MIKE AND JESS' TRAVEL DIARY
Tokyo Trip
Day 2 - October 15 2024
Last night, I (Jessica) got only 4 hours of sleep, even after only getting 5 the night before the flight and being up for 26 hours. It wasn’t the best start to the day, especially because my body typically needs a consistent 8-9 hours to feel well, but I was not going to let it ruin our Disneyland day! Mike slept well, thankfully.
These Disney days posts will be long, and we won’t be leaving the resort area, so if you only care about our Tokyo city travels, skip till Day 4!
Our happy entry time was 8:30 and we wanted to get in line about 15-30 minutes early. A quick note, the Tokyo Disney parks are very different than US parks when it comes to opening times. Here, people show up as early as 5AM to get in line for the park. The vast majority of people that will be in the parks for the day are already in line 30 minutes before opening. So, even though we were able to get into the Happy Entry line that is only open to Disney hotel guests and were 20 minutes early, we were hundreds and hundreds of people back.
Thankfully, if there’s one thing the Japanese do well (and there’s a ton of things they do well), it’s having efficient queues. So, As soon as it hit 8:30, we started moving and were through the gates within 5-10 minutes. Once through the gates, we secured a fastpass for Haunted Mansion at 9 on the app.
The most popular ride in Tokyo Disneyland is the new Beauty and the Beast ride, which has consistent line waits of 2 plus hours. Most people run to this ride as soon as getting through. Thankfully, with the vacation package, we were able to book a ride time for it so we had a fast pass ticket to use between 11 and noon.
So, instead, we power walked to the back of the park, where most people don’t go until later, to ride the also-new Pooh’s Honey Hunt ride. Pooh is one of our favorite Disney movies, so it was important we got to ride it at least once. The pooh ride is typically a 90 minute wait on a slower day. We walked directly on and were one of the first 15 people to it. It did not disappoint! I’ll say it more than once here, but the Tokyo Disney parks do a lot of things bigger and better than the US parks (not saying from personal experience, but I read this over and over when researching the parks) and one of those is their rides. Both Pooh and Beauty and the Beast use a new trackless ride technology, so you are in the car, gliding around and the car is tilting and bouncing gently, so you feel more immersed in the story.
Since we were out of the first ride before the normal opening time for the park, we booked it to Big Thunder Mountain, also in the back of the park, in hopes of getting another short wait. We also walked right on to the ride. I was not super excited about this one, just because they have it in California and so I have done it dozens of times, but it is the only roller coaster in the park, so we wanted to get it in once. It was so much better than the CA one! It was smoother, longer, and while it did have the same theme, the track was totally different. We were holding our arms up and screaming the whole time, it was super fun!
We then started walking to Haunted Mansion to use our fastpass. There was clearly a lot more people in the park at this point and the Haunted Mansion line was over 30 minutes, so it worked out great. For October through December, they transform the ride to Nightmare Before Christmas theme, which is my favorite Disney movie, so I was hyped to go on this. It was a bit disappointing, though. It was cute and fun, but I think since it’s so old, it’s just less impressive than the other rides. I’m glad we did it, but we did not need to do it twice. With these parks, you can get another fastpass either (1) once you have checked into the previous one’s ride or (2) after two hours of getting the previous one. Since we got to Haunted Mansion to use ours at 9, we were able to score another pass for the Monsters Inc ride for 10:30.
Once we got out of that ride, we decided to go on something most people would not care about this early in the day: Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin. It was exactly as expected- cute and fun, but one of the shorter track dark rides.
At this point, I was starving and we had been rushing from ride to ride in the hot sun and rides were at peak wait times, so we wanted to get some food. We went to a quick service restaurant with a Beauty and the Beast theme and got some surprisingly good food- a Croque Monsier sandwich with cheese and ham, onion and potato hashbrown bites, an apple caramel churro (horrible, but other people love this flavor so it must just be us), their seasonal Berry Cheers drink (NA grape and berry flavor sparkling drink with a berry foam) and an apple jelly wine spritzer. The drinks were so stinking good and the savory food was very good for theme park food but we were haunted by the apple caramel churro. They smelled so strong and had the effect of an overly strong Yankee candle lit and burning in a closed room for hours if you were anywhere in the vicinity of one, so we kept getting whiffs of them throughout the day as people ate them and shuddered every time.
It was time to get to our next fastpass ride, Monsters Inc. It was very cute; you have a flashlight attached to the cars and you shine them on various items/characters as you go through and the sets react to the flashlights. So, if you shined a light on a locker door, it might open up and have a character inside react.
Since we had just checked in to the most recent fastpass, we were able to book another one and secured Big Thunder Mountain again for 4PM.
We were still a bit hungry, so we went to Tomorrowland Terrace for some Mickey chicken nuggets, fries, their seasonal dessert- a pumpkin crepe and another seasonal drink: Kiwi and Muskat (a Japanese grape) sparkling drink with fruit and jelly at the bottom. With our vacation package, we have free, unlimited, drinks on anything non-bottled and non-alcoholic. After the Berry Cheers drink blew us away, we decided to get as many of these fun (and free!) drinks. We were basically deciding where we would eat based off their drink menu! Everything was fine except the drink. It was so good! In the US, if we want non-alcoholic drinks, it’s either soda or lemonade, at best. So getting super flavorful, cute drinks is a real treat.
It was finally time for Beauty and the Beast! This ride is super hyped up online, and is a really long ride time of 8 minutes, so we were pretty excited. The ride is within an entire castle, it’s super impressive. As you approach the line to get onto the cars (large teacups that fit 10 people), you enter a room, where you get a pre-show with very well done animatronics and special effects that tell the beginning of the story of how the Beast became so and how Belle ended up at his castle. Then, you get on the teacups and begin the ride. It was a really really great ride. We definitely understood why people love it so much. And being able to only wait 10 minutes not including the preshow was amazing.
It was time for another fun drink, so we walked to Plazma Ray’s to get the famous alien mochi (they are SUPER popular here) and a couple vodka and grape jelly drinks. The mochi were so yummy and the cutest treat we got all day. Each alien is a different flavor; strawberry, chocolate, and custard. The drink was super delicious too, but this ended up being the worst decision of the day. I didn’t really think about it as I was so caught up in the fun of the day but the alcohol mixed with how I was already feeling was not good. I got nauseous, somehow even more tired, and more dehydrated from it. Silly me. We took an hour to relax on a bench in an air conditioned area so I could gather the strength to rally since it was only early afternoon.
At 12:30, we were able to book another fastpass for Star Tours at 3:25. All other rides had sold out, so even though Star Tours has some of the shortest waits in the park, we figured it didn’t hurt to grab it.
Once I felt a bit better, we made our way to Pirates of the Caribbean. They do not offer any passes so we had to wait in the normal line for the first time of the day. This ended up being the longest line we waited in and it was 20 minutes! Most other rides except the small kid rides are over an hour all day, so we really lucked out and it proved how much being able to get into the park early pays off. The ride was cute, not much different than the one in California, but it’s a nostalgic ride so we wanted to make sure to get it in.
We planned to get our shopping for the day in right before leaving so we didn’t have to rent storage lockers, but we decided to do all the looking now so all we had to ddo before leaving is return to grab what we wanted and pay for it.
Once we hit all the main stores, we grabbed a frozen dessert with Yogurt and Ramune (a Japanese brand soda) and walked back to Toon Town to get some Halloween themed steamed buns. This was one of our “must eats” during the park. The park website said that Toon Town Treats was the only place to get them in this park. Unfortunately, once we got there, we saw they were selling their non-seasonal steamed buns, themed as Chip and Dale. Oh well, we will just have to get them in DisneySea tomorrow. We still got them because Mike loves Chip and Dale. One was filled with Sloppy Joe-type filling and the other was “potato.” We did not expect to bite into it and get a very sweet mashed potato filling. Not the best, but the meat-filled one was really good. And they’re so cute!
It was time for our Star Tours fastpass, so we walked back to Tomorrowland. At this point, the parade was going on so the line was only 15 minutes and so they just put us in the regular line, even though we had the fastpass. Mike really enjoyed this ride and I would have as well, except it is a 3-D glasses and moving car ride. It made me so nauseous, I had to close my eyes for half of it, but it was really well done.
With the vacation package, we got an additional 2 free fast passes to any rides that already have the fast pass option. At this point, we had ridden every option except Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters. We didn’t have much interest in this ride, but it is closing for good at the end of the month, so we decided to give it a go since we won’t be able to here again. It was not great. What’s wild is it was a 100 minute wait time when we walked on.
As the day was moving on, I knew I would not last until 9PM, closing time, so we decided to get all the rest of the rides in now, get dinner, then finish shopping and head back. So, with our second vacation package pass, we did the Pooh ride again because it was Mike’s favorite of the day.
As soon as we got out of Pooh’s we had to rush to Big Thunder Mountain to make it within our fast pass time. It was sunset at this point, so the ride was even prettier. As we were walking away from it, the line increased to over 2 hours. Insane.
It was peak dinner time, so we found a couple places that did mobile order (you place your order within the app and pay, then pick up your food at the counter when the app says it’s ready) so we didn’t have to wait in any lines. We got the Snack Box and smoked turkey leg at Camp Woodchuck. It was all better than expected.
Mike wanted a bit more savory food and I wanted dessert, so we did a Mobile Order at Captain Hook’s Galley for Seafood pizza (obviously for Mike), some cheese and potato croquettes, and a Mickey strawberry castella cake. Mike was not impressed with the pizza and the potatoes were just OK. The cake was cute, but not good, either. We could’ve skipped this for sure and ended up throwing half of it away.
But we couldn’t end on a sour note, could we? Off to Pecos Bill’s we went to get a pork and rice roll for mike (pressed sushi rice wrapped in teriyaki flavored bacon) and a pumpkin maple churro for me. The rice roll was interesting for sure, much better than the pizza. The churro was so good! We are glad they actually can do a good churro so we can get some more tomorrow.
Finally, as our feet were screaming at us and I was feeling like a zombie, we did the final shopping (the stores were absolutely packed) and made our way back to the monorail. We got back around 7:15 and into bed by 8 in hopes we slept better for our DisneySea day tomorrow.