the long and winding road...

Passholder Event
Disney had a neat promotion for annual passholders (APs). You had to email and request one of 1250 free tickets to a special after park closing event. If your email was chosen as a winner you could bring in yourself and up to 3 additional APs. I heard about it too late to enter but through the generosity of another AP and the magic of the internet, managed to score 4 tickets for G and me plus friends! I was a bit nervous as the event officially ran from 8pm -midnight. G is usually in bed about 8pm but decided to give it a try figuring if it was a complete disaster we could just leave and go home. As it turned out, wow!!! what a great evening! It was on a wednesday night so we got there a bit early to avoid the traffic. While waiting for our friends and benefactors we took the opportunity to do a bit of character hunting.

We got to see Mickey in his fall wear:
Goofy in his Jack Skellington costume
And Bre'r Fox. G didn't know who he was but when I told her "Bre'r Fox" she said "oh, he BLEW the house down!!!" Fox, wolf, close enough I guess.
Once our friends showed up we hit the Haunted Mansion real quick. Only Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Main St were open for the event so we thought we'd get a quick Nightmare Before Christmas fix before those areas were closed for the evening. By the time we finished with the mansion it was nearly 8pm and the park was starting to clear out the day visitors. You couldn't get on the rides if you didn't have one of the special orange wrist bands. By 8:30 or so, the rides were all pretty much walk on! I've never seen Disneyland like that ever. I guess DL capacity is about 70-75k but for this event the maximum number of guests in the park would have been 5000. In about 2 hrs we rode Star Tours, Buzz, Rockets, Alice, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Mr Toad, Snow White, Tea Cups, and watched a parade! Amazing! Georgie and her friend Gracie laughed and squealed and ran from place to place like the crazy exhausted little things they were.
I also got to meet Shelby from My Year With the Mouse and her family. That was pretty cool! How cute is her little boy??? Unfortunately we had only a few spare moments to chat and never got to have a churro together :-( A definite must for next time.

Now that G is tall enough, a lot more of the park has opened up to her. She was excited to give Star Tours a try. She really liked it. Me, not so much. As I've read, yes, the ride is less queasy inducing than it was before but it still made me feel putrid. It always seems so hot in there to me. Ick!

The parade is called Soundsational. I'm not really much into parades in general but this one was very good. The floats were beautiful and quite impressive. Each of them featured a different Disney movie or theme and was accompanied by costumed dancers. G's favorite was definitely the princess float which I think had every princess on it!

After the parade, they pulled the floats onto Main Street along with their characters and you could have your pictures done with them. We did wait in the long but very quick moving line for the Aladdin float and then caught a quick pic with Mary Poppins. I would have loved to find the princess float and do a picture with that one but, alas, it was almost 11pm and Georgie was toast! It was definitely time to go home.

All in all it was a great evening! I'd been worried that it might be a complete disaster but instead it was probably one of the more enjoyable times I've ever spent at Disney. Yeah!!!