Halloween Theme Parks

Remember when I said I wanted to visit Disneyland over Halloween? Well, we did it. For the kids' October break this year, we headed to California. We hit up Universal Studios first, and then a couple days at Disneyland followed.

Universal Studios

It's been years since I've visited Universal Studios, so we decided to add this as our first stop. We drove straight there and hung out at the CityWalk area after we arrived. It was a fun area.

There was a candy shop full of TikTok famous candy that the kids liked.


We stayed at BLVD Hotel, which is a more budget friendly option but still walkable location. Thankfully, there is a Universal Studios tram that you can take to drive you up the large hill to enter the Universal Studios area. The stop is on Universal Hollywood Dr just east of Lankershim Blvd.


They drop you off right at the entrance of Universal Studios. 

We had one day planned here, so we arrived at opening and headed straight back to the Harry Potter area.

It was really cool.
The ride lines everywhere weren't bad at all. Our longest wait was at Bowser's Challenge in the new Super Mario World.
The park has limited hours (usually 10-7) but that's enough time to hit pretty much everything. 
They had some carnival games and I ended up winning this huge koala that the kids loved.
 

Disneyland

After Universal, we relocated down to Anaheim to hit up Disney. 

We again stayed at The Anaheim Hotel.
This trip made me realize that it's not just Mabel's age that interferes with a good time at Disneyland. She gets ride anxiety and didn't enjoy most of what the park has to offer. We still made the best of it, but I had to head back to the hotel with her, or skip a few rides with her. It's hard to plan the perfect trip when you have different tastes in "fun," but we still managed to make the most of it. She enjoyed our "dates" of her and I doing our own thing a few times.
But I was able to do a couple big kid rides too.

Overall it was a fun trip, but I might wait awhile to head there again.
 

 

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