Hi all,

Here are some updates that I observed earlier this week whilst in Disneyland Resort California.

Cars Land is now becoming very visible as construction at the Disneyland Resort grows. From behind the Pacific Wharf area you can currently see large cranes and a massive scaffold covered structure. The construction of Cars Land will very soon force the closure of much of the Bountiful Valley Farm area permanently.

The Little Mermaid attraction at Paradise Pier also moves ever forward, with the massive show building now mostly up in framework. It will be very interesting to see how they deal with the crowds for this new attraction when it opens, and World of Color crowds all at the same time. People are going to be pretty annoyed if the attraction is pretty much useless after 6pm every night like much of the rest of Paradise Pier because of the World of Color show.

The new back entrance to Bugs Land opened this week, and is right next to the Tower of Terror. This will not only provide a more consistent flow through the park, instead of random dead ends in these areas, and cause unnecessary walking, but also means that Disney can now close off parts of the Backlot area to lay the tracks for the new Red Car Trolley due to open with the new improvements.

The entrance is slightly less underwhelming than the main entrance to Bugs Land and doesn’t really give that feeling of being shrunken to bug size and entering their mysterious miniature world, you just sort of “step in”.

The Silly Symphony Swings were open and taking guests for a spin around Paradise Bay. These replaced the Orange Stinger that closed last year. Overall the swings look better than the Stinger, but still lacks something for me, and causes for there to be a lot of unused space around the attraction due to the sheer size of it’s plinth. There are walkways underneath and around the attraction that are sparse and underused.

Finally, over at Disneyland Alice in Wonderland was closed for the first part of our trip due to the issue that was raised with it last month regarding the lack of security rails. Alice had been closed for a couple of weeks, with concern growing among fans that Disney would use this as an excuse to close the attraction permanently, claiming that nothing could be done with is. With no warning, and the website still claiming it was closed, on the second to last day of our two week trip Alice was re-opened once again, albeit in a temporary state of repair. We managed to ride it twice, but the lines were normally quite long, which I think may be to do with the fans turning up to support the ride in hope that Disney notices and don’t close it. At one point it even had a longer line than Big Thunder Mountain! Currently, the ride has tarps round it and some false flooring around the outside upper track, it does not look as good, but at least for now it is open.

Ok, I think that’s everything!

Dan.