Kristin goes to Disneyland

A little over a week ago I went to Disneyland and California Adventures with a group from school. I had so much fun! It was my first time ever going to Disneyland (I have been to Disney World twice, but the most recent time was 20 years ago - hard to believe my junior year of high school was 20 years ago). One of my students had heard it was my first time and so he brought be his first-time button. I wore it for a while and then I went to City Hall on Main Street and got my own (one of the few things i
n Disneyland that are complimentary). I proudly wore my button for the rest of the day.
Disneyland has a great system now called fast passes. You can get one fast pass at a time. However, what I quickly realized is that you are eligible for a new pass when your current pass is available for use, but you have a one-hour time frame in which to use it. Thus, I (and a student most of the time) would go and get fast passes right before we would get on whatever ride we had a fast pass for. The other great thing is that with the Disneyland app we could check out wait times and the availability of fast passes (and what time they were good for) and make our decisions appropriately.

I got to ride everything I wanted to ride, many of them twice. I think my favorite part was the Tower of Terror over at California Adventures (we had park hopper tickets). The Tower of Terror is basically an elevator that goes up and then in the dark plunges down and flies back up and so forth. On the ride, you're frequently changing directions and free falling. I had just recently been teaching about projectile motion which is similar to free fall (the vertical component of projectile motion is free fall). As a result, I found myself thinking about the physics of it each time we rode it.
We were also able to get tickets for the World of Color show at California Adventure (fast pass tickets, but they don't count toward your one ticket at a time you're allowed to have). Then we decided to go early and wait so that we could get front-row seats. We got them. We were standing right on the edge of the water. This also meant we got wet. The World of Color is a neat show (See the video below) it uses water fountains, water screens, projection, fire, music video, lights and more. When I lived in Baotou (Inner Mongolia, China) they had two parks with nightly shows. One was a water screen where they projected video and the other was a fountain with lights synced to music. The World of Color was like these two combined, but so much more!

World of Color

The videos are of 1) The World of Color Show, 2) The California Screamer roller coaster - note this one might be problematic if you have a weak stomach and 3) a Newsies presentation at California Adventures.