Disney Parks guests made the most of February 29 when Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and Disneyland Resort in California celebrated Leap Year by keeping a theme park on each coast open for 24 hours of nonstop memory-making fun.
For the first time ever, both the Magic Kingdom Park and Disneyland Park were open for 24 hours straight as part of a bi-coastal salute called “One More Disney Day.” From 6 a.m., February 29 to 6 a.m., March 1, 2012, local time, guests filled the extra day of leap year with a marathon of Disney magic and fun.
At Disneyland, the celebration included complimentary “One More Disney Day” buttons for all guests and limited-edition “One More Disney Day” mouse ears for the first 2,000 guests to enter the park. Overnight, guests enjoyed character appearances (with some characters in pajamas), special food offerings and a viewing of Fantasmic!, the water show at Rivers of America.
Disneyland’s “One More Day” event has had mixed reviews from park guests. In a very unscientific survey of Babes In Disneyland readers, we found the following sentiments:
- There was a rush of people who waited for the park to open so that they could get their buttons and limited-edition mouse ears. The park was a bit crowded in the morning as a result.
- The afternoon was great, according to most accounts and resembled a moderate to slow weekend day.
- While accounts differ a bit in the time the crowds really started to ramp up, between 5:30 and 7, presumably as folks got off from work, the crowd levels began to soar. A dear friend of mine, who lives about 10-15 minutes from Disneyland (by side streets, mind you). She decided to make an adult night out of it and made a Blue Bayou reservation for 10 p.m. so that she and her boyfriend could leave for the park after the kids were done with homework and dinner. They left their house at 8 p.m. The traffic leading up to Disneyland was so bad that by 10:30 they were dead stopped in traffic about a mile from Disneyland. They ended up giving up and turning around to go home. This was a particular disappointment given the fact that she had taken the next day off from work to recuperate from her overnight trip to Disneyland!
- Other readers noted that the park was so crowded and perhaps under-prepared for the amount of guests that food was very limited. The line for Main Street’s Corn Dog Wagon reportedly stretched back to Star Tours. Other restaurants were said to only have a limited amount of food on hand and some restaurants were not open at all.
- Many readers noted that they were happy with the event, overall, and knew going into the event that it was going to be really crowded and took it in stride.
As for me, I knew it was going to be packed and stayed far away from it all–at home. I’m not big on enormous crowds, as I had my fill of navigating them when I was a Disneyland tour guide. I considered spending the night at my parents’ house in Orange County and heading in for the sake of good journalism first thing that morning, but when I found out folks were camping out the night before, I decided against it.
Leave a comment below about your “One More Day” experience.
Tomorrow I’ll be posting a guest piece about a Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom experience!
Photos courtesy of the Disneyland Resort.
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You know, the characters may have been up on the train station platform when I left (at about 6:40 a.m.), but I was so tired by then I don’t remember at all. That’s what I get for doing the full 24 hours with no caffeine or sleeping!
I think what the experience was like depends on when you arrived and what your expectations were.
My brother-in-law and I arrived at 5am 2/28. It was very busy getting in (expected by anyone with good sense, I think), and for the first hour or so. By 8am it was moderately busy at most and the much of the day was very enjoyable with easy-to-manage crowds.
Around 4pm – 5pm (when people started getting off work and thinking they would pop by for a few hours or come do the overnight thing), it started to get very crowded–and by 11pm it was insanely busy. Again, I pretty much expected this, so we took it in stride.
We did all of our must-do’s before the expected crowds descended, and then accepted lines on what we wanted to do overnight as par for the course. We chose to look for things we could enjoy. As a result, we had a wonderful time.
Those who showed up later in the day generally tended to have less favorable experiences–especially if they didn’t consider the fact that there would be a ton of people with the same idea.
Interesting (and coincidentally), I posted a blog post today as an Off-Topic Thursday post on my blog, if you’d like to read a little more about my day and see some of the photos I took. http://www.faithandthemagickingdom.net/2012/03/off-topic-thursday-one-more-disney-day.html