lots and lots of disney fun

so as you can imagine, we've been to disneyland a good number of times in - oh, say the last four months or so.  and while each visit is always a ton of fun and probably deserves its own post, i figure it's probably best to try and whittle them down into one to keep from becoming too repetitive.  like, here's a few shots from the day after my birthday (because of course you know i had to get my birthday button!):

this was one of our summertime visits, when the bean finally got one of her beloved cream cheese pretzels, we discovered the most delicious cold brew coffee, only served in galaxy's edge and a visit to toontown to see the construction walls up as they work on building the new mickey & minnie ride:

this is from our first visit using our magic keys - which is what disneyland is calling annual passes now.  don't be fooled - there's pretty much zero difference between the two programs aside from the fact that we have to make reservations for every visit.  it kinda sucks, but at the same time it does make it more manageable once inside the parks.

we managed to score tickets to the annual halloween party for the night before halloween.  we hadn't been to one of those in awhile, and we had a great time and took home a giant backpack full of candy from the treat trails.  this was also the first time we got to ride the new spider-man themed ride, webslingers.  it's super fun, by the way.  definitely give it a shot if you visit.

one of the bean's days off from school happened to land on the very day that all of the holiday festivities at the 'land began.  it was a fun way to kick off the season, and it also happened to be disney+ day, so there were some giveaways in the morning (which we missed, d-oh) and photo ops and stuff throughout the resort.

these shots are from one of our quickie visits where we just went to soak in some disney magic, eat a churro and browse through the shops.  

a couple of days before christmas, we met up with cousin seven and her fiancé for a super rainy disney day.  when you're armed with an umbrella, a raincoat and rain boots, it really doesn't matter how much it rains...it's still a fun day at disneyland.

our final visit for 2021 was on new year's eve eve.  we took our time getting there, rolling in at around 6pm after the last of the rain had fallen and scoring a sweet parking spot in the toy story lot.  that's the only one as of right now that has a bus to take you from the lot to the entrance to the resort, and it sure beats the long walk to and from the parking structure.  supposedly the trams are going to return sometime this year, which will be nice.  maybe everyone will go back to parking there while we just keep on keepin' on at toy story.  and for this visit our goals were to have dinner (which we did, at plaza inn), use up our last "festival of holidays" food & drink tabs and see the fireworks.  mission accomplished!

would i recommend buying a magic key at this point?  i'm not really sure.  we really miss being spontaneous and dropping in on the parks whenever the urge hits - although everyone tells me that they've had good luck scoring reservations by looking the night before they want to go.  we haven't really tried that yet especially because the last couple of months have been so busy for us, so maybe we'll give it a shot soon.  in any case, it's been really nice getting to visit our favorite place as often as we have, and i'm looking forward to more disney fun in 2022.  omicron be damned.