Well…. Day two at the Grand Californian (and day one at the park) has been a pretty mixed bag.
I’ve gotta be honest about the room…. I’ve stayed in $250 - $300 a night rooms that were much nicer than this (we have a theme park view room). There is paint flaking pretty badly in the bathroom on both the door, and frame. The carpet has several areas that are thread bare with a lot of loose thread. The humidity is strangely high. So much so that when we turn on the heat, the sliding glass door, mirrors, and TV literally fog up. And best of all, there was a giant (we’re talking the circumference of a dime) waterlogged, half smoked joint on our balcony. Not exactly what I wanted my two year old to pick up.
We had dinner at the Craftsman Grill. My wife and I both agreed that the burger and fries were the best we’d ever had. Delicious! Granted, it was $75 for two cheeseburgers and a kids chicken fingers so I would have been pretty disappointed if it wasn’t, lol. What wasn’t acceptable for a place charging $25 for a cheeseburger was the fact that both of their ice machines are broken (both days we’ve been here so far) and their fountain soda machine is out of more than half of the flavors.
Let’s be honest though…. The reason most of us pay to stay at the Grand is the convenient location, and early entrance to
Disneyland. Well, that’s been a pretty mixed bag too. I can’t deny the location is great. But the Early Entrance is a TOTAL JOKE!!!
We were literally the very first people in line to enter the park (wife took pictures). Since we have a two year old, we went straight to Fantasyland to ride Peter Pan. No go, it was closed. No worries. We went to Alice in Wonderland. Closed. Ok…. We went to Casey Jr. Circus Train. Closed. Ok, this is getting ridiculous. We asked if anything was actually open because the app wasn’t updating. We were told Mr. Toad was open, so we went there. CLOSED. At this point we relegated ourselves to riding Dumbo since it was one of the only rides open. Since nothing was open, all of the early entrance people in fantasyland were funneled there, so there was a ten minute wait. We then were able to just squeak out Pinocchio with just a few minutes left of early entrance, for a grand total of TWO rides. With only a few minutes left of early entrance, we stopped by Peter Pan again and were told by the cast member that there was no estimated time for when it would open, so we got into the 30 minute line for Snow White. Within 5 minutes of getting into the Snow White line they opened up Peter Pan, just in time for the regular opening.
All in all, I can’t say I’ll ever make the mistake of paying for the Grand Californian again. The location is the only perk I see, and that’s just not worth the cost of the hotel. I’d rather just stay at a nice, good neighbor hotel and use the four figure savings to extend our trip next time.
Hopefully I’ll have some better things to write about over our next few days here. Bleh.