Disneyland 60th, Anaheim, California - Oct 19, 2015

I decided to take my sisters (Terry and Penny with Penny's husband Rick) to Disneyland that year. This was Disneyland's 60th anniversary and roughly 50 years since our first visit back in the '60s. You'll find a B&W picture from 1967 of the three of us in front of the castle.

Whenever we visited as kids, this was a day trip for us coming up from San Diego. I got us a suite at the Disney Hotel. The monorail used to run through the hotel, but I was disappointed that was no longer the case.

As a kid, I used to see the tour groups walking through the park and always wondered what that experience was like. I thought the tour we were on would take us through Walt's office above the fire station, but it didn't. We did get to visit the Dream Suite in New Orleans Square. We couldn't take pictures inside, but you'll find several images taken from the balcony.

We stayed for a couple of nights and had a park hopper pass. I think my last visit had been in the late '70s. The first addition to the area was California Adventure, and then the whole Downtown Disney experience grew up around the park. I had been to Walt Disney World a couple of times in the 2000s, but this was my first time back to Disneyland.

This was an interesting visit. We came in October, which marks the start of the holiday season at Disneyland. The Haunted Mansion and It's a Small World are both decorated differently at this time of year. They have a trick-or-treating experience in the evenings, but I didn't realize that they clear everyone out of the park around 5pm and you can only get back in with a special ticket. My sister was so upset about the shortened visit that she wrote a letter to Disneyland to complain. They replied with two complimentary passes that she put to good use the following year.

We had a great time, and this was the first time I had a decent camera in the park, so I was pretty happy with that. There were a couple of strange things, though. The Marvel universe characters wandering the park just didn't feel right in the house of Mickey. The other issue was that several rides were breaking down during our visit. We had trouble with the Haunted Mansion where the conveyor stopped a few times. The worst was the Indiana Jones ride, which also stopped a couple of times. That breaks the illusion a bit, though it did give us a chance to study the detailed environments around us. After a couple of failures, they shut the ride down completely, brought up all the lights, and walked us out. I don't remember ever experiencing anything like that as a kid — rides were either unavailable when you arrived, but never failing mid-ride.