, even unbelievable that Disneyland operates in such a manner. Even worse is that the most memorable impression of The Happiest Place on Earth would be of the total cluelessness with which they handle the most basic operational logistics. This isn't what you're supposed to remember when you visit a park. I really want to go back. I really want to get a better feel for the place. The attractions are good, the park is gorgeous and they put on quite a good show. It's just their logistics that stink.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Next: Disney's California Adventure
Footnote 1: ", Mom, "[Return to text]
Footnote 2: Where I come from, almost all U-turns are illegal.[Return to text]
Footnote 3: Yes, I confess to being so amazingly primitive that I still think that digital watches are a neat idea. Of course I also remember that when I got my first digital watch, mine was the first digital watch I had ever seen where you didn't have to push a button to see the current time...[Return to text]
--DCAjr
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