Disneyland Tips & Tricks Thursday - All YOUR Questions, All Day Long...

Last week we teased a new segment we're going to be trying out on Thursdays, so today we're officially rolling out said segment and we couldn't be more excited to see how they go!

One of the funnest parts of running our blog (as mentioned last week) is not only knowing that people are reading what we write, but researching exactly how they found us to begin with.  One of the ways we can do that is by looking at what exactly people typed into a search engine to wind up on our page.  We see some real crazy ones, but interspersed with those are some really great questions, that we think would make good question/answer articles on the blog.  So each and every week, at least for the foreseeable future as there is certainly no shortage of questions being asked, we're going to be picking one question from our searches to answer right here on the blog!

This week's question was a real good one, we thought, so without further ado...

"Can fast passes be used past their posted time?"

We know that there are still a lot of people who may not be familiar with Disney's FASTPASS System, who may be wondering just what the deal is.  At its simplest, each ticket into Disneyland is entitled to utilize the FASTPASS system.  Only certain attractions at Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park have them*, but where it's available, if you insert your Park ticket into the FASTPASS machine at said attraction, it will spit out a little ticket for you to bring back later in the day, at an allotted time as noted on your FASTPASS, which will let you bypass the standby line and walk pretty much straight onto the attraction.   We know a lot of people that aren't all that fond of FASTPASS, but we've never really understood the arguments against it, and we use it constantly ourselves and think that it can be a great asset in planning out your day and making sure you get on the more popular attractions without waiting in line for possibly hours, especially during the summer, to do so.  And you can continue to get them throughout the day for multiple attractions; your FASTPASS will always tell you when you are eligible for another, so if you plan it just right, you might not have to stand in line for any of those more popular attractions.

But what happens if you have a FASTPASS for Star Tours: The Adventures Continue that tells you to return between 11:55AM and 12:55PM and, due to one reason or another, you miss your hour window?  Will you lose your right to ride?  Will you be laughed at and mocked by Cast Members for your inability to read the clocks which are literally all over The Park?  Will you spontaneously burst into flames as you speed toward the attraction entrance?  Amazingly enough, none of the above will happen.  Simply put, you can use your FASTPASS anytime after your allotted time begins, even up to Park closing.  Sometimes things just get in the way, and Disneyland knows this better than anyone, so if you have a FASTPASS, and it's the same day (it won't work the next day), you are able to ride your attraction any time you'd like.  We don't do it often, we're too goody-goody not to at least try to get to our attraction on time, but it's nice to know that if we do miss for some reason, we can still ride whenever we get a chance to.  And, horror of horrors and shame on us, sometimes it's a lot of fun just to let them stack up throughout the entire day so we can ride them all in an hour window right before The Park closes.  Gasp!

We have no way of knowing just who submitted the question, but we think it was a great one!  In fact, up until a few years ago, Chad didn't know the policy and thought you had to be there at the right time or you lost your FASTPASS.  After his fellow Annual Passholders stopped laughing at him, it's a lesson he never forgot, and we never miss a chance to pass the information on to other Park Guests who might be wondering the same thing, and can ask in an open environment free from ridicule.

We hope that today's article has been a good one!  We'll be back next week with another brand new question (or comment) that we'll be dealing with from our Google Searches so in the meantime, keep searching and keep asking questions.  You never know what we're going to come across next!

*The entire list of FASTPASS attractions at the Disneyland Resort was a little out of the scope of this article, but you can find the complete list here at the Disneyland Resort's official website

The Disneyland FASTPASS - "Almost" Wordless Wednesday

We never ceased to be amazed.  We'll be walking up through the FASTPASS line at various attractions scattered around the Disneyland Resort, and invariably will hear the words, "I hate people who use FASTPASS.  Why don't they wait in line like the rest of us?", muttered as we walk by.  While obviously this is an "almost" wordless post, so I can't spend much time dealing with this phenomenon now, it did make me think of this picture we took recently when we were at Disneyland Park for an entire day.  We think you'll understand why given the context.

Enjoy!  We sure did!!

Gawrsh, they must REALLY hate us for this one!

Star Tours: The Adventures Continue Opening Day!

It seems only fitting that we end our week's worth of Star Tours: The Adventures Continue and "Star Wars" articles with a piece on the very attraction that inspired us to do so in the first place.  We've literally been talking for months now about how excited we were for the new attraction to debut, and it officially opened for the very first time yesterday.  Even though we were lucky enough to have ridden it several times before it was officially opened to the public, we were nonetheless extremely excited to get to The Park and be a part of the insanity of seeing it open to everyone.  We haven't been blogging long now, and we've never been to another attraction's official opening day before, so when you put the two together we just knew we had to be there for this one!

Our plan had originally been to be inside The Park when rope-drop occurred, but we ultimately decided to take it easy in the morning and go into The Park a little bit later than planned.  If you read our "challenge" in our post earlier in the week, you'll remember it was also originally in the plans to basically just "run around the mulberry bush" all day long and ride Star Tours over and over again until we collapsed, either from exhaustion or heart attack.  Well, you know what they say about best-laid plans, but we'll get back to that in a minute.  We wound up getting to The Park around 9:30 in the morning to this...

Greeted with madness!

It might look like it's just a mass of people moving through The Hub near the Partners Statue, but we can assure you it was not.  When we arrived the line began at the back of the statue, wound around in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle a bit, weaved towards Pixie Hollow, back into The Hub, into Tomorrowland and down towards the entrance to Star Tours, back out into The Hub again, along the front of Plaza Inn, past the entrance to Star Tours and back near the Star Trader, back towards and into the overflow room, and finally into the Star Tours building itself.  Sound convoluted enough for you?  Yeah, we though pretty much the same thing.

Several things were already kind of working against us at this point.  First, the attraction wasn't set to open until 10:30 so a long line had already had time to form.  Second, the Fast Pass system for the attraction wasn't in operation yet.  We had kind of counted on that to get us a few extra rides during the day, so we pretty much knew immediately that the number of times we were going to be able to ride were going to be drastically reduced.  But, ever the intrepid adventurers and gluttons for punishment that we are, we jumped into line and prepared to wait.

Making our first pass by Star Tours

Amy had made it out to join us by this point so along with her and Chad's son Michael, the waiting commenced.  We wish we could candy coat it and make it sound like it was the most exciting thing we had ever done, but there's really not much to say.  We wound around the area for the next three and half hours before we were finally able to board.  We spent the time tweeting, blogging (some of which you may have read), talking with some people around us, engaging an awesome Cast Member named Sam who was running part of the line at the time, and just enjoying the atmosphere.  Even though we can't really say moving through the line was exciting, the atmosphere was very much so, if that makes sense.  We loved listening to people, chatting it up, and the excitement in the air was palpable.  Even though the line was huge and the wait was long, people were genuinely excited about riding Star Tours for the first time, and it was an awesome experience to be waiting alongside them, excited just like they were.

Some of our favorite art in the overflow room - The StarSpeeder 1000

Even now we long for a trip to Alderaan!

They promised Rex and delivered. Too bad the poor guy has been labeled "defective".

Mark, Amy and Michael get ready to board!

We didn't get to spend a whole lot of time in the queue taking pictures yesterday (once inside the line moved very quickly), but we did notice a few things we hadn't before.  Rex talked!  Well, sort of.  Since he had been labeled "defective" he kind of stuttered a lot and repeated himself over and over (just like a broken droid would), but it was definitely a nice touch!  We also got a big kick out of the droid in charge of checking the luggage on the left as you move through.  As the luggage moves along the conveyer, he inspects the inside of each piece with an x-ray machine and there's some pretty funny stuff going on in some of those bags.  We won't spoil it for you, but be sure to keep an eye out for it!  And there's a Hidden Mickey in this room as well!  We'll say more about it when our friends from FindingMickey.com have had a chance to see it for themselves, but it's really cool so keep an eye out.

We made it through, got our glasses, watched the pre-flight video and hopped aboard.  Amazing atmosphere in the cabin during that first ride.  People were obviously truly excited to be on board, and there was a ton of clapping, yelling, screaming, and laughing going on.  It was awesome to be a part of it all.  Unfortunately, other than seeing a different "Rebel" on this ride (we saw Admiral Ackbar finally), we didn't get to see any new planets or sequences.  Well, Amy did, but Chad and Mark have been stuck waiting to see Coruscant or Tattooine for a few rides now.  Ah well, another excuse to ride it lots in the future!

Once we were done with that first ride, we had a decision to make, though.  Were we going to see our own "challenge" through and hop right back in line again, or move on to greener pastures?  It was already around 2:30 at the time, and after weighing our options, and given the length of time the line still was (still 2 hours plus), and thinking about how many times we'd really be able to ride the rest of the day, we decided to move on and try to catch it again later in the night.  We talked about it some later and came to the conclusion that with food being a necessity, we really would only have been to ride it one, maybe two more times than we did, so we're pretty happy with the decision that we made.  We moved on to the Tomorrowland station, and railed it on over to New Orleans Square for lunch at Cafe Orleans.  We weren't in line for Star Tours, but we had an awesome time hanging out, enjoying some fantastic grub, and watching 8-year old Michael really put the moves on Amy in some "Kids Meal" competition.

Days In The Park gets all competitive, Kid's Meal style!

Gumbo, Pomme Frites and Mac at Cheese at the Cafe

Amy's Monte Cristo and Mint Julep

Splash Mountain awaits

After an awesome lunch, we met up with another friend of ours and hopped into line (it was day all about lines) for a ride on another of our favorite attractions, Splash Mountain.  We hadn't had a chance to ride it yet since it reopened on the 27th, so we waited the hour or so it took (seemed like a drop in the bucket compared to Star Tours) to ride and get soaked.  And we meant, we got soaked.  We've never been so drenched coming off of this ride, ever.  Even when we rode it around 5 times without leaving our boat, we weren't as wet as we got yesterday.  Amy swears (and she used to work at Splash Mountain) that she's never seen a wall of water as big as the one that nailed us yesterday, so we figure that's really saying something.  We remember seeing the water rise up and over Michael's head and just making it way back along the boat.  It was seriously frightening and fun at the same time.  If you get a chance to ride Splash soon, we recommend it big time.  They seem to have ramped the water up to an 11, and it's always a good time!

Before the soaking

Hoisting the R2 popcorn bucket - Michael was so happy!

We're happy to say that we did in fact ride Star Tours just one more time before we went home.  By this point, Amy had had to mosey on but we still had a nice little group going and we decided to ride it one more time.  We hopped back in line and waited another two and half hours to ride it once more.  Saw nothing new this time, either, but had a fantastic time yet again.  There was a huge group of "Star Wars" fans on our final flight of the night that were just loving being on board, and that made it all the more fun.  Plus, riding with friends who had never ridden it before (and their little 4-year old son) made it just that much more special for us.  We left The Park around 10:30 or so, only having ridden twice, but loving every minute of our day out.

Yeah, it was longer than that...

So there you have it, the official opening of Star Tours: The Adventures Continue from the Days In The Park view.  The Day didn't really pan out the way that we had originally envisioned, but that's okay!  We had a fantastic time (we really hope that came through), and that makes it all worthwhile.  We're definitely ones that understand the importance of going with the flow while you're in The Park, and not getting stressed out or locking yourself into one thing, so for us the Day went exactly the way it was supposed to.  No regrets, no sense of failure, just an overwhelming sense of "Yeah, that's what it's all about!". 

How about you guys?  Were any of our other readers in The Park yesterday?  How many times did you brave the lines to ride?  Let us know because as always we'd love to hear from you.  Thanks for coming along with us!

We went to Star Tours Opening Day and all we got was this AWESOME shirt!

The Friday Fast Pass: The Fastpass!

It's been a while since we did one of our Friday Fast Pass segments! We figured what better way to get back into the groove of offering up some Days In The Park tips than to focus on the very thing we took our segment's namesake from: the Park Fastpass.

What people did before the invention of the Fastpass system is beyond us! Well, we know they stood in line a lot more, but we're sure you get what we're trying to say. And when it comes to line bypassing, nobody does it better than Disney! You need only look to other theme parks and the example they set (charging you above and beyond your park admission for the privilege) to see just what a great thing The Parks have going for them here, and you'd do best to take advantage of it as often as you can.

If you're uninitiated into the world that is Fastpass still, it's really simple to explain. As mentioned before, it's basically a "line bypassing" system The Parks have implemented meant to save people time and cut down on long lines. You get it automatically with your Park admission ticket, so you don't have to do anything except go to the attraction you want and, if it has a Fastpass option available, get a Fastpass ticket to come back at a later time and ride (or see in the case of  World of Color) it without having to wait in the long lines to do it. The attractions that have Fastpass options have little ticket dispensing booths near the entrance and all you have to do is insert your Park ticket (or Annual Pass if you're a passholder) and it will spit out a ticket for you to bring back at a later time to enjoy your attraction. Easy enough, right?

Each of the two Parks has their own set of attractions that are "Fastpass enabled". They are:

Disneyland Park:

• Space Mountain
• Roger Rabbit's Cartoon Spin
• Autopia
• Indiana Jones Adventure
• Splash Mountain
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

Disney's California Adventure:

• Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
• Soarin' Over California
• Grizzly River Run
• California Screamin'
• World of Color

We also have reason to believe that they will be adding a Fastpass option to the new Star Tours: The Adventure Continues and The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure in the future (having taken those from Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters and we're still unsure about the ones that were at Mulholland Madness previously), but we guess that only time will tell.

So, do we actually use the Fastpass system ourselves? You bet we do! Over the years it's become an integral part of our Park excursions, and it's even more important for people who don't make it to The Parks as often to use this fantastic system.

With that in mind, we present our top 5 tips for using the Fastpass system in The Parks for maximum enjoyment!

1. Begin early! It just stands to reason logically that the earlier you get into The Park, and the earlier you begin racking up Fastpasses, the more you can get throughout the day (barring an attraction running out which does happen, especially with some of the more popular attractions like Space Mountain). You're allowed to get one Fastpass every hour (from when you got your last one - your Fastpass ticket will tell you on the front when you're eligible to get another) so do it! And although we tend to fly by the seat of our pants most days, when we do go to The Park with a mind to ride something, we occasionally do know which attractions we want to get Fastpasses for, and we make sure to move down the list and get our next as quickly as we possibly can so we get everything in before the end of the day. Starting early will help you do that.
2. Double the pleasure! Using the Fastpass system to your advantage you can almost get two rides for the price of one. Many times we'll get a Fastpass, sacrifice ourselves to the lines, and by the time we're done with the first ride, our Fastpasses are up and we can get right back on for a second go-around. It's a really great way to do rides like Space Mountain, Splash Mountain or the Tower of Terror if you've a mind to. And sometimes we've even been able to triple our pleasure! If you have members of your party who aren't riders, if they're willing, you can even borrow their tickets or passes to get extra Fastpasses and do it again! We don't do this one often but we have been known to from time to time.
3. Know what to use your Fastpasses for! In our experience, some of the attractions that have Fastpass options aren't necessarily the best ones to be using it on. The lines are usually pretty negligible and are fast moving so we don't like to use them there. Our suggestions would be Space Mountain, Splash Mountain and Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland Park, and Tower of Terror, Soarin' Over California and Grizzly River Run at Disney's California Adventure. These are the ones that typically have the longest lines during the busiest seasons which can run anywhere from 1 1/2 to 2 hours. 
4. You can go past your time on your Fastpass ticket to ride. Each Fastpass ticket has a return time on it ("Return Anytime Between 9:30 and 10:30AM for example). For the longest time we thought it was a rule that must strictly be adhered to, but that's not the case. You can go ride anytime after that. We'll never forget when our friends found out that we didn't know this. Their laughter and mockery are still ringing in our ears. We still try to get back to the attraction as quickly as we can, but it's nice to know that if we miss our time for some reason (such as standing in another line) that we can still use our Fastpasses anytime we want.
5. And lastly, pay the kindness forward! We can't count the number of times we've been moving about The Parks, and a family or something has come up to us and offered us their unused Fastpasses. We make it a point (the passes in the picture at the top of this article notwithstanding) that if we have Fastpasses on us that are unused to do our best to give it to another group or family that might be able to use them. If you're not going to use them, do your best to pass them on and make someone else's day just a little more magical. Isn't that what it's all about?

So there you have it: our Days In The Park tips for this week all about the Park Fastpass system. We know that a lot of people already know about this stuff, but you never know when it might come in handy, or when one of our tips might be something even users might not have thought of before.

Do you have any tips of your own concerning Fastpasses? Let us know and we'll do a follow-up article soon and include them. 

Now get out there and ride it up!