I’m just back from a short overnight trip to Disneyland – we went up to attend Taste – the final signature event of this year’s Food and Wine Festival. Taste was fun – I’ll have more information and pictures up later.

We stayed at the Paradise Pier – the last time I stayed there was almost 11 years ago, when it was still called the Pan-Pacific. We had a room with a view of the Paradise Pier area of DCA – it was really pretty at night:

And in the early morning:

It also gave us quite an interesting perspective for viewing the Pixar Play Parade, which has changed (again) from what I saw a couple of weeks ago, as I reported in this blog entry. Lightning McQueen and Mater were back at the beginning and end of the parade. And the stilt-walking chefs of Ratatouille also returned – though there were only three of them.

From the room we could see many of the floats on the parade route

The biggest change, though, is the return of the “bug’s life” parade unit – Heimlich and his many parts plus the float. The float was modified significantly – only the front part with Flik and Atta on the swing is there now. It looks a little odd when you compare it with the size of the floats for all of the other units.

Even with the “bug’s life” float back, the weird Toy Story Tinker Toy creature is still part of the parade (but don’t get me wrong, I think it looks pretty cool):

The acrobats have not returned to the Toy Story float – it’s still just the monkeys hanging on the bar.

A while ago I talked about the Prince Caspian Pre-Parade that was coming to Disneyland at the end of April, and I had a chance to see that. I didn’t notice any swooning females, but Caspian looked pretty good. And the horse was quite beautiful, and BIG.

He had quite an entourage – the banner bearers in front, the standard bearers, plus the courtier leading the horse – but it was his final attendant who cracked me up – The Royal Pooper Scooper. 🙂

During Magic Morning I had a chance to get a close look at Jingles, the lead horse on the King Arthur Carrousel, which was dedicated to Julie Andrews last month. If you look closely you can see Mary Poppins’ umbrella on the rump. Her initials, JA, the number 50, and Mary Poppins’ boots and flying silhouette are on the saddle. It’s really beautiful – so detailed!

The sparkling/chasing lights that are on the floral Mickey at the entrance to Disneyland cooperated with me a lot better than they did when I was there with Lisa Berton back in March – this time the light show was running almost continuously. It’s more impressive in person when you can watch the lights as they move and twinkle, but hopefully you get the idea.

And now that I’m back from Disneyland I’m leaving for Disney World, where I’m planning to blog live this week. A little bonus trip for me – but I’ll be writing more about that in my next blog entry.

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