Disneyland and the joys of flying standby!

So about a month ago, my family decided that we wanted to take a quick trip to California to see Disneyland all decorated for Halloween. Our family LOVES Disneyland! I couldn't even guess at how many times we've been. I think that my parents have been at least once a year since they were married. Or if they've missed a year, that's not too common. In fact, they've now been twice this year. Anyways, as Scott and I were growing up, we visited Disney most years as well. But I haven't been back for about 6 years. So this trip was long overdue! Since I work for JetBlue, we can fly standby down to California. Perfect! None of us really had a lot of time that we could take off of work, so we decided on a very fast trip. Down early Thursday morning, spend the day in Disneyland, fly back early Friday morning!

Ahhh...the joys of standby! For three weeks, the flights looked fantastic for us to get on. There were about 50 seats available on the flight, and only 6 people besides my family on the standby list. Plenty of room! 2 days before the flight, about 25 seats had sold on the plane, but that still left 25 and still only 11 people on the standby list! Perfect! Then comes the day before the flight! Every time I checked, things looked worse. More and more people we signing up for standby! By midnight there were over 40 people listed. I was just panicking! We can check in to the flight up to 4 hours before, and the order you get on board goes off of who checks in first. So I knew that it'd be a race to get checked in. Somehow, miracle of miracles, I got all 5 of us checked in fast enough that we could get on! But there is nothing more stressful than being up at 3:30 in the morning, fingers crossed that you can all get on a flight in 4 hours! I didn't want to let my family down by not being able to get us on!

The flight was great. Gotta love those TV's! So, we picked up the rental car, checked in to the hotel, walked to Disneyland, and then it was time for fun! There were pumpkins and Halloween decorations EVERYWHERE! It was so much fun to see!

Here's dad at the entrance to the park. If you look closely you can see that they made Giant pumpkin versions of some of the Characters above the entrance.

The Haunted House was one of the things that I was the most excited for! I love The Nightmare Before Christmas! It was great to see how they had completely changed all of the decorations both inside and out to go along with the movie!

Over in California Adventure, they had an entire area called "Candy Corn Acres". Everything was done with giant candy corns! They had windmills, corn stalks, flowers, and lots more! Candy Corns are one of Scott's favorite goodies, so I had to take a couple of pics of him and Kelli with the Candy Corns. Sorry, one of the pictures is a bit dark.

The rides were all great. I hadn't been on Pirates since they updated it with characters from the movies. And Scott got to go on the Matterhorn. He was pretty insistent that we needed to get on it asap, because it seems to always break down before we get a chance to go on it! We went on the Tower of Terror a couple of times. Even convinced dad to go on it the second time! The park wasn't too busy so we got to ride everything that we wanted to. I think that the longest wait we had was about a half hour. It was a really fun day!

Surprisingly, the best part of the day was probably the fireworks show! I have NEVER seen such a fantastic show! I really wish that I'd had a video camera with me! It was all Disney Villains. They had music and lights and images projected on a big screen. Even fireballs! Also, they lit up the castle with all of these different colored lights that somehow transformed it into looking like a haunted house! It was just such a fantastic quick trip! I think that we need to make a Halloween visit to Disneyland a new tradition!