Storm Troopers Hitting the Ground

[vovat]

Wednesday was our last day at Disneyland, and it wasn't even a full day. We returned to the main park, and the first thing we rode was Peter Pan's Flight.

This is another one where you ride past scenes from the movie, this time on a suspended pirate ship with some stuff beneath you.

I do hope whoever designed this sign of a smiling Peter above instructions for adults to supervise their kids recognizes the irony.

It's probably a legal requirement to display such rules, but isn't that against everything he stands for? Maybe they should have put Nana on the sign.

I got some frozen apple cider at Maurice's Treats, and then we made our way over to the lake, which has several attractions that are only open in the daytime. There are two boats you can ride, the steamboat Mark Twain and the sailing ship Columbia. We ended up on the former, simply due to timing.

Next came Tom Sawyer Island, where you take a smaller boat to an island with a lot of steps and some crazy bridges.

And Davy Crockett's Explorer Canoes is one where all the passengers row. I'm not sure whether this is actually necessary, but it's definitely a different experience from most rides. I had kind of a difficult time getting into the correct rowing rhythm. Maybe they needed one of those drums. Our next stop was Galaxy's Edge, and while we'd walked around the one at Walt Disney World, we didn't really do anything there. This time, we went on both of the rides there, Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run and Rise of the Resistance.

On the former, the part before the actual ride has the pirate (but not of the Carribean) Hondo Ohnaka recruiting a crew to steal some coaxium fuel, borrowing the ship from Chewbacca.

Riders are divided into groups of five, each with two pilots, two gunners, and one engineer. Beth and I were the pilots. It's kind of like Midway Mania in that it's both a ride and a game, but I think was worse at this one. I couldn't help thinking that, if a group of kids rode this, they could potentially get way too serious about it. The wait for Rise of the Resistance was said to be sixty-five minutes, and you had to pay extra for a Lightning Lane pass, which we didn't do. The ride was having problems, so our wait ended up being longer than that. A lot of Disney rides have an introductory story before you actually board, but this one was even more complex than usual.

You meet BB-8, Rey (in hologram form, albeit much better quality than the ones in the movies themselves), and Lieutenant Bek, an original character for the ride. He's from the same species as Admiral Ackbar.

Anyway, you enter a Resistance ship with a moving floor and windows showing space, then you're captured by the First Order, taken onto a star destroyer, and made to walk down a corridor lined with Storm Troopers.

The Resistance comes to the rescue, and you ride an escape pod all over the place to dodge your captors. Kylo Ren shows up a few times during the ride. I saw a few costumed characters in Galaxy's Edge, but the only one I got a picture of was Chewie.

I noticed some Storm Troopers asking kids to give allegiance to the First Order. We also got Diet Coke in collectible bottles, which we still have.

The final thing we rode was Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and I'm probably more entertained than I should be by the safety announcement, delivered in character in a wacky hillbilly accent. "This is the wildest ride in the wilderness!"

We left the park later than I'd intended, and by the time we'd gotten some food from Monty's Good Burger (the vegan equivalent of In-N-Out; I had the "chicken" tenders and thought they were all right, but the texture was kind of weird), returned the rental car and gotten a ride to the airport terminal, we just barely made it in time for our flight. The flight itself went off without a hitch, but we were both exhausted afterwards. And that's it for the time being, although I should probably go back and talk about some things we did before the trip in a future post.