parktrotter

I expended great ingenuity in trying to keep the kids occupied in the Anaheim airport, but was mostly bested by the problem. You can buy them junk food, but in the end, it is a question of how much fun they can squeeze from crawling over and under the seats. One would think that the aircraft would be a distraction, but in fact a four year old tires of the planes quickly.

Dustin is eleven, and can read or do Sodoku or the like. After a few hours, I rustled up some sports pages for him to look at. No need to buy one: they were lying around all over the place. Lewis needed activity, or food, and got both. When we finally got on the plane, five hours late, he fell asleep so deeply that he did not stir until the next day.

Is there a way to keep a small child entertained in an airport? No really easy way, no. Again, we had left Disneyland and raced to John Wayne Airport just in time to discover that the flight had been delayed, and we had nearly five hours to kill. We had turned the car in already, of course, so we were stuck.

The only tip I have is the obvious one: don’t go through security right away, because you can’t go back. Your only resources will now be whatever is on the other side. Not that this airport, which is small, has much to offer. It does have the giant bronze statue of John Wayne, which, after days in the clutches of Disney, was admirably un-PC. Woody the Pixar toy cowboy, you will notice, lost the handgun out of his holster sometime before he ever left the brain of Pixar. John Wayne’s bronze revolver, on the statue, is enormous.

Then it was time to leave.  A Travel Tip: for clothing that people don’t see, like underwear or socks, pack old pairs that you were planning to get rid of anyway; rather than bring them home, throw them out when you’re done with them. Travel Tip #2: Don’t buy so much junk that you need to make space in your luggage through lunatic expedients like throwing out your underwear.

We rushed to the airport.  The Enterprise car rental people were cheerful, efficient, and not at all teenaged, which was a great relief after so many days in Disneyland and California Adventure.  The people at the Southwest counter were adults, too.  I was surprised at how relieved I was to be in the hands of adults: I breathed out an audible sigh, and felt my stomach decompress.  Then the Southwest woman said that our plane was deicing in Chicago and would be five hours late, and my stomach reversed course.

The Matterhorn, which isn’t actually all that tall or fast, makes for a good first roller-coaster experience for the young child.  Lewis first went on it when he was three, although it perhaps was not an altogether positive experience: he began yelling “Stop! Stop!” when the car was nowhere near stopping, and this is of course an experience that you’re locked into.  As a four year old, he had a better time: he started calling it “Mistletoe Mountain,” no one knows why.

A classic urban legend states that there is a basketball court inside the Matterhorn, and that legend turns out to be…true .

An aside: when did they start trading on Tinkerbell’s body? She was always hot, but on t-shirts, posters, etc, she’s been showing off her goodies more and more. Ariel was, of course, the great pioneer where this sort of toon-sexploitation is concerned.

Again, the dinosaurs on the Disneyland Railroad come, ultimately, from the movie Fantasia, which was produced all the way back in 1940.  The scene recreates, among other things, the combat between the tyrannosaur and the stegosaur from that movie, and shows its age in an interesting way that I claim originality in having noticed: the tyrannosaur has its tail down toward the ground.  Compare the tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park in 1993, which keeps its tail up.

What is the difference here?  The imagined dinosaur from the 1990s is built for speed, while the one from the 1940s is built to lumber.  It reflects a revolution in paleontology.  We used to think that dinosaurs were big, slow-moving dimwits; look at a kid’s book from the 1950s and you’ll see what I mean (they always say that dinosaurs had a “brain the size of a pea,” for instance).  Now, we picture them as vigorous and intelligent.

The railroad is one of the only things in the park that has not changed since I was a child in the 1970s, except for the stop at Toontown (the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit is now over twenty years old, so I wonder what percentage of the park’s guests know what is being referred to—but again, as I’ve noted before, no one knows who Mr. Toad is either).  It still takes you past the Grand Canyon and back in time to the Animatronic dinosaurs, a scene based on the movie Fantasia, and so not particularly new, either.

Our trip on the train the previous night had been ruined, for me, by the employee conductor who threatened to STOP THE TRAIN if the passengers did not more exactly obey his orders.  I was probably the only one who noticed—which is what the employees rely on so that they can get away with behaving like this.

January 5 was Twelfth Night, the traditional day when the Christmas season ends.  Am I ready for it to be over?  You bet, but I will miss it all the same.  Here are the Disneyland decorations one last time.  And here’s one more tip for next year: when walking down Main Street during the Christmas parade, cut through the stores. Everyone is out watching the parade, and the stores are empty and warm.

We spent our last day in the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail, mainly, but had earlier spent a few hours in Disneyland.  The perfect way to get around, if you have a child who is three or four years old, is on the old railroad that circles the park and stops in New Orleans Square, Toontown, Tomorrowland, and the head of Main Street.  The engine, remarkably, is an actual steam engine.  Sit in the first car, so that the child can get a look at it.

We went on Soaring Over California on a rainy day when we could walk through repeatedly without waiting more than a few minutes. I actually liked it more and more: the films they show are so sharp that you can look around inside the scene. At one point, you “fly” over Yosemite Falls, pursuing a hang glider (illegal in Yosemite National Park, I believe—and so edited in). The climb to the brink of Yosemite Falls is a hike I have long wanted to do and have not found the time for yet, and I have always wondered how the trail reaches the plateau up a seemingly solid wall of granite. If you look hard enough at the film, near the bottom of the screen, you can see the trail and follow it northward. You can tell I was ready to get out of the city entirely.

But enjoyed the thing immensely, as did Dustin and Lewis, although Lewis did not like the fireworks at the end. He can put up with virtually anything, but he seems to have extraordinarily sensitive ears where explosions are concerned. He otherwise babbled happily for days about how “you need to pick up your feet, because you wouldn’t want them to hit the trees.”

I think, actually, that’s supposed to be Soarin’ Over California, but I refuse to cooperate. Once inside the ride, they seat you in one of six rows of—well, it’s hard to describe. A row of theater seats with seatbelts, essentially. After the employees are done yelling, the machinery picks up your row and all the others and suspends it in front of an IMAX-like theater screen, which then shows famous locales around California (the Golden Gate Bridge, Lake Tahoe, and so on) while swinging the seats around in a way that does make it feel as if you are flying. Try to get in the first row as you enter, so that your view is not blocked by feet dangling from the row above.

They blow wind in your face, and artificial scent that I actually wish they would drop: the “tree” aroma just smells like an air freshener you would put in your bathroom. Anyone who has actually been in a forest would not be fooled—and, come to think of it, probably nearly all the people in a place like this have never been in a forest, except to drive through one. The people at a place like this are like the people in the film WALL-E. They’re pretty round.

To finish with the California Adventure park, I think everyone likes this one: the virtual reality ride they call Soaring Over California. Ride-goers (a new word?) line up in the Wings of Fame hallway, where they look at photographs of famous aircraft and aviators. It’s another example of what I’ve said about the atmosphere in California Adventure. In Disneyland, they stay on message, and a hallway like this would be lined by drawings of Goofy trying to repair a biplane and chopping his ears off, or something of the sort. Here, you get photos of actual reality. I prefer the actual reality—but it does interfere with the creation of that total alternate reality for which the older Disneyland is famous.

At the end of the line, they show you a safety video starring the actor Patrick Warburton, Elaine’s boyfriend from Seinfeld. It’s played for laughs, and is—actually fun, probably the only safety warning in either park that deserves that word. Then you enter the ride itself.