Tokyo Disneyland - Happy Birthday Mr Baptist!

The day for our much-anticipated visit to Disneyland finally arrived! We met at the local convenience store at 8.00am this morning to board our mini-bus for the journey to Maihama. We arrived about 9.15am and headed straight for the entrance. Disneyland is full of Halloween decorations for the month of October. Our first stop was the Guest Info Centre, to pick up a special "It's My Birthday" sticker for Mr Baptist. What a way to celebrate your birthday - at Disneyland!! After confirming our meeting place in case anyone became separated from the group, we headed for our first roller-coaster ride, Space Mountain (which also happens to be Tate-Sensei's favourite ride). The weather was sunny and quite warm, which is a good thing, but it also means that a lot of people decided to spend the day at the "Magic Kingdom". The waiting (queueing) time for Space Mountain, even at 9.30 in the morning, was 80 minutes! A couple of members of our group decided a roller-coaster ride was not for them, so they went off with one of our Japanese volunteers to do some shopping and get some "Fast Passes" for our next ride. Fast Passes enable you to jump the queue at very popular rides, but you can only get one Fast Pass every two hours or so, and there are a limited number for each ride per day.

Disneyland was so crowded today that the waiting time for the most popular rides was over two hours - we decided that was a bit too long for us! However, thanks to the Fast Pass system, we rode on Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Railway, Pirates of the Caribbean, It's a Small World, Star Tours and the Racing Cars. Some people managed to ride Space Mountain a second time at the end of the day, as they decided that would be more fun than shopping!

Unfortunately it became very windy towards the end of the day and into the evening, so the night-time "Electrical Light Parade" and fireworks were cancelled, but we still had a fantastic day, and it was a very tired group of students that arrived back in Sakura at 9.30pm.