Disneyland daze and wi-fie woze

Qantas Flight 93 touched done just after daybreak. After flying backward across the international dateline, we arrived in Los Angeles about an hour and a half before we flew out of Adelaide. For the first time since I bought it, the date on my Seiko watch is correct. The Qantas queues were cleared expediently and, despite pre-departure warnings to the contrary, the welcoming US officials were neither officious nor intrusive. That may be one of the advantages of travelling with a sweet-faced eight year-old girl.

Sandy, Eden and I spilled on to the sidewalk in front of the LAX terminal about 9am. Our hotel had suggested we take the Super Shuttle from the airport to Anaheim, so we went on the hunt for a Super Shuttle dispatcher in blue shirt. When eventually we found her, she exuded an air of indifference to our desire to use her company’s conveyance. As we had nothing better to do, we loitered in the general vicinity until the dispatcher eventually grunted at us and pointed to an approaching van. As I gathered up our cases to stagger towards the blue minibus, the dispatcher suddenly became uncharacteristically animated. “Don’t you go forgetting my tip,” she hollered at my back as I scrambled aboard the bus. When I opened my wallet to extract five dollars for her unstinting service, the smallest note I could find in my fluster was a $20 note – too much for too little, I decided, and thus ran the gauntlet of her glower as our bus pulled away from the curb.

Highlights of our first three days in the US

• Repeated rides on the breath-taking Matterhorn ride

• Walking around in shirt sleeves in the middle of winter

• An all-you-can-eat buffet at Cap'n Kidd's for just $9.95

We invaded our suite at the Castle Inn on Anaheim’s South Harbor Boulevard with gratitude. It provided almost palatial space after 14 hours in cattle class over the Pacific. Sandy crawled into bed to snooze for a couple of hours. Like her dad, Eden was far too excited for any shuteye, so we wandered off up the road to Target to buy her a summer dress to accommodate the unseasonably warm winter’s day in California. Sadly, it has had only one day’s wear as the clouds set in the next day and rain on the third.

While we were stocking up on sugar-laden cereal, chocolate chip cookies and other vital supplies, I also popped a TomTom GPS unit into our shopping basket. If you are a married man who has not learned of the matrimonial virtues of satellite navigation systems, let me share a secret: They are a bargain at any price for two reasons. Firstly, a GPS unit generally prevent you getting lost by providing straightforward and accurate navigation advice. Secondly, and most importantly, if you do get lost, you can absolve yourself of fault by blaming it on the GPS unit – which the forward-thinking husband will have configured with a female voice! That divinely inspired combination of features has the capacity to save many family holidays, if not the family itself. Because our US trip is a bit of a big deal, a GPS unit is as imperative to the success of our odyssey as passports and deodorant.

Happily, we did not need the TomTom to find our way from the hotel to Disneyland: Bert at the front desk provided all the navigational assistance we required: “Turn right at the road and then left at the second set of traffic lights”. Bert even sold us discounted three-day passes to Disneyland and its sidekick California Adventure World, so it was indeed a happy encounter. As a result, within hours of our red eye arrival, we were brandishing our passes for inspection and submitting our bags for security checks as we entered the Land of a Million Dreams.

Click on a photo below to enlarge and view our travel slideshow 

{gallery}usa/disneyland{/gallery}

As we walked down Main Street to the cartoon kingdom of Fantasyland, then wandered through the gee-wizardry of Tomorrowland, I wondered how future-proof Disneyland is. Even in the low season leading up to Christmas, the plazas, novelty stores and food courts of the theme park were filled with people. But many of them were Baby Boomer grandparents or their Generation X successors escorting grandkids or their own offspring on a pilgrimage to the imaginative heartland of their own youth. Despite its trash-free tidiness, Disneyland does look dated. It is yesterday’s vision of an idealised America, a world of frontiers, fun, fantasy and an unlimited future.

It is a future vision that resonated in the 1960s, an era when mass media in most towns meant a handful of radio stations, a couple of newspapers and (if you were lucky) a couple of TV stations. At the centre of that congenial cultural convergence was Disneyland, a dream park where families could merge with fantasy. As we rode through Alice’s Wonderland on the back of a caterpillar or scaled the Matterhorn for a breath-taking plunge along a rollercoaster rail, my senses were swamped by the excitement of fulfilling an ambition that started 40 years ago when we used to crowd around our black and white TV each Sunday night to Disneyland appear at 6.30pm on New Zealand’s only TV channel.

Those seeds planted then, and arguably for the next decade, have borne bountiful fruit in the many millions of pilgrims that have visited Disneyland since it was opened in 1954. But I wonder whether the harvest will be so plentiful from the MTV generation, spawned by the media proliferation that started in the 1980s. Disney is no longer the centre of fantasy in a world of diversified media, just one of the options. So, I wonder, when Eden’s generation come of age, will they have the same burning desire to visit Disneyland as their parents? Or will it crumble into history, memory and myth, like the amusement parks that fell victim to the era of electronic home entertainment.

It’s amazing the thoughts that go through your head when you’re standing in a longish queue waiting to climb aboard the Nemo submarine (which Sandy informed me was formerly the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine during her 1985 visit). During our three day at Disneyland, we had a great time and Eden discovered she is addicted to a fast food snack called a churro – a foot-long piece of deep-fried dough rolled in cinnamon sugar. A highlight was the Disney Christmas parade, which provided a 20-minute promenade of Walt Disney’s comic offspring along Main Street.  Sadly, we missed the fireworks during our visit – the first night due to post-flight fatigue and on the second and third nights through cancellation, caused by wind.

The lowlight of our visit to Disneyland was the claimed free wireless Internet access from our hotel, the Castle Inn & Suites. While it did have a wireless network visible to my Fujitsu notebook, it was not usable unless I was parked in the hotel lobby – a disconcerting experience if you want to do something private, like using Internet ban to check if you have any money in the bank. After I voiced my concerns, one of the reception staff offered me a log-on to the wireless network run by the adjoining Super8 hotel (where he also worked), which produced better, albeit intermittent, results. As a result of these Wi-Fi woes, my ability to stay on top of email and completing outstanding work, let alone populating this blog.

Twitter