Summer Adventures 2019: Downtown Disney

Hey Everybody, I hope you had a wonderful weekend!

In case you weren’t aware… my boyfriend, Nick, and I had a little Disney vacation last week! 🤣😄 We were there for three days and two nights (We would do that a little differently next time, but more on that later), arriving Monday afternoon and leaving Wednesday evening. The first day we were there, we hung out at Downtown Disney, doing some shopping and all that fun stuff, on Tuesday we did Disneyland, and Wednesday California Adventure. I have quite a bit to say about each day, so instead of writing one super long post, I figure I would do a post for each day. That way it’ll be easier and more enjoyable for all of us 😂

So for today’s post, we’re going to focus on Downtown Disney!

This was my first time actually spending time looking around and shopping at Downtown Disney… at least that I have memory of 😂 Usually, since I live close enough to Disneyland where it is basically a day trip, I would go for the day and spend it all at Disneyland. I’ve never done a Disney trip like this, where we spend a few days up there, and it was definitely worth doing, especially if you have younger kids and are able to afford it. Also, most of the time I went to Disneyland, it was for my high school’s marching band (I did colorguard) and we would march in the holiday parade that they have during Christmas time. Even when we did my senior trip for high school, we only went to Disneyland, and didn’t go anywhere else. Usually with these trips, we would be in bigger groups too, so it was nice just having one other person to decide what we want to do and when.

Now, let’s get on with it!

On Monday, I had a dentist appointment at 10am, so we didn’t end up leaving until around 11:30am. However, traffic wasn’t too bad, despite being around lunchtime, and we ended up at our hotel around 12:50ish.  We stayed at a hotel that was right across the street from Disneyland, and so we didn’t have to worry about parking until Wednesday, when we had to check out. That’s one of the reasons why we would have stayed another night, was to make it easier on us when it came to parking. Plus, going to the hotel room when it got hot during the middle of the day was nice, and it was a great way to get away from the crowds to cool down for a bit.

Anyways, we got to the hotel a couple hours before checking in, so we parked the car at the hotel, then headed on over to Downtown Disney. This first trip there, we didn’t buy anything besides some Jamba Juice, because we wanted to wait until a little later in the day to make our purchases. It also made it easier for when we were able to get into our room, so that we didn’t have extra stuff to bring up, along with everything else we had.

Anyways, the first place we stopped at was World of Disney, which is the giant Disney store located there. It was fun walking around the store and seeing what they had there, especially since they had a couple of pressed penny machines (I like collecting them, since they’re a fun and cheap souvenir 😂). There were pressed penny books above the machines as well, so if that’s your thing and you want one, they’re $12.99…I think, or somewhere around that price.They also had cute little Disney backpacks, but they could be a little pricey, as some were $75 and others were $90.

After World of Disney, we went into a couple of smaller Disney shops. The first one was the Disney Dress Shop, which is more of a clothing and cutesy bag boutique. The other store was Disney Home, which, as the name suggests, sells Disney themed items for your home, such as kitchen ware and items for your pets.  I almost considered getting some items from these places, but didn’t end up doing so in the end, because after thinking about it, I wasn’t really interested in anything enough to buy it. Although, The Disney Dress shop has more of the little backpacks priced at around $75 as opposed to the $90 ones, and there are some really awesome mugs at Disney Home. If you’re interested in any of those things for souvenirs, I would definitely check those places out first before buying anything at World of Disney (Not saying that their stuff isn’t awesome, just that these places also have cool stuff that you might want to check out).

Then, we went to Nick’s favorite place in Downtown Disney: The Lego Store. It was fun walking around the store and looking at all the different Lego sets that were available, especially the Stranger Things set! They also had a giant Lego Darth Vader on the second story, so keep a look out for that, all my Star Wars peeps. Nick knew he wanted to buy a set or two there, plus we have been collecting the Disney Lego Mini Figures, so we’ve been on the hunt for the Lego Movie Mini Figures, because you could get the Wizard of Oz characters (which we found all four! Plus an extra Scarecrow and Tin Man).

After we browsed there for a bit, we stopped by the Disney Pin Traders kiosk right across the walkway from the Lego store, and looked around there for a bit. For those of you who don’t know, when you go to Disneyland or Disney World, you may notice cast members have a lot of pins on them, especially if they’re working on the retail side of things. You can trade Disney Pins with them, but they must be Disney Pins. You can also buy pins and lanyards at these kiosks, because they have some really cool pins that you can’t easily find and trade.  You can buy pins online too, but you run a higher chance of getting fake Disney Pins that you won’t be able to trade with cast members, although if that aspect of it doesn’t matter to you, then I would say go for it. After seeing a few Youtube videos about all of this, I thought the pins were so cute, even if I don’t take part in the trading aspect of it. We didn’t spend a lot of time here at first though, because it was really hot, and the kiosk was outdoors, so it wasn’t fun looking through the pins with all the heat.

When we had walked through all of Downtown Disney and gotten our Jamba Juice, it was close enough to 3pm, so we headed back to the hotel to get settled into our room. We finished that, took a little break in the hotel room, ate at the Ihop next door, and then headed back to Downtown Disney, where the real shopping began.

Our first stop was the Lego store, because we knew we wanted to get the mini figures I mentioned earlier, and Nick wanted to get his Lego set. Then, we went back to the pin kiosk across from the Lego store, and that’s when my pin collection officially began. Nick ended up buying my Nightmare Before Christmas lanyard and my first pin for me (it’s the little Pluto pin at the bottom of the lanyard. Also, thank you Nick😘). Then I got my Mary Poppins pin, my Disneyland Castle pin with the Mickey Mouse balloons, the Lion King pin and the Maleficent pin.

We finished there, then went back to World of Disney, where I bought T-shirts for my family and I (they were on sale for $22 each when you bought two shirts). They had some fun T-shirts there, including the one I got for myself, which is a Disneyland T-shirt that says Disneyland across the front and a list of the rides and the date that they opened on the back.

By that time, we brought all of our stuff back to the hotel, and once again took a break. This was definitely the best part of having the hotel across the street, as with all the heat and people, it was nice to go back to our little room, crank the AC and relax. Once we cooled down and showered, we went and grabbed a late night snack from McDonald’s. We were planning on going going back to Downtown Disney for a third time, but it was too late at that point. Instead, we went to a little Mickey and Friends gift shop at one of the hotel’s, and bought a few mystery key chains.

And that, my friends, brings the first day of Disney fun to a close. Overall, it was a fun first day, and a great start to our Disney vacation 😄😄 We got a lot of shopping out of the way, which made more time for us to enjoy the parks the next couple of days. It was also cool, because I don’t usually spend that much time shopping at Disneyland since everything is pretty expensive, but this time, since I have the budget and haven’t really splurged on myself like this in a while, it was really nice and fun!

On that note, I’ll see you all in the next post, where I’ll talk about our fun day at Disneyland, especially with seeing Galaxy’s Edge for the first time.

Thank you for reading, and have a good week!

 

-Erin 🙂

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