Part 1
I am a Disney lover and would go every year to Disney World if I could. I have family in California and my last trip to Disneyland was in 1983. This year I decided to go back to California!
Where to Stay and Getting There
Before I go on any trip as a librarian I like to do research. There are several informational sites about Disney World, but surprisingly not that much about Disneyland. The Disney World site gives you everything you need to know and you can book you’re your entire trip through them. The Disneyland site is not as helpful. They only have three hotels and they were pretty expensive. The site did not run smoothly and booking this way would not save me any time or money. Instead I searched on Himpmuck http://hipmunk.com and Trip Advisor http://www.tripadvisor.com which found available hotels and motels with ratings for the Anaheim and Orange County areas. I used Hipmunk to find our flight. I joined for free, gave them our dates and they emailed me rates for our flights. They changed daily and I found Tuesday and Wednesday listings gave the best deals. I started doing this in December and I booked directly with the airline in January for our trip in early March.
I did not want to rent a car but wanted to be close to the parks. I decided on the Parkvue Inn http://www.parkvueinn.com, which was directly across the street from Disneyland and California Adventure. A hot healthy breakfast was included everyday along with a comfortable room with a microwave and refrigerator. It was clean, comfortable, and we could see the park fireworks from the parking lot!
We flew into the John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, which was a fifteen-minute ride in a taxi to the Parkvue. I chose this instead of Los Angeles International because it was closer Disneyland and less crowded. The taxi ride cost about $40 whereas a ride from LAX would have been much more expensive because it was at least thirty minutes away.
From my research I learned getting your tickets before you arrive at the park is a must. Discount Tickets and Tours http://discountticketsandtours.com was a five-minute walk. They book tours and sell tickets to most area attractions. Real discounts are rare for Disney. We got five dollars off our non-hopper tickets and were pleased. We didn’t think hopping between parks was worth it since it is a smaller area than Disney World. At the time, we weren’t sure we would have time to go to California Adventure.
My next post will talk about Disneyland! The following are some blogs and sites that gave me good information on the Orange County area and the Disney California parks.
http://www.loveourdisney.com
http://www.disneylandvacationtips.com
http://www.mousesavers.com
http://anaheimoc.org
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