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Mickey's Halloween Party at Disneyland - A Disneyland Special Event Review
by Carolyn Brooke-Millward

My husband and I attended Mickey's Halloween Party for the first time last year, during our first-ever visit to Disneyland in California.

I had pre-booked tickets for the actual night of Halloween as soon as they went on sale, and had a confirmation email which I printed off. We spent much of the day itself trying to rest, as we knew we would be having a late night. We slept in a little in the morning, and then took our time getting ourselves ready, before heading over to Disneyland for a couple of hours. We toured the park in a fairly leisurely manner, and then at about 4:00 pm. we went back to our hotel, the Fairfield Inn, for a couple of hours. Hubby took a nap, while I did some online stuff and sat with my feet up!

At around 6:00 pm, we quickly put on our costumes – hubby wore an orange shirt with 'Psycho Ward' printed on it, added some tattered Mickey ears (that I had bought cheaply online), and smeared his face with bright red lipstick and black eyeliner. I had a corpse bride outfit, complete with a posy of black roses and a tattered veil.

I made sure I had our ticket confirmation email, and we set out on the short walk to the park. When we got there, we scanned our tickets and were given wristbands and goodie bags – how exciting! We already had a plan for the evening, so we picked up a party map and set out to find some Trick or Treat trails, figuring that until the park emptied of regular guests, the rides would still be a bit crowded. We might have done some shopping, but we had already bought hubby an event t-shirt before we left the park for our break, and we didn't see any pins unfortunately, so we can only assume they had sold out by that point. We checked our map, and discovered that there were lots of trails to explore, and it was great fun trying to find them all. Probably the most tiring treat trail we found was the one in the Monorail Station, because we had to walk all the way up the ramp and into the station itself! But we think we explored all the trails over the next five hours, according to the map. Sometimes there were big queues for a trail, so we bypassed those and found ones that were less busy, coming back to the more popular queues later in the evening.

What impressed us the most was that when we have done this party at Walt Disney World, there has been one treat station per trail; here, there were four or five treat stations per trail, which resulted in our getting an entire tote bag full of candy! We had to keep stopping to empty our goodie bags into my tote bag. We had chocolate bars, bags of fruit-flavored candy, pretzels, Cheez-Its, yogurt-coated raisins, baby carrots, cheesy puffs, dried apple slices... all sorts of yummy things! Cast members were very generous with the handfuls of goodies that they gave out, and were all in a very party mood, interacting with the guests and seeming to really enjoy themselves.

We absolutely loved seeing all the costumes that people were wearing. There were some astonishingly good ones, and some really inventive family ones, too. For example, we saw one family dressed up as characters from Monsters Inc., with dad being Sully, mum being Mike, and a baby Boo that was really cute! It made the evening so much fun, because lots of people were dressed up and everyone was really enjoying themselves, laughing and complimenting other guests on their costumes. I kept saying the "hurry baaaack!" line from the Haunted Mansion bride to cast members, which made them laugh, and hubby kept smiling at people in a psycho kind of way, sometimes pretending to follow people too, which was funny.

During the first parade, we also managed to fit in some rides, going on Big Thunder Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion, all with around 20 minutes' wait each. We thought that these would be the most appropriate rides to do at this event, and we were right - the Haunted Mansion in particular was a huge amount of fun, with a terrific atmosphere!

We sat on a curb near "it's a small world" to watch the second parade, Mickey's Costume Party Cavalcade, which was lovely, (if a bit short), and nibbled some of our party treats while we waited. (I also discovered an absolute LOVE of Cheez-Its, which I had never had before!) We then walked round to the hub to watch the special firework show, Halloween Screams, which was also very good. Unfortunately, we missed the dance parties that were going on, as we seemed to be busy doing other things all night, and we also didn't get to meet any of the special characters that were out. We did see Jack Skellington and Sally, but they were absolutely mobbed, so we just took some pictures from a distance! There just seemed to be so much to do, and not enough time to fit everything in.

By the time we had done all that, it was 11:45 pm, and the park was due to close shortly, so we made our weary way back to the Fairfield Inn for the last time, bidding a sad farewell to Disneyland, as we were leaving the next morning. We did the last bits of packing, putting our Halloween costumes away, completely filled my small hand luggage suitcase with Halloween party treats, and fell into bed, happy and exhausted.

We would definitely recommend this event to anyone who was interested, we thought it was good value for money and a really fun evening. We would do it again in a heartbeat!

Added to PassPorter's Article Collection on 04-10-2015 08:04 AM

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