California Day 3: Disneyland

Donald Duck’s Seaside Breakfast at PCH Grill

We kicked off day 3 of our California vacation by having breakfast with Donald Duck. We spent our Disney night’s at the Paradise Pier hotel, which houses Donald’s PCH Grill. (Donald does require reservations, so plan in advance if you want to do this!) We scheduled a super early breakfast so that we could eat and still hit the park when it opened!

I LOVE scheduling character dining when we do Disney because it frees us up from feeling like we have to wait in lines at the parks to meet the characters. Donald, Daisy, Stitch, and Minnie all came right to our table while we were eating.

Following breakfast, we walked into Downtown Disney and took the Monorail into Disneyland. This took us past the entrance lines and straight into the middle of the park. (I definitely recommend going this route–while everyone else was walking from the front of the park, we were going in the opposite direction, so the crowds were low.)

Disneyland

This was Jase’s first visit to Disney–that he will remember. (He went to Disney World when he was five months old!) He wasn’t super excited about the characters, but he LOVED shooting the aliens in Buzz Lightyears Astro Blaster and riding Gadget’s Go Coaster.

{Side note: Disneyland is extremely strict with their height requirements. Most of the rides require a height of 40″ and Jase was literally just-a-hair under that. So much so that when we changed his shoes the next day, he met the 40″ requirement for California Adventure. If you have a little one who might be a little under the height requirement, pack shoes with a thick sole!}

We purchased MaxPass as part of our Disney package and it was well worth the extra $15 per ticket. Disneyland still does fast passes the “old Disney World way” in that you can schedule multiple passes at once, all from your phone. Using these passes, we were able to hop around the park and not have to wait more that 20 minutes at any ride!

One of the kids favorite things to do was trade pins. When we checked into our Disney hotel, we were each given a lanyard and a trading pin as part of our package. The kids were able to trade their pins at any shop or with any worker who was wearing a lanyard. They loved looking at all the available pins and deciding whether or not to trade one of their existing pins.

The only character Jase was super excited to see was Pluto and he just happened to walk by while we were eating lunch in Toontown. Jase saw him and his whole face lit up. 🙂

Disney is super fun, but super exhausting! At the end of the day, our devices showed that we had walked around 15,000 steps. (By our calculation, that equals about 27,000 Jase-steps!)