Disneyland November Avenger's Half Marathon Day 1

Thursday November 10th:
4am alarm went off. We showered and packed the last minute things and had smoothies and coffee at home. On the road by 5:40am for an 8:30am flight. It’s an hour drive to the airport and we watched the sunrise. We got through security very quickly this time. We grabbed breakfast burritos and coffee for a little more substance to get us to our next stop. Our flight left on time and we even landed a little early in Phoenix! We walked and stretched our legs for a while. We grabbed an early lunch at Paradise Bakery since we had a two hour layover. We left on time and landed 30 minutes early at Orange County Airport! Apparently we had a good tailwind! We had already booked our Super Shuttle. So we went straight to the pick up area. It was a busy day. But we were in the next van to pull up and only had one hotel stop before ours. We stayed at the Best Western Pavilions off Katella. Since it was before noon, our room wasn’t ready. But we changed into shorts and got our pack ready. They held our luggage for us. We stopped by the race Expo really quick to get car magnets, just in case they sold out. I’ve gotten them for every Disney race I’ve done. We picked up two Super Hero Half Marathon ones and two Coast to Coast 2016 ones (since we have two cars). We went through Downtown Disney and security (they are now way more thorough then they used to be so it takes a LOT longer). We stopped at the ticket booth and bought our Deluxe Annual Pass (it was cheaper to buy this pass that has one date of our two trips blocked out than to buy multi day hopper tickets for both trips).

We opted to start at California Adventure because wait times looked good on the app. We saw that Radiator Springs Racers was a 20 minutes wait, which is unheard of! We went back there, and sure enough, just 20 minutes!! I’m thinking it had gone down and just came back up and people didn’t know it yet. This was a 20 minute wait at 2pm!!! It ended up being about a 30 minute wait, but a great start to our trip! Our car won on the race! When we got off the ride, it was up to a 60 minute wait and the queue was full! I got a voicemail that our room was ready at this time. We weren’t quite ready to go back there yet. We opted to ride the new Rollicking Roadsters with a 5 minute wait. Our cars danced to the Mombo. It’s a cute ride, nothing I would wait long for. But they have several different songs that your cars can dance to. Much more fun than the giant air hockey table type of ride it was before! We then went to Toy Story with a 30 minute wait. Ryan beat me as always, but I was close this time! We were going to ride Screamin but it was down. We were snacky, so we grabbed two Pork Bao and their Festival of Holidays Food and Wine they had going on. WOW, their prices are much higher than WDW Food & Wine! It was $8 for one small steamed bun! So $16 for two! They were delicious! But with those prices (everything was $8-12 for the same size portions that WDW does at Food & Wine) we never did try anything else.

We walked back to our hotel, got our luggage and went to our room around 3:30-4. We unpacked and then walked next door to the convenience store. We picked up gallons of water, a pack of Pepsi and a Chocodile! If you’ve never had a Chocodile, try one! It’s by Hostess and it’s basically a vanilla cake version of a Ding Dong but shaped like a Twinkie! We dropped all of that off in our room and filled our pack with drinks. We left our room around 5pm.

Long line at security again. But we discovered that we could scan our AP’s and link it to our DL app on our phones! This was only helpful to get into the parks and for PhotoPass. We still had to pull out our cards to get our Fast Passes. But it was a huge time saver at entry!!! Space Mountain was down. So we went and grabbed FP for Tunder with a 6:20pm return time. But then we hopped in line because it was a 25 minute wait at 5:45pm. We really only waited 10 minutes. We walked to Haunted but it was a 65 minute wait (wait times are long this time of year due to the Nightmare Before Christmas theme). We opted to not wait and backtracked to Pirates. It was a 20 minute wait. We then went and used our Thunder FP. We were hungry so we went to the Plaza for dinner. We split the fried chicken plate. It was 3 pieces of amazing fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, steamed green beans and a dinner roll! It was seriously so amazing! And just $17! A great deal since we could split it! This is a great place to eat because you get free refills! We just got water, but could get a cup and fill it ourselves as well. We forgot to check the app and went to ride Space but it was still down. So we went to Indiana Jones with a posted 55 minute wait. We were in line for about 5-10 minutes and it went down. This ride can come back up quick or it goes down for hours. You never know. Since we hadn’t invested much time in line and we were still outside the building, we opted to leave the line. Itwas after 8pm. We decided to just walk through shops instead. We also grabbed fudge and a peanut butter sandwich (graham cracker, thick peanut butter layer and triple dipped in chocolate). We put them in our pack for later. We were back to our room by 9:30pm. We ate our snacks and relaxed. Lights out by 10:45pm.
Miles logged 13.1