Mission: Characters - Halloween 2009 About This Page:

[Vala]

Someone thinks me rambling is entertaining, so I'll post my mamooth write up here too.

This was my fourth trip to Disneyland overall and the second for Halloween. But it is my first attempt to write a real trip report. So please bear with me there.

Also I apologize for the lack of photos. Usually I take a lot, but I found it kind of difficult this time because I had to use a scooter.

Pre-Trip stuff summed up:
We flew in on October 27 from Frankfurt, Germany.

We means my friend and room mate Andrea and I. Andrea is really camera shy, so you might see her on the occassional photo in the background. But she really doesn't like me posting photos of her with the characters, so I am not going to do it. I'm happy enough when she actually agrees to posed with a character. Her mom always says I am the only person in the world who can get her on pictures at all.

Lufthansa is the only company offering direct flights to Los Angeles from Frankfurt, and after the return trip from hell in 2007 I refuse to make that long trips with stopovers. In 2007 I had gone with American Airlines and a stop over in Dallas… which led to me being stranded in Dallas for a day, and AA only paid for my hotel after quite a discussion. That taught me one lesson: No matter what the airline tells you: 45 minutes are not enough for switching planes! If they refuse to rebook you, look for another carrier.

Anyway, the flight was quite uneventful. They were even nice enough to overlook that I was over the baggage limit when checking in… I do have the habit of suddenly coming back with more bags than I left with, but being over the baggage allowance on the way in was completely new to me.

I did have my first (and only) celebrity sighting of the trip though… a German actor was sitting three rows in front of me. At first we were not sure if it was him, but then we noticed he had no less than 4 flight attendants frequently coming back to him to ask if he was doing okay, and then he was even served food from Business Class. So the secret was out.

The only negative thing about the flight was that the only snack they offered during the trip was some kind of peanut cookie. I always had been under the impression that peanut allergies were not that rare. The flight attendant looked at me like I had two heads when I asked about an alternative. Nothing major, but it did seem very odd to me.

We did leave a little late, but made good that time until we arrived at LAX.
I know that airport does have quite a bad reputation, but it never seemed that bad to me. First time I encountered that airport was in 2006 when a friend dropped me off there to catch Supershuttle. I had wanted to get a rental car, and she told me no, traffic was “too horrendous.” When I finally saw it I was wondering what she was on about… Frankfurt Airport is *way* worse.

Due to me breaking my foot some weeks before the trip rental car was out because Andrea doesn’t drive, and I was kind of scared about using Supershuttle too. But I had tried hopping on a bus before we left, and that went quite well. So we settled on trying the Disneyland Express on the way in, and than for the way back we had booked a towncar service.

It will sound odd to some, but I developed the habit to write my reports in present tense while typing my sci-fi convention reports. I decided to give it a try for Disneyland too... we'll see how this ends up.