Sander, Daniëlle & EmilyOur Family life...

Our Family life...

Photos and dinner…

Often we get questions about how we get so many photos with the 2 of us together during our Disney vacations. That answer is very simple in both the Disneyland Resort and the Walt Disney World resort they have a service called the Disney PhotoPass. Disney has photographers on special places throughout the resort like character pots, nice views and character dining locations. These so-called PhotoPass photographers make pictures from which are afterwards available online. To see them online you will get a PhotoPass which holds a unique code with which you can add the PhotoPass photos to your account. At this PhotoPass portal you can edit the photos by adding frames, autographs, cropping, changing the colour and more.

Photo locations @ Magic Kingdom
Photo locations @ Magic Kingdom

 

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So far everything is for free but as nothing comes for free there are costs involved if you want to have prints, digital photos or photo gifts. For us we think the best value we get is when pre-ordering a PhotoPas CD which means you get all the pictures including all the edited pictures for one fixed price, and with all I mean all. Up till last year you needed to order the CD (shipment costs only), but since last year you are also able to download them directly.

Also new since last year is the PhotoPass+ which is a bit more expensive but also has some more benefits. You do not only get the photos made by the photographers in the park but also the photos made at dining locations throughout the resorts and on-ride photos from the following rides:

  • Space Mountain
  • Splash Mountain
  • Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin
  • The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
  • Rock ‘n Roller Coaster
  • Expedition Everest
  • Dinosaur
  • Test Track

And what is neat is that you can pre-order the Walt Disney World PhotoPass+  online via the following link: Pre-Order WDW PhotoPass+ The only limitation of the PhotoPass+ is that it’s only valid for 14 consecutive days and we plan to be in WDW for at least 18 consecutive days. After contacting Disney PhotoPass we learned that it’s possible to add an additional 4 days of regular PhotoPasses without having to order twice. So we decided to order and we can’t wait to see the pictures from Splash Mountain and Dinosaur they must be the funniest ones of them all. International visitors must order early enough since the PhotoPass+ voucher including the PhotoCD is shipped towards your home address with regular mail, from experience it sometimes takes a couple of weeks before they arrive. Below you see some PhotoPass Photo’s from last year in Disneyland:

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And Disney is adopting the digital world to the maximum. They have something new in Walt Disney World called the My Disney Experience where you can start planning your trip online. Theme-park tickets have a RFID chip integrated to access the parks and to use the FastPass+ system. It even possible to give you a more personalised Disney trip if you want. In addition you can also start planning your trip online and manage your tickets, FastPasses, showtimes from an App for either iPhone or Android to manage things online during your vacation. And before people start to think how can Disney expect that visitors are paying money to be online during their trip in all 4 major theme-parks and Downtown Disney there is a complimentary wireless internet access available. It’s also possible to manage everything at once for the entire family you are visiting with.

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After reading about all this digital enhancements and having our PhotoPass+ ordered we did like to make some diner reservations online and through the iOS app. We have reserved a Character lunch at the Tusker House Restaurant in Animal Kingdom and at Hollywood & Vine in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. After checking out the menu’s I already have an appetite!


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Photos on our last full day…

The last full day of our vacation is today and as always I needed a surprise for Danielle but  what and how could I organize it?

Yesterday I insisted that we had breakfast in our hotel and  I went to the reception to thank them for the good advice on he trip to downtown LA. Danielle believed this so I thought nothing can go wrong from here. I asked the lady at the reception to call the Disneyland Dining reservations and asked for a character breakfast at Goofy’s Kitchen in the Disneyland hotel. But it took so long to get through the waiting line that before she had an operator on the phone Danielle already came to see what took so long. So the surprise was a little bit away but she was still happy with it.

Off course this meant getting out of bed early today, at 7:00 sharp our alarm clock wakes Danielle and she woke me 30 minutes later. At 7:50 we are in the car on our way to the happiest place on earth.

We parked at the Disneyland Hotel parking and at 8:15 we were in line for a photo with Goofy, the first photo of today. We get the photo package and the digital copy for free with our PhotoPass+. The breakfast buffet is really good and it’s also not so crowded. The food is also themed to a goofy style with for example a peanut butter jelly pizza, upside down cakes and more. And besides food there were also characters we made photos together with Chip, Dale, Pluto, Aladdin and the Fairy Godmother.


At 9:45 we left for Disneyland because we wanted more photos! But before it was time for photos we did some space traveling with Star Tours and grabbed a Fastpass at Space Mountain.

The first photos we made were at Pixie Hollow with Tink in her winter clothing and from there we went for some Disney princesses at the royal walk in Fantasyland.

From there we walked to Rapunzel at the Tangled photo location were we waited for about 45 minutes for a photo. From there we walked through Frontierland where we found the fabulous five in the Halloween outfit. Too bad that there was no photopass photographers on this spot.


From there we walked over central plaza to take some additional photos with with the enormous castle in the background. And than it was time for our Space Mountain Fastpass, the onride photo is also included in our photopass+ and that was the last photo in Disneyland.


It was about 15:00 when we hopped to Disney’s California Adventure. First thing to do was getting photos made on our way to the Tower of Terror. We first walked in the standby entrance but after looking in the Mobile Magic app we decided to grab a fastpass instead since the return time was about the same and so we could make some other photos in the meantime. After we made some photos we grabbed a coffee at the Starbucks in the park and then it started to rain. The first rain of our vacation on the last full day.

So we walked through the rain to see the Aladdin Musical, the genie was this time even better he had some great one-liners and jokes. After the show our fastpass time slot for the Tower of Terror was passed but we could still get into the fastpass line. We loaded the photo on our photopass and we walked through the park to have a last look on Cars Land and checkout the wait time at the California Screamin’, the wait was only 15 minutes so we decided to ride this coaster once again. The last ride of this vacation.

We left the park after a couple more photos for our photopass+ and went to the Irvine Spectrum mall about 20 minutes south on the I5. It’s a nice looking mall but there was not much going on, probably because it was a thursday evening. We got our diner at Dave & Busters and afterwards we drove back to our hotel for the last night on the west coast.

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