I visited Disneyland, the home park of my childhood, at the beginning of May. My previous visit was a few weeks before the pandemic, which turned out to be fitting as I would consider the subsequent yearlong shutdown to be the end of a Disneyland era. I don't have time for a full trip report but wanted to share my thoughts while they're still relatively fresh.
Disneyland is still the best themed park in the world, and it's not even close. Maybe DisneySea competes, but I think Disneyland wins for being the original. Like every person on this board I've grown to love Europa Park, a place I hope to visit annually until I die, but in terms of proper, high quality theming, the two parks are in completely different categories. I had a semi-religious experience riding the Mark Twain at sunset, and while EP has some beautiful views, there's nothing even close that compares to a similar view at Disneyland. It's like the word "sightlines" was never translated into German. Online there are a lot of complaints about Disney going downhill, but to be honest I didn't notice many of them. Things like a lack of real live entertainment were obvious, but the parks and the rides looked as good as I've seen them. The prices were obviously a joke, much more than in the past, but I saved my lunch money for a while and it was kind of a special occasion.
I thought the recent complaints of "you have to be on your phone the whole time" would be overblown, but no, you really do have to be on your phone the whole time. Between being the designated "Lightning Lane" wrangler and mobile food orderer for my party I felt like I really was buried in my phone the whole time. Not as big of a deal for me as this was my crew's first visit and probably my 40th so I was happy to carry that weight, but I can imagine it could be a big drag on a vacation to have to be so tied up in your phone just to do normal things throughout the day.
In a similar vein, the 60-day reservation window for restaurants is absolutely brutal. I'm lucky enough to live in Europe where reservations dropped at 3pm instead of 6am, and was able to get a slot at all the restaurants I wanted, but for most people you have to be awake right at 6AM on the dot and from that point you have about a 15 second window if you want a table at Trader Sam's. I'm not sure what a better system would be, but this one doesn't strike me as a particularly good way to solve an issue of limited capacity.
I've also read a lot of complaints about "Genie Plus" and while it's a very confusing and occasionally frustrating system, I think it's actually better than the free Fastpass or $10 Maxpass from before. People love to write that Fastpass was free and equal for everyone, which in a sense is true, but it definitely favored the locals who knew how to use the system better (I'm sure everyone here has seen the Defunctland video by now). The current method of charging everyone $30 per day seems to favor out-of-town visitors, which seems like the best way to do it, given the limited capacity at the park. For us coming from a continent away, $30 a day is nothing compared to the entire rest of going to Disney, so we gladly paid it and were able to do everything at the parks twice. The locals with Annual Passes Magic Keys aren't going to pay $30 as readily when they can just come back in a couple weeks. I don't love how quickly "pay to play" became a thing at Disney, or theme parks in general, but since that genie (ha ha!) can't really be put back in the bottle, at least they seem to be building a system that works for people who are really on a special trip, the people for whom it might be years or even decades before they can come back.
As far as rides, the only new one was Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway, which is an instant classic Disney dark ride for me. The queue, the preshow, and the ride are all brilliant. I skipped the new Spider-Man ride because nothing about it appeals to me. The person I went with had been to EP a few times and this was their first time at Disneyland, so the comparisons were pretty funny. They found Piraten in Batavia way more exciting than Pirates of the Caribbean, which at first I thought was heresy but after some reflection, it makes some sense...
And finally, it pains me that I can't remember his name, but we had perhaps the best Jungle Cruise skipper I've had in my entire life, which means dozens and dozens of trips around the jungle. I took a picture but missed his nametag. I want to say Ryan (?) but can't recall, but wow, I was dying laughing the entire trip.
Overall it was a great trip, and there's nothing more (forgive me) magical than showing Disneyland to someone for their first time, but yikes is it expensive, and not entirely chill. For my annual trips I'll take 8-hour days and €6 beers at EP, thank you.
