MIKE AND JESS' TRAVEL DIARY
Tokyo Trip
Day 3 - October 16 2024
DisneySea day! General consensus in the global Disney community is that this is the best theme park in the world (not just Disney parks), so we were sufficiently excited. In addition, the main reason we purchased the vacation package was to have unlimited access to the new Fantasy Springs land, which most people walking in with a regular ticket have very limited access to, even if they are in line at 5AM, which many here do.
A breakfast buffet at the hotel restaurant is included with the vacation package, but you have to preselect a time to do so. The latest we could book was 6:40AM. Unfortunately, I (Jessica) did not sleep well again, so I was up before our 6:20AM alarm, but Mike got better sleep. The buffet was fun as they had a huge array of global foods and drinks, plus some Toy Story themed items.
Since we were not going to line up for the park immediately, we went back to the room and slowly got ready. Unless you show up to line up at 6 or 7, you’ll just be waiting in line for hours, but won’t get any of the “first in the park” benefits since there will be thousands of people ahead of you in line, so we chose to head to the park after opening around 9:30 (The park opens around 8:30).
When we got to the entrance, there was still a long line that we waited about 30 minutes in to get into the park. There was so many more people in the park than there was in Disneyland the day before. It was a bit overwhelming.
We only had four rides outside of fantasy springs that we cared about in this park- Tower of Terror, Indiana Jones, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and Sinbad’s Adventures. We had a fastpass ticket to Tower of Terror included in the vacation package, so there was not rush for that ride. The Sinbad ride never got over a 5 minute wait time. So, we wanted to score fastpass tickets to Indiana Jones and/or 20,000 leagues. Thankfully, right after entering, we were able to get Indiana Jones fastpass for later on in the day.
We immediately headed to Fantasy Springs, on the far end of the park, so we could see the land with the least amount of people in it for pictures and exploring.
The 3 main areas within the land are Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, Frozen, and Tangled. There are 4 new rides within the areas, Peter Pan’s Neverland Adventure, Fairy Tinker Bell’s Busy Buggies, Anna and Elsa’s Frozen Journey, and Rapunzel’s Lantern Festival.
I had read online that Anna and Elsa’s ride queue was really beautiful, but that you skip the whole queue sequence when lining up in the Premier Access line, which we have included in our Vacation Package Passport. So, I wanted to ride that first, but get into the Standby line to walk through the queue instead of getting in the Premier access line while the standby line was short, since this line can get to a 2-hour wait (even with such restricted access!). The queue was themed as Anna and Elsa’s castle and was absolutely gorgeous so we were glad we were able to do this.
This ride has been hailed as one of, if not the, best Disney ride ever. So, our expectations were quite high, but it did not disappoint. Holy S**T the ride was good. And we aren’t huge Disney fans. We have watched Frozen twice. But were completely blown away. I almost cried during the ride.
There were a couple drinks we wanted to get with our Free Beverage ticket within the land that have caffeine in them, so we decided to start getting those in.
First was the Magic Milk Tea at the Snuggly Duckling restaurant within the Tangled area. The restaurant is built exactly like the tavern in the movie and they really outdid themselves with the decor. You can immediately tell in this land that they spent billions creating it, it’s pretty awesome.
For a snack, we went to Oaken’s OK foods and got a very strange cardamom and meat bread with a lingonberry jam.
Next, we went to Arendelle Hall for the famous Apple Tea Soda that is only sold at these parks. Also, we just wanted to get into the gorgeous restaurant and the free beverage tickets allow us to do that without ordering food. We also walked around the Frozen land and got a bunch of pictures.
Since we were nearby, we decided to go on the Frozen ride again.
Next, we got on the Tinker Bell ride, which was only a 5 minute wait. This is a kid’s ride but is done so well. They put a surprising amount of money and effort into this for it being a short track ride.
The drink I was most excited about getting in this park was the Pixie Dust kiwi and citrus soda at the Lookout Cookout, the Lost Boys themed restaurant. You start off with a big yellow star in the drink. Then, once you stir the drink to mix the layers together, the big star disintigrates and turns into some small yellow stars. It’s so cute. and the best tasting drink in the parks.
Next, we popped over to the Peter Pan ride, which is a dark, track ride that uses 3-D tech to “fly” you around on the lost boy’s adventure. Mike loved this ride and it was very well done, but not surprisingly, I got sick on it.
At this point, we were starving and the food in Fantasy Springs leaves a bit to be desired, so we made a mobile order to Miguel’s El Dorado for some Halloween themed steamed buns we tried to get yesterday, a spicy smoked chicken leg, and chestnut tart.
During lunch, we discussed how we wanted to spend the rest of the day after we had already spent a couple hours in Fantasy Springs. We were hoping to be able to do/see everything in the park so we did not need to use one of our Tokyo days to come back out to a park, so we decided to start working our way around the gigantic park. Anyways, we wanted to go back to Fantasy Springs at night to see the land lit up, and even though we had not done the Tangled ride yet (We will regret this later), we thought we would have enough time to do that and all the other rides a few more times in the evening.
So, we made our way to Port Discovery for a shrimp steamed bun for Mike.
Then, we hit American Waterfront where Mike also got garlic shrimp popcorn (which he said was delicious) and did the Tower of Terror ride, which was a much better themed version than the California Adventure one, but it did have shoulder straps which made us both feel very claustrophobic.
We needed to rest our feet some more, so we went to Zambini Brothers and got some more Alien Mochi and their Halloween themed Strawberry jelly coke for Mike.
Next up was Mediterranean Harbor, where we got an order of Mike Wazowski’s melon bread (milk bread filled with melon custard) and a coffee-scented Mickey croissant at Mama Biscottis.
The next land was Mermaid Lagoon, an indoor kid’s land, which was very cute. We got a Sea Salt and Strawberry ice cream Monaka and a tropical fruit Mickey ice bar.
All sweeted out, we walked to the Arabian Coast to ride the Sinbad ride and get some curry. We stopped at a vending machine to get some waters and overheard the person behind us say “If the Tangled ride is closed all day, we can just use our passes on the Frozen ride.” I’m sorry… WHAT??
We were idiots that didn’t ride the Tangled ride while we were there in the morning thinking there was no rush. It never occurred to us that new rides break down more commonly than older rides. Not gonna lie, we got pretty bummed out for an hour or so. The other issue with this is that every person in line for the ride when it breaks down, plus every person that were able to get tickets to the ride while it’s down, get a free “premier access” ticket to any ride in the park, at any time. With the new land being everyone’s goal, everyone uses this free pass to go on the other Fantasy Springs rides. So, the premier access line, which we paid a ton of money to use as you essentially walk on the ride in, becomes an hour-long wait. We started to see the other ride’s wait times spike absurdly. We felt so dumb for not spending all the time we wanted to in the morning. We had to hope the Tangled ride opened back up, so things would even back out in a few hours.
We got on the Sinbad ride, which is a long, slow, dark ride taking you through Sinbad’s Seven Seas adventure. It’s cute and Small World-esque.
We needed some real food after all the snacking we had done and got a mobile order to Casbah’s food court for some beef curry and chicken tandoori. This was the worst meal of the two parks, and we didn’t even think to take pictures, which you can thank us for.
It was time for our Indiana Jones fastpass line. All other fastpass lines typically take 0-10 minutes to get onto the vehicles. This one took 40 minutes. We wondered if a lot of people with the Tangled free pass used it here. Our feet were killing us at the end. While standing in line, Mike checked the Fantasy Springs rides again to see Tangled was still down and- guess what?- Peter Pan’s was now down. So, there was more people with the free passes. The 2 minute Tinker Bell ride now had a 60 minute queue and Frozen’s was over 2 hours. Looks like we had more time to kill. The Indie ride was great, though, and was also better than the CA one. Longer and slightly smoother.
We had our fastpass to 20,000 Leagues, which was a cute dark ride where the car is a submarine and you have a flashlight to look around the “sea bed” where many monsters live.
After the ride, we saw the Peter Pan ride was back in order, so that was positive. With the vacation package, we had a voucher for a free popcorn and popcorn bucket, so we decided to go get that at the Soy Sauce and Butter flavored wagon in Port Discovery. I was hoping I could get the Halloween themed popcorn bucket with this voucher because it’s so cute, but they said I could only have the ugly diaper-bag vacation package bucket. The popcorn was not great, it was more of a sweet soy glaze.
We were resting our feet for a bit, when we saw that the Tangled ride was back up! So we immediately hobbled our way to Fantasy Springs again. To give you a sense of how big the park is and why I keep making comments about our feet, my watch said we walked 8 miles in Disneyland yesterday (which felt low) and 14 miles on this day.
Fantasy Springs did have way more people in it and the Premier Access line to the Tangled ride was wrapping around the area, probably an hour wait or so, so we crossed our fingers that it would keep dying down and started doing the other rides. It was about 7 at this point and the park closes at 9, so we had to get everything else we wanted in quickly.
We did the Frozen ride for the 3rd time, which thankfully had no Premier line wait since everyone was waiting in the Tangled ride.
Then, we did the Tinker Bell ride, which was possibly better at night, twice since it was walk-on line.
We wanted to get one last Pixie kiwi drink before leaving, so we took a load off and drank that.
Lastly, at 8:15, we decided to try Tangled again. Thankfully, the line was way down and we waited about 10 minutes to get on it. This ride was a bit disappointing. It was gorgeous, of course, but was super short and didn’t have any of the wow factor the Frozen ride did. It felt a bit like a throwaway ride. However, the lantern festival scene was gorgeous.
We had initially planned to do each ride twice, but this one didn’t feel necessary.
Mike wanted to do one more ride before we left, so he had to decide to do Peter Pan’s for the second time or the Frozen ride for the fourth time. He chose Frozen. It’s that good.
We started heading back to the front of the park (felt miles away) at 9PM along with a sea of people. We were worried the monorail would be backed up, but as usual in Japan, they are efficient and we were able to get on the next available train and back to the hotel in 20 minutes.