Sunday, April 24, 2011

Odds and Ends: Weekly Cap-Off (4/18 - 4/24)

Visits to the Park this week:  0
No trips this week! The weekends are usually our time to play, but with the Easter holiday weekend upon us, for us, family and time at church are just way more important. We hope that all of our readers have a fantastic weekend and if you do celebrate it, Happy Easter to you!

Last Week on Days In The Park:
We were still riding the "vacation" wave during the first part of the week, but picked up the sword again on Thursday and started swinging.

We put out the third (can't believe we're at 3 already!) episode of the Days In The Parkcast (podcast) on Thursday

And on Friday, Chad got all sentimental and talked about one of his favorite things in The Park; his wife Stephanie

At The Parks:
Summer is coming!  Could we be more excited?!

They were filming the commercial for The Park's newest parade, Mickey's Soundsational Parade just yesterday.  We know a lot of people were there and from what we've heard, the floats that were present looked amazing.  We're not huge parade people usually, but we do like to see new things so we're pretty excited about this!  The Disney Parks Blog ran a video a while back (we think we might have even showed it before) giving a little preview and information on the creating of the show, so we thought we'd share it again!  In addition, our friend Sarah from Magical Days With The Mouse took a lot of great shots of the filming yesterday so be sure to check her out too!


We're also steadily moving closer and closer to June 3rd and the debut of The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure, Star Tours: The Adventure Continues and Goofy's Sky School.  It should be a red-letter day in The Parks.  We've entered the AP (Annual Passholder) sweepstakes to try and be one of the first to ride Star Tours (during the soft opening dates) so we're hoping we get picked; the drawing for the sweepstakes will be on May 16th, so there's plenty of time to enter if you haven't already.  There are several days to choose from, with two time slots (12 - 4pm and 4 - 8pm daily) each day to choose from as well.  The more days and slots you pick the better your chances of getting in.  If you haven't entered yet, what are you waiting for?  Check out the AP section of the official Disneyland website to enter yourself, and good luck!  The Parks Blog is also running a special Imagineer Meet-Up for The Little Mermaid, too.  If you're interested in signing up for a shot at the 150 spots available, check out the link for more details!

Next Sunday (May 1st) will also be the day of the 25th Annual AIDS Walk Orange County which is being held at The Resort.  Chad will be walking as part of Team Finding Mickey with our friends Neil and Rosemary from FindingMickey.com.  Having seen firsthand what AIDS can do to a nation (having living overseas as a teenager), we feel extremely blessed and excited that Chad has this opportunity.  Be thinking of him as he walks the 5K (3.2 miles) all over Disneyland Park, Disney California Adventure and Downtown Disney next Sunday, and for everyone who is participating in this important charity event.  

Here At Days In The Park: 
We just released Episode 3 of our Days In The ParkCast this week, and we've picked up some new listeners since then.  You guys are awesome!  If you haven't had a chance to listen to us yet, we'd love to have you guys do so and let us know you think.  You can listen to it on our website (we include all of our episodes at the top of the site), through whatever RSS reader you choose, or we're available in the iTunes store.  If you listen to us in iTunes, we'd really appreciate it if you would take the time to leave us a rating and even a review if you see fit.  Anything that will help more people find us and listen is okay by us!  Several people have now and we're very appreciative to all of you!  Heck, even if you don't listen to us in iTunes you can still check out our iTunes page and leave us a rating or a review. Every little bit helps. You can find the means to subscribe to us at the top of our website, in the right sidebar.

We're looking forward to slowly getting back and picking up the pace this week.  We're not sure what schedule we want to keep exactly, but we're thinking it's probably going to be more of a, "if we have something to say we'll say it", mentality in the future.  Knowing us, we'll have something to say every day, but if we don't, well, we've decided we'll be okay with that too.

We did take a look at the weekly segments we were doing and which ones performed well (and which didn't) so we could decide what we'd like to keep and what we'd like to maybe shunt for the time being.  Our newest, "Magical Mystery Mondays" continues to do really well as people try to guess where our pictures are taken (glad so many people are participating in them), as well as our "Almost Wordless Wednesday" posts (people love Park pictures).  Unfortunately, what didn't make the cut were our "KILT - Karacters I Love Thursday" posts.  They were really popular (by our standards anyways) and did well at first, but not so much anymore, so we've decided to shift our focus on Thursdays to something else, or maybe just use the day to write and plan some new articles; we'll have to see.  At any rate, it doesn't mean we won't take character pictures anymore (we love doing it), but we'll just include them in our regular articles in the future.  We know that not everything we try is going to work well, so we're okay with that.  Thanks for letting us try it out for a while!

And as always, we'll be sure to fill in any gaps we have with some of our thoughts, mischief, favorite things, videos and pictures, or anything else we can think of to share some of our favorite times with you.

Hope you'll keep dropping by to spend a virtual Day In The Park with us.  We enjoy having you around!

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