parktrotter

Of this one, too, I approve. I approve of it so much that I’ll give the corporate advertising link .

Redwood Creek Challenge Trail is in the California Adventure park. The idea is that the visitor is in a national forest in the Sierra and is either training to become a firefighter or ranger or is just goofing around in the woods—it’s not clear to me, and it doesn’t matter. You climb through a kind of Habitrail maze made of netting, higher and higher; the netting hangs between towers that are designed to look like fire lookouts. Parents chug along behind children on the uncertain netting. Children fall on the netting, to no bad effect, and the younger ones get their shoes caught. One mom had to try to fish her four-year-old’s shoe out from underneath the netting, and got lucky when another adventurer proved to have a hand and wrist thin enough for the task. The more mayhem I saw, the more I approved. The kids were all delighted.

Lewis adored it, just as Dustin had when he was that age. Dustin adores it at his present age, too. As I noted before, they’ve given Tom Sawyer Island a makeover to cash in on the Pirates of the Caribbean mania: you can have your picture taken in front of a heap of pirate gold constructed of some indestructible Disney substance. Kids today otherwise find most of the same attractions we found there in the 1970s: the floating bridge, the lookout nests, the caves–especially the caves (the fort remains closed). Here, again, is an opportunity to work off some of the calories everyone is consuming back on the Mainland.

I can make a little list of Disney attractions that do involve some physical activity. I think we went on most of them. Lewis loved them; small children generally do, since they’re like a playground jungle gym writ large. We visited Tarzan’s Treehouse on a slow day without lines, and Lewis dragged me through it four times, one trip right after another in a kind of loop. The climb is substantial (don’t do it if you’re really afraid of heights). I felt almost virtuous when we were done, and Lewis was ready to stay for another hour.

The traditional place for kids to really get a workout is Tom Sawyer Island, in the middle of Frontierland or Gender-Apartheidland or whatever they’re calling it. It’s still essentially the same as it was when I was a child in the 1970s: you ride across the moat on a motorized raft, dock at the island, and go wild. It’s the nearest thing to “nature” in Disneyland. The ducks and coots are real, actual birds, if popcorn-addicted. It’s also the nearest thing to unsupervised, nearly-dangerous fun.

What else can I tell you about Disneyland that would be useful for the family traveler? Let’s look at a few individual “rides.” This first one involves no riding: Tarzan’s Treehouse. It’s essentially just a concrete tree in Adventureland or Tropical Ecosystemland or whatever they’re calling it now. You climb up three or four stories into its plastic canopy and walk through a series of exhibits that tell the updated story of Tarzan (Jane is, I must say, pretty hot; Tarzan is too, if you swing that way, hyor hyor).

This was the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse back in the 1970s, a favorite of mine just for the waterworks: a kind of vertical conveyor belt made of bamboo cups carried water into the tree and let it cascade back to the bottom. Removing it was a mistake; surely they could have written it into Tarzan’s story.

No matter what, I heartily recommend Tarzan’s Treehouse. Disneyland is a Sea of Fat: there is so much junk food on display everywhere, so much of it being consumed everywhere, that you can gain weight from the odors alone. Tarzan’s Treehouse is one of the few places where you can work up just a trace of a sweat.

The Christmas Fantasy Parade is, of course, not the only way Disneyland has been dressed up for the holidays. They have the traditional tree up just as you enter the park, at the head of Main Street. There are lights up everywhere–that part is all kind of a blur. In the big open entrance-area that leads to the California Adventure park, they play surf-rock carols. Downtown Disney is elaborately decorated; Santa Claus greets the kids on the first level of the Disneyland Hotel. And there is the nightly firework show, seen above.

Travel Tip: during the Christmas parade, dads who have had enough of the general atmosphere of Merriment and Wonder can hide on the patio of the Plaza Inn restaurant under one of the propane heaters, within sight of the parade, but not TOO close. All the available employees are covering the parade, so no teenaged “cast member” will appear and tell you to stand at least thirty feet away from the heater for your safety and protection, and please keep arms and legs inside until we come to a full and complete stop.

We’re traveling again, visiting family in the farm country near Merced, California. We spent Christmas day there, where our boys played with their cousins (eight years old, six years old, three years old–oh, the noise, noise, noise, NOISE). I just realized that we have spent the last three Christmases in this same hotel, the Ramada on Childs Avenue next to highway 99. Again, I usually hate hotels, but I have grown fond of this one, and I wanted to take a brief break from the Disney-blogging and give them a good review.

In a limited way, at least: we have stayed every time in the family suite, and always only on Christmas night, so this may be the hotel-review equivalent of Daffy’s insurance policy (the one that covers a black eye obtained in a hailstorm on the Fourth of July in a stampede of elephants and one baby zebra, etc). But at $129, I think it’s a bargain: you get two big rooms, two TVs, two coffee machines, two bathrooms, etc. One room has two queen beds, one has one big king. This is not a fancy place, mind you: we need new fixtures in the bathroom, where the tiling, for instance, is quaint–and I don’t mean bed-and-breakfast-in-Vermont quaint, I mean old-and-busted quaint. But in the end, these are minor flaws.

And this is Merced, where the most prominent local feature is probably the gang-banger graffiti, visible on every flat surface along the highway and everywhere else. They need to clean it up by any means possible. Let’s get convicts out on chain gangs if necessary, painting that garbage over; they’re otherwise advertising the unlivable quality of this whole area in the loudest tones.

Graffiti aside, the Ramada is convenient for Yosemite National Park; the highway 140 exit for the park is just north on 99.

As it is now Christmas, the Angry Dad will go easier on the Christmas Fantasy Parade at Disneyland.

But it is overwhelming, of course. Here is the bland, generic description from the Wikipedia page on this subject:

• Aladdin and Jasmine ride on the Magic Carpet, driven by The Genie.

• 8 Snowflake performers skate down the parade route on roller skates.

• A snowy Christmas Tree rolls down the parade route.

• 8 Snowpeople scurry along, 4 male, 4 female.

• Mickey and Minnie ice skate atop the Ice Rink float.

This is only one “unit” of seven such units (I imagine if the “Snowpeople” were to scamper instead of scurry, the whole production might be blown to hell). But here is the peculiar feature, from the Angry Dad point of view: just when you want to leave, they do something surprising, something that leaves you thinking, “That’s pretty cool.” For me, it was the ballerina on top of the music box, an actual human doing actual ballet on an oversized music box twenty feet up on the top of the float. Like guys all up and down the parade route, I thought, “Impressive…and she’s pretty hot.”

By the time we settled down on a curb for the 6:30 Christmas Fantasy Parade, we had been in Anaheim for three days, nearly all of that time in the grip of Disney, and I was approaching the point at which I had enough of the Magic.

Disneyland is, of course, a wholesome version of Las Vegas, an intentionally overwhelming experience. Here is a fine description of the mental atmosphere in Las Vegas, from In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle by William Fox. He is describing developer Steve Wynn’s art collection, and the opening of a Guggenheim gallery on the Strip:

Both the art and the gambling are aspects of spectacle. The Strip, once competition arrived in the form of gambling in other states and on Indian lands, morphed into mass spectacle.  It became a pedestrian experience where people go to stroll the neon-lit sidewalks at night in order to participate in something larger than life, larger than themselves.  You go to Las Vegas precisely because you want to be overwhelmed by an excessive visual ordeal.  We define and describe spectacle by the use of superlatives, and Wynn tells you on his taped message that his paintings are the “most expensive” and “the best.”  The Guggenheim’s advertising offers the viewer no less.

Disneyland operates by the same kind of absolute sensory overload, only of a very sugary sort. In the parades, the dose of sugar is dangerously large.

Think about it: that drunken pirate on Pirates of the Caribbean ride who rocks back and forth on the cannon, while shooting at his friends and singing “yo ho,” has been doing that for twelve-plus hours a day nearly every day for 41 years. No wonder he looks a little worn out.

To repeat, here is one of the essential strategies of a Disney theme park: set up some little thing, like a mannequin singing a song, and drive people past it once every ten seconds or so. I mention this here mainly because, toward the end of our trip, it started to freak me out a little. It is so easy to imagine the pirates bored to death–and so easy to see why robots always turn on their human masters.

But another Disney strategy is to sit the park visitors still and run the repeating exhibit past them. Just from thinking about this subject, I have this other piece of deathless verse stuck in my head:

On this very special night

We wish we may we wish we might

Have the wish we wish tonight

In a Christmas fantasy.

The words from the song that plays during the Christmas parade that runs down Main Street during the season. It was, for me, the last straw.

The essence of Disneyland is a kind of extreme repetition. Note, for instance, this deathless verse:

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.

We pillage, we plunder, we rifle and loot.

Drink up me hearties, yo ho!

We kidnap and ravage and don’t give a hoot.

Drink up me hearties, yo ho!

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.

The song the pirates sing in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, of course: Repeat one billion times. There are other verses to the song, but no one can understand the words, and see if you don’t get the “yo ho” part stuck in your head right now (here is a nice page written by a fan of the ride, with the rest of the song on it).

Why is this the essence of Disneyland? It is one of their basic techniques: set up some little thing (an animated mannequin singing a song, often) and drive people past it once every ten seconds. The pirates have been singing that song almost nonstop for 41 years.