So last Saturday after team practice, Laura and I told ourselves that we would just go to Disneyland for dinner and maybe a little dancing before heading back to Atomic for the live dancing. My friend Lila Desatoff had called me that morning and let me know that Burnie was in town from San Francisco this weekend, so they were spending the day at Disneyland, so we decided to hook up with them and go to dinner.

When we got off the tram, we spent a little bit of time wandering through World of Disney looking at jewelry (Laura and I were still on the quest for the prettiest necklace in all the [Disney]land), then we headed inside the security checkpoint to renew Laura’s annual pass. After spending A LOT OF MONEY (sigh…when did it get so darned expensive to be a Disney die-hard?) we headed into the park to continue our necklace quest. We wound up in the Main Street Jewelry shop when I noticed I had a voicemail! It was from Lila saying to slow down, that they were right behind us (when we were coming through the ticket turnstile’s). I called her back and told her where we were, when all of a sudden we spotted the perfect necklace! It had Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and everything! So we purchased it and walked outside to join Lila, Burnie, Scott (who we already knew from swingin’) and (newcomer) Joel. We decided to go to Naples Ristorante e Pizzeria in Downtown Disney for dinner.

After a lovely meal, Burnie headed to the structure to get a Jacket and Scott headed off to his roommate’s birthday “celebration” (they had no idea what they were doing, except celebrating). The rest of us headed into Disneyland to stand in the behemoth (standard) line at Gibson Girl. With yummy ice cream in hand, we headed over to the swing plaza to “enjoy” Doc Anello and the Swing Machine and do some dancing. About halfway through the break inbetween the first and second sets, Burnie and Joel said they wanted to ride Roger Rabbit’s Cartoon Spin, so we headed off to Toontown.

Toontown was still open for another 10-15 minutes by the time we got there, but Roger Rabbit’s was closed, so we stood in line for Gadget’s Go-Coaster (like 20 minutes). Then we headed over to Matterhorn. Burnie quit on us because the line was rather long and he didn’t think his back could take it, but the three of us kept standing in line. We get up to the loading dock…we get into the car….lights on dashboards start blinking and the ride breaks down. So we stand around watching the employees running around, hauling the bobsleds onto the sidetracks (really exciting). The announcer says the ride will be inoperable for 45 minutes and we agree to wait 10-15 minutes and see what happens.

We start chatting with the cast member on the loading dock (Andrea) about what has to happen when this particular mechanical error occurs (every zone of track has to have it’s brakes, sensors, etc manually reset and then any sleds trapped in those zones can be manually run through back to the loading dock). We ended up waiting the whole 45 minutes to ride, but it wasn’t a wasted 45 minutes. We talked to Andrea, we talked to each other, we watched tinkerbelle and the fireworks. Then finally we got to reboard the bobsleds and off we went! We were on the right side of the mountain (closest to the ice crystals) and it was lots of fun. They still had some work lights on at the top of the lift hill which was amusing and the 2nd yeti (not the glowing eyes) had a really bad hair day (like someone took a hair brush and brushed it back to front instead of front to back). When we finished, I jokingly asked the cast member near the speakers (not Andrea) if we could ride again, and he acted all dramatic and I assumed he was going to say no. But then Andrea told him that we COULD ride it again. So we rode the Matterhorn twice in a row after an hour and a half wait. It was so exciting! Then we headed back to the swing plaza (the last set had already started), danced a little bit, then headed home tired.