More Disney...

On Monday we ventured out of Disneyland and right next door to Walt Disney Studios. I'd never been to one of these, so this was very exciting for me.

Here we are at the gates!

Ok, to be totally honest we took that one our way out. I'm only confessing that because you can tell the sun is setting.

Boo's door!

Uh-oh, Nina's been found by the Child Detection Agency!

Maggie's not in any of these Monster's Inc photos because the whole thing weirded her out. I'm not exactly sure why, she didn't say. She said she understood that it wasn't real, and she didn't mind any of the other movie characters in the park. Maybe because Monster's Inc was scary?

Then we went on some rides. Or, tried to. The cars ride broke 35 seconds into it, so we got on line for the paratroopers parachutes, and that broke too. At least this time we didn't spend a whole 5 minutes on line first.

I was a little nervous about getting on one of the scary rides after so many malfunctions, but third time's a charm, right? And it was fine. First I did Andy's Race Car, for which we have no picture, but then I did the wonderfully fun falling elevator at the Hollywood Tower of Terror. Behold:


I have to say, the French people need to import some good mechanics, because the rides were constantly broken. Thunder mountain was closed twice (I asked the guy sending people away, "Wasn't this broken yesterday too?" and he said, "Yes. It works, it breaks, it works, it breaks..." Not so comforting!)

Besides using our time wisely, we had one more trick to help us avoid lines: Fastpass. We got them because we stayed at the Disneyland hotel, one per person per day, and they let us skip the whole line! Noting feels as unfairly VIP as bypassing a 45-minute line. We used them twice to ride the Buzz Lightyear ride line, which was worth it because that was a really fun one.

The whole trip was just fantastic. The girls had an amazing time and are already asking when we can go back. Off-peak at Paris was totally the right choice, too. Even though it was a little chilly, we did hardly any waiting. We usually spent more time walking through the empty line space than actually waiting, which never failed to reinforce how long the lines could potentially be.

After Disney we did one last day in Paris. I didn't get to download those photos on to my computer and Nick kept the camera, but I'll see if I can pull some off of Facebook so that I can do a blog post about that. Still so much to catch up on!