Welcome to part 4 of my travel series on Disneyland – I’m hoping that by sharing our family’s experience, you’ll feel a bit less overwhelmed with planning your own family’s vacation – and be able to tailor to your own family’s personality. Check in often and follow our family’s experience, including a selection of our favorite photographs!
Planning Ahead: “Super Tip”
We are fortunate that friends of ours are quite the Disney connoisseurs – and gave us a money-saving, vacation enhancing Super Tip, which I’ll get to in a moment.
One aspect of the Disneyland experience, and by Disneyland, I mean the bigger Disneyland resort area – including California Adventure and Downtown Disney, is how many layers of experiences one can have. Layers upon layers. And, they can be tailored to your family’s personality.
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| Classic Disneyland - It's a Small World |
If this is your first trip to Disneyland and it’s a short one, odds are your trip will be packed with hitting the classic highlights – such as riding Space Mountain, getting dizzy on the Teacups, or visiting the princesses. Given a bit more time you may find yourself exploring deeper, and checking out Tomorrowland’s House of the Future, or CA’s It’s Tough to be a Bug. From fulfilling to building traditions, it seems each family has its own agenda in terms of how they explore Disney.
Once you’ve had your fix of all of the Must-Do’s, its time to check out another layer of Disney: Hidden Mickeys! Disney Imagineers have built fun directly into the architecture and landscaping of the Disneyland Resort. You can check out the book: Hidden Mickeys Guide: A Field Guide to Disney’s Best Kept Secret by Steven Barrett as your guide! The classic Mickey shape has been sprinkled (with Pixie Dust, I’d imagine) throughout the parks, and it’s your job to find them! We hadn’t discovered this particular experience until our second Disney trip just this year. We brought the guide with us and spent the last 2 of our 6 days at the park finding hidden Mickeys at the areas we happened to be in. Once we got the hang of it, and knew (relatively) what we were looking for – it was pretty fun. Hidden Mickeys can be as little as a small classic Mickey head and ears shape on one of the many coats of armor decorating the waiting area the Matterhorn, to large wheels arranged in the classic head and 2-ear in the middle of the Thunder Mountain Railroad.
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| Can you see it? |
I admit, they can be tough, and a guide book is a good way to go. What’s nice about this particular book, is there are several sections, based on how you want to discover the Hidden Mickeys… either with less direct clues, an area-by area scavenger hunt, or obvious, “look for this” clues that lead you directly to them. We haphazardly went through a bit of each section. On our drive home, we each found ourselves instinctively searching for more Hidden Mickeys – in fact, our youngest son found one while blowing our glass floats in Newport just last month (on one of the propane valves)!
Hunting for Hidden Mickeys is a fun experience you can have while at the parks themselves, and you get to take the memories of the hunt home with you. One layer of Disneyland that is both an experience and a souvenir are trading pins. Pins have always been at the Disney parks, but in 1999, as part of the Millennium Celebration, pin trading was introduced. It has certainly flourished and the number of pins available is impressive. You’ll notice while at the parks, that many of the cast members (employees) wear lanyards around their necks, or a square piece of material on their hip with several pins attached. If a cast member has a pin that you want, and you have a pin to give back to them… they are obligated to make the trade!
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| Showing off our pins, including Grandma's first 2 pins! |
This brings me (finally) to my Super Tip! Our Disney-savvy friends instructed us to search on Ebay for “Disney trading pin lots” and purchase trading pins before our trip. While the pins at the parks range from $7-$20 (and more…) each, we managed to purchase a “lot” of 40 pins for only $39. Forty pins, you say? Yup! Each of our boys started out with 20 random pins from the Ebay purchase. You don’t need that many, of course… but I’d argue its more fun if you do. Just don't forget to make your purchase far enough in advance of your trip, that they arrive before you leave (obvious, I know... but I fell into that trap - and had them mailed to our hotel in Anaheim because I'd waited too long)!
We bought the boys each a lanyard at the parks, but you could certainly get one less expensively beforehand. There were a handful of pins the boys thought they wanted to keep, and it was their responsibility to keep track of their special pins, and pins they wanted to trade. I loved that the boys had their eyes out all of the time, looking for pins to trade, which opened up doors for them to make conversation with the cast members. The interactions were often humorous and cast members always very friendly and happy to make the transaction with them (I’m pleased to say there are no exceptions in our experience).
Each year we let the boys choose a very special pin to purchase for one of their souvenirs – something that they hadn’t traded for, and something that reminded them of our experience at Disneyland. I’ll admit that I’ve got the bug as well… the boys (my husband included), even bought me my own lanyard and a few pins to get the trading started.
It seems like as soon as you think you know it all about Disneyland, the Imagineers have left something behind to grab your attention yet again, and bring you back into the many, many layers of Disney.
Planning Ahead: “Techy Tips”
Kimberly Teichrow, staff photographer for True North Parenting, lives in Bend, Oregon with her family. They love to take adventures, and Kimberly loves to capture them through her lens.
