(Urayasu, Japan)

Amidst a busy schedule in Japan meeting up with friends and family, Grant and I did manage to steal out for a day or two to do something on our own. We enjoy amusement parks, especially the rides, so we made it a priority to visit Disneyland again on this trip. If you are interested, check out this post of Disneyland from two years ago. It really did feel like we came full circle after two years of traveling.

One thing we didn’t plan for was visiting Disneyland on their anniversary. Granted they are celebrating this anniversary the whole year, so anyone that visits in 2018 can also enjoy the special decorations and events. It  was Tokyo Disney’s 35th Anniversary! Whoo-hoo!

Tips on When to Schedule Your Disneyland Trip:

      1. Try to plan your visit during the off-season

We planned our trip to avoid the crowds as best we could. We took into consideration that the spring or autumn is always less crowded than during the summer vacation months for school kids. So if you can plan around that, all the better.

     2. If possible, plan your trip on a weekday

Disneyland is more crowded on a weekend, so if you want to avoid the weekend crowd, plan for going during the week.

     3. If you don’t mind getting wet, plan your trip on a non-sunny day

Another thing to consider is that many people plan on going when the weather forecast says it will be “all day sunny”. So we took our chances on a rainy day, or more specifically “cloudy in the morning and rain in the afternoon”. We took an umbrella just in case and braving the rain paid off. We waited at most 25 minutes for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and with fast-pass tickets got on most rides in under 20 minutes. We did get a little wet from the rain, but it wasn’t too big of a deal to walk around with our umbrellas.  I think the pay-off of less waiting time and crowds was really worth it. I compare this experience to going on a crowded summer day during the weekend, in which case I’ve waited 2 hours or more to ride Big Thunder Mountain.

Tips to Maximize Your Time at the Park:

     1. Plan for picking up fast-passes

Fast-passes are free and available to all. There are ticket machines at the entrance of popular rides where one can scan their entrance tickets and out pops a fast-pass ride ticket, with entry scheduled for a later time. Then you can move on to other rides in the vicinity that you don’t mind waiting for and come back at the allotted time written on the ride tickets. This allows you to skip the main waiting lines and wait in a much faster line. This is really convenient, especially if you would like to maximize your time at Disneyland, and doesn’t have a high learning curve to use. Keep in mind you can only have one fast pass per person per ride at a time and you can get another one after the allotted time on your ticket or after two hours, whichever comes first.

    2. Visit the most popular shows and rides during parades

Another way to avoid waiting in a really long line is to time your visit to the most popular rides during the parades. Or if you don’t want to miss a parade, a lot of the daytime parades are similar to the main nighttime parade, with the only difference being the nighttime one is more spectacular and usually involves a light show. So you can choose one to catch for sure and skip the other ones. The reason is because the parades are really popular at Tokyo Disneyland and a lot of people watch them and then resume going on the rides. You can take advantage of this “down time” to avoid the long lines. This also applies to shows and restaurants as well if you want to avoid the crowds. We managed to watch one parade from a distance while waiting in line for Peter Pan’s flight, which has it’s line outside and facing the parade route.

I hope you enjoy our photos. I didn’t want to do a repeat Disneyland post so I am featuring what was different this time, specifically the decorations (spoiler alert… the theme color was a purplish-dark blue with secondary colors of magenta, bright green, electric blue, and gold).

The castle at the center of Tokyo Disneyland is Cinderella’s Castle. We’d never gone inside so we decided to check it out on this trip:

These wall panels are neat, the sparkles appear when you take a photo using your flash:

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