Sarah B in SD
04-17-2008, 04:08 PM
Travel dates:April 12 -13
Travel method:Car
Resort: Disneyland
Accommodations:Paradise Pier
Ages Represented in Group: Grown-ups 28-35
Disney Resort Experience Represented in Group: VERY Experienced
Comments:Our first Mouseadventure
Cast of characters: Team BiggHamm Sarah(me), Jason (my hubbie) Kelley & Eric P.
This is from my blog:
Mouseadventure
Spring 2008 Recap
Saturday April 12th we met up with Kelley & Eric Parham, hopped in their Mazda 3 and headed up to Anaheim, our first stop was Disney’s Character Warehouse, a Disneyland Outlet, for a little discount shopping, I actually got a beautiful 50th Anniversary watch, stainless steel originally priced at $125, for $29.99, not bad!
We checked into the Paradise Pier Hotel, which is on Disney Property, and was also the location of Mouseadventure, well at least the start/finish point. We were happy with our room, we had a nice view of DCA, and once the sun went down, the lights looked so pretty. Saturday brought temps that hit 100 degrees, did I mention that I do not do well in the heat? We settled into our digs, then split up to explore the hotel a little, the boys went over to the Disneyland Hotel and Downtown Disney, Kelley & I were happy to do a little shopping and have a Pina Colava, a delicious Pina Colada with Rasberry puree at the Surfside Lounge.
We met back up with the guys for our 5:30 dinner reservations at the PCH grill, Eric and Jason had pizza, Kelley and I had burgers. Kelley and I went back to the room, took our Tylenol PM’s and got ready for an early night; we had a huge day ahead of us. Of course the guys did more exploring and went up on the deck to watch the fireworks; they pipe the music in and everything.
The phone rang at 6am, energetic band music was pumped into my ear and so began our day. We had agreed to order room service for breakfast, we ordered before bed so at about 6:20 our delicious breakfast arrived, we knew we needed to fuel up, so this worked out great. We packed our belongings, got dressed, filled our camelbacks and we were off.
Team BiggHamm (the BIGGarts and the parHAMs) dressed in matching shirts featuring Hammy from Toy Story and oinking pig hats went downstairs to join 700 other people to begin Mouseadventure. We checked in, received our answer sheets, lanyards, pins and name tags, we moved down the hall to have our team photo taken then found spots in the gigantic ballroom.
It was really exciting, we got to meet lots of other teams and seeing all the great T-shirts and clever plays on words was so fun. The Bell rang and Mouseadventure was on, our first task was to complete a trivia game, it was 100 questions and it was pretty challenging it was very fast paced, we were then instructed to turn in our answer sheet in exchange for our actual quests.
Binder in hand team BiggHamm headed out the back of the hotel, we decided to take the Monorail into Tommorowland, as 3 of the quests were based there. We also had alphabet pictures taken from locations throughout the park that we needed to identify. We were immediately hit with the realization that this was much harder than we had imagined, and our initial goal of completing all quests was altered to “well, if we don’t finish last…”
In heat hitting 102 degrees, wearing pig hats and brains frying from the sheer difficulty and intricacy of the quests, we continued to race around the park. We hit a stride and pace and were actually figuring things out, but at about 2:30, one hour before the turn in deadline, we started to wilt, hot, tired, hungry and thirsty. After being turned away from Tom Sawyers Island, it was closed, we tried our hands at the Frontierland quest, we were just unable to finish it. We found a shady spot, hypothesized at as many answers we could and at about 3:15 we turned in our answer sheets, feeling tired and astonished at the sheer difficulty of the Mouseadventure.
We rode Splash Mountain to cool off then slowly made our way back to the ballroom. Everyone looked as tired as we did, and it was much quieter than it had been in the morning. The top 3 teams in each division were announced, obviously not us, along with the t-shirt contest winners, raffle prizes and team mascot competition, in which we made it to the finals, the pig hats were surprisingly popular.
We pulled out of the Paradise Pier Hotel, chatting excitedly about what we could do better next time and how we could manage our time better. We were unanimous about giving it another shot, we all felt we worked well together and each brought our own strengths to the team, and we never really melted down at any point during the day. We were so anxious to know how we placed and how many points we ended up earning, but we would have to wait until they were announced later in the week.
Here I sit, Thursday morning, the results were announced last night, we came in 37th, we are ecstatic! This being our first Mouseadventure, to come in 37th out of 139 teams feels like a huge victory to us, our final score:
Quests: 350/585 Trivia 72/100 Total 422/685
To put that into perspective, Teams 1-3 received 570, 532 and 531.
We are more determined than ever to compete again and improve on our ranking. It was a great learning experience, we were challenged and made some great memories that we will always cherish.
Travel method:Car
Resort: Disneyland
Accommodations:Paradise Pier
Ages Represented in Group: Grown-ups 28-35
Disney Resort Experience Represented in Group: VERY Experienced
Comments:Our first Mouseadventure
Cast of characters: Team BiggHamm Sarah(me), Jason (my hubbie) Kelley & Eric P.
This is from my blog:
Mouseadventure
Spring 2008 Recap
Saturday April 12th we met up with Kelley & Eric Parham, hopped in their Mazda 3 and headed up to Anaheim, our first stop was Disney’s Character Warehouse, a Disneyland Outlet, for a little discount shopping, I actually got a beautiful 50th Anniversary watch, stainless steel originally priced at $125, for $29.99, not bad!
We checked into the Paradise Pier Hotel, which is on Disney Property, and was also the location of Mouseadventure, well at least the start/finish point. We were happy with our room, we had a nice view of DCA, and once the sun went down, the lights looked so pretty. Saturday brought temps that hit 100 degrees, did I mention that I do not do well in the heat? We settled into our digs, then split up to explore the hotel a little, the boys went over to the Disneyland Hotel and Downtown Disney, Kelley & I were happy to do a little shopping and have a Pina Colava, a delicious Pina Colada with Rasberry puree at the Surfside Lounge.
We met back up with the guys for our 5:30 dinner reservations at the PCH grill, Eric and Jason had pizza, Kelley and I had burgers. Kelley and I went back to the room, took our Tylenol PM’s and got ready for an early night; we had a huge day ahead of us. Of course the guys did more exploring and went up on the deck to watch the fireworks; they pipe the music in and everything.
The phone rang at 6am, energetic band music was pumped into my ear and so began our day. We had agreed to order room service for breakfast, we ordered before bed so at about 6:20 our delicious breakfast arrived, we knew we needed to fuel up, so this worked out great. We packed our belongings, got dressed, filled our camelbacks and we were off.
Team BiggHamm (the BIGGarts and the parHAMs) dressed in matching shirts featuring Hammy from Toy Story and oinking pig hats went downstairs to join 700 other people to begin Mouseadventure. We checked in, received our answer sheets, lanyards, pins and name tags, we moved down the hall to have our team photo taken then found spots in the gigantic ballroom.
It was really exciting, we got to meet lots of other teams and seeing all the great T-shirts and clever plays on words was so fun. The Bell rang and Mouseadventure was on, our first task was to complete a trivia game, it was 100 questions and it was pretty challenging it was very fast paced, we were then instructed to turn in our answer sheet in exchange for our actual quests.
Binder in hand team BiggHamm headed out the back of the hotel, we decided to take the Monorail into Tommorowland, as 3 of the quests were based there. We also had alphabet pictures taken from locations throughout the park that we needed to identify. We were immediately hit with the realization that this was much harder than we had imagined, and our initial goal of completing all quests was altered to “well, if we don’t finish last…”
In heat hitting 102 degrees, wearing pig hats and brains frying from the sheer difficulty and intricacy of the quests, we continued to race around the park. We hit a stride and pace and were actually figuring things out, but at about 2:30, one hour before the turn in deadline, we started to wilt, hot, tired, hungry and thirsty. After being turned away from Tom Sawyers Island, it was closed, we tried our hands at the Frontierland quest, we were just unable to finish it. We found a shady spot, hypothesized at as many answers we could and at about 3:15 we turned in our answer sheets, feeling tired and astonished at the sheer difficulty of the Mouseadventure.
We rode Splash Mountain to cool off then slowly made our way back to the ballroom. Everyone looked as tired as we did, and it was much quieter than it had been in the morning. The top 3 teams in each division were announced, obviously not us, along with the t-shirt contest winners, raffle prizes and team mascot competition, in which we made it to the finals, the pig hats were surprisingly popular.
We pulled out of the Paradise Pier Hotel, chatting excitedly about what we could do better next time and how we could manage our time better. We were unanimous about giving it another shot, we all felt we worked well together and each brought our own strengths to the team, and we never really melted down at any point during the day. We were so anxious to know how we placed and how many points we ended up earning, but we would have to wait until they were announced later in the week.
Here I sit, Thursday morning, the results were announced last night, we came in 37th, we are ecstatic! This being our first Mouseadventure, to come in 37th out of 139 teams feels like a huge victory to us, our final score:
Quests: 350/585 Trivia 72/100 Total 422/685
To put that into perspective, Teams 1-3 received 570, 532 and 531.
We are more determined than ever to compete again and improve on our ranking. It was a great learning experience, we were challenged and made some great memories that we will always cherish.