Tokyo Disneyland

Not a week went by since moving to Japan 5 months ago that we didn't hear the kids ask us when we were going to go to Disneyland. This was one of the first places we told the kids about when we broke the news to them that we were moving here. We knew it would automatically mean that Japan was a cool place to live. The funnest part of this trip was how secret we kept it all the way until we walked off the train at Disneyland. We drove to our hotel at the Disney Resort and boarded the Disney train. We had somehow managed to convince the kids that we couldn't go that day but that we had something else fun planned. We knew the train was a dead giveaway so we just tried to play it out as long as we could. They totally believed us and when we got to the Disneyland exit we told them that we could get off to take a look. As we walked to the entrance we finally broke the news and they were surprisingly surprised. It was so fun to see their faces. After getting our 2 day tickets we headed inside and went immediately to Tomorrowland to ride Space Mountain. Little did we know that you literally have to be in the park when it opens and not 30 minutes later because we were only able to get 2 fast passes for the entire day. There were so many people there it was unreal. I guess that is how it always is at Tokyo Disneyland. We were able to ride on Space Mountain twice that morning and swapped so the girls could ride on some smaller rides. From there we carefully planned to ride the big rides whenever there was a parade because the Japanese are all crazy for the parades. Since there seemed to be a parade every 2 hours we were good to go. I was so happy for Peter because he was tall enough to ride ALL of the rides this time. Even Emma was tall enough to ride everything. She rode on Big Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain for the first time and loved them both. It was fun to see her excitement/scared face as we rode on Thunder Mountain together. She felt proud to have the wristband that meant she was tall enough to ride. It was a a little surprising to hear all of the kids ask when we could go to the Hanuted Mansion. Even Emma was excited about that one. Luckily everything was decked out with the Nightmare Before Christmas theme and so it really wasn't that scarry (good for the kids but disappointing for me because I like the original so much better). We didn't spend anytime at Toon Town this time and so we really didn't see too many of the characters but we were ok with that. Our mission was to ride as many rides as we could before it closed. We got through all the main rides and only skipped a few of the smaller ones like Dumbo. We made it to 9:00pm and decided to get our traditional ice-cream at the Parlor before heading back to our hotel. I always used to get chocolate when I came here as a kid so naturally I picked chocolate. We watched the fireworks while we eate our ice-cream and then made our way out of the park. It was fun to ride the Disney train only one stop back to our hotel. The kids were so tired that it was not hard to get everyone to sleep that night.