Truth About Disneyland | Ethan Swidler

As a senior in high school in Southern California, you hopefully will get to experience the joy of making the trip to Disneyland with the senior class. Fortunately, my class had the opportunity to go yesterday, Thursday, May 19th. With the year winding down and the senior festivities starting to peak, we are all starting to check out of school and into that summer lifestyle. Yesterday was just a sneak peek into the next coming weeks.

We started the day with an early morning bus trip up to Anaheim. After the hour and a half bus ride and the hour-long shuttle wait, we were finally in the park. The “happiest place on Earth” was just about to be conquered by me and the 600 other people in the senior class from Canyon Crest Academy. As soon as we walked in we headed straight to the Hyperspace Mountain ride. While in the line we were able to buy our fast passes, order food, play heads up (a game on your phone like charades), do the Wordle, and basically anything you wanted. After what felt like an eternity, we went on the ride. It was a fun two minutes and thirty seconds after a two-hour wait. Thankfully we paid an extra $20 for the rest of the rides so we could get on them quicker. We then reserved times about an hour ahead of time for the different rides. After Hyperspace Mountain, we rushed over to the food we ordered ahead of time because we had almost missed our window that was hours ahead.

The group rushed across the park to get to the food. We stopped at the Harbor Valley restaurant, which had some great lobster mac and cheese. Once we gulped down the meal we headed over to the Indiana Jones ride, where we had the fast passes. We got in the fast pass line, in which we only waited for 30 minutes instead of the standby line that had to wait 65 minutes. This ride was one of my favorites because of the quick turns and the idea that you were being chased and you had to follow Indiana Jones to get out. Since this ride had such a short wait time, we had some time to kill before our next ride. So we walked over to the Star Wars portion of the park, this was sweet. Most of this was recently added to the park within the past five years or so, so I had never had the opportunity to go to any of it. Everyone decided they wanted to go on the Millennium Falcon, a team game/simulation where you are flying the Millennium Falcon trying to take out the enemy.

The rest of the day was filled with waiting in line for a cumulative five hours and going on about four rides. Towards the end of the day, we really wanted to go on the “Rise to Resistance” Star Wars ride. We got in line with just about 3 hours to spare. After about an hour and a quarter of the way through the line, the ride was stopped for maintenance. We spent the remainder of our time waiting for the ride to get started again, but it didn’t. We had to rush out and get back to the bus to go home.

Overall, Disneyland is a fun place for children to run around and look at all the Disney characters, however, the actual park itself is 98 percent waiting around for the rides. I had a great time spending the day at “The happiest place on Earth” with my friends, but I will not be going back for a very long time.