Day 6 [part 1]: OFFICIALLY IN TOKYOOOOO!!!!! Sheraton Grand Tokyo Bay Hotel, Disneyland Hotel, DISNEYSEA!
And FINALLY!!!! 4:55 am local time, and we have arrived in TOKYO!!!! This was the city that all of us were most excited for. Tokyo Disney Resort is so highly rated, by everyone and especially Glendon haha. Plus the city itself is so exciting. Fast paced, polite, foreign, modern, something new new new for all of us! (Minus Glendon, but he’s in LOVE with Tokyo.) Okay! So previously, we had ordered a pocket WiFi and we just had to pick it up at the airport. This is so that we could easily connect to the internet while we’re in Tokyo. I can’t remember how much it was and for how many gb… I don’t think it was too expensive (cheaper than a phone plan) and we decided on.. something like maybe 5gb? Maybe it was 3gb. Or maybe less. Honestly I can’t remember, but whatever we decided on, we chose it because cost wise it made most sense and seemed adequate for the 10 days we’re there. Mostly we wanted it so that we could pull up maps, use uber, and yes, use social media haha. Pick up was very easy.
(Side note: The stinky dreadlocks guy pulled out his guitar in the middle of the airport in the pick up area and started busking. Is busking legal in Tokyo? I really don’t know! Either way he started to do a performance. And the entire time it looked like he kept trying to make eye contact with us. We’re sorry, but we don’t want you to crash our Tokyo plans, Mr. Stinky Man.)
So! From the airport we called an Uber to take us to our destination: Sheraton Grand Tokyo Bay Hotel. It’s a beautiful Sheraton that is basically right at the Tokyo Disney Resort. It’s along the monorail line and right on Tokyo Bay. It was around 6-7am by this time, and our plan was to check in for the morning, and check out by the late check out time. This way we could nap since we hardly slept on the flight in, then grab all our stuff and make our transfer over to the Disneyland Hotel. Then spend our day and evening at Ikspirai (their version of Downtown Disney).
Okay, if we weren’t obsessed with staying on actual Disney property for our extra 15 minutes of entry, we would have been okay to stay at the Sheraton. It’s a beautiful location, right on the Bay! Anyways, we had a couple hours of sleep, woke up, and decided we couldn’t wait. We didn’t want to go to Ikspirai… WE WANTED TO GO TO THE PARKS!!!! LET’S GO TO TOKYO DISNEY!!!! But first we had to transfer all our luggage over to the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel. There is a Resort Liner bus at the hotel to take you to the monorail line. (Honestly it’s about the same amount of time to wait for the next bus as it is to walk to the monorail station. About 5-7 minutes haha. But we wanted to see the bus.)
HERE WE GO! Disney Resort Cruiser
(So cute. The details. THE DETAILS. ALL THE MICKEY EVERYTHING! SO CUTE)
How the windows look from the inside. AND THE SEATS
UHH, PERFECT
The hand holds!
Needless to say, Jenna and I squealed when we got on. WE SQUEALED ABOUT A BUS. But seriously though. So cute. I want it all. I never thought I could want to own a bus. (2 minute bus ride later, we’re at the monorail station)
Here is a map of the Monorail line
So right now, we are at Bayside Station (the green area) and you can see that it lists all the Tokyo Disney Resort Official Hotels. Included are Sunroute Plaza Tokyo, Tokyo Bay Maihama Hotel, Tokyo Bay Maihama Hotel Club Resort, Hilton Tokyo Bay, Hotel Okra Tokyo Bay, and Sheraton Grand Tokyo Bay Hotel. They’re all along the Tokyo Bay and all look like great places to stay, and each of them will have a bus that will take you to the monorail line. The actual “on property” hotels are the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel, Tokyo DisneySea Hotel MiraCosta, Disney Ambassador Hotel, and their newest one Tokyo Disney Celebration Hotel. Ambassador and Celebration would be their moderate resorts, and Disneyland Hotel and MiraCosta their Deluxe. I don’t think they have any “value” resorts.
Small side note: our hotel stays on property at Disney in Tokyo would have cost us a LOT of money. We had 3 nights at the front half of our Disney time at Tokyo Disneyland Hotel, but we booked these three nights with DVC. Then, for our second half of our time in Disney, we booked discounted SPG rates at the Sheraton Grand Tokyo Bay Hotel for 2 nights, and then splurged for a night at Hotel MiraCosta. There’s basically only ONE room style available at Hotel MiraCosta that fits 4 adults. (It seems they don’t have queen sized beds in Japan, all double sized! So rooms that are available for 4 adults would either have to have 4 double beds, or be like this one which had 2 double beds, a cot and a pull out.) Otherwise we would have had to book a super extravagant room that would have been a million times over budget. Glendon had to call in on booking day to Hotel MiraCosta to book this room (the website wouldn’t take our Canadian Credit Card, so it had to be called in) and was on the line for 3 hours while they had a translator help him out. Good thing he originally had the room in a booking phase on the website because all the other ones got booked up while he was on the phone. Literally we got the LAST ONE. This one night at one of the cheapest rooms was still about $700-$800 Canadian. To put into perspective, our 3 bookings with Sheraton Grand total was less than one night at the Hotel MiraCosta haha. But we felt we NEEDED to experience it.
Anyways! The monorail line: There are only 4 stops. From the Bayside Station, the next stop is Tokyo DisneySea Station (Hotel MiraCosta at this station), then Resort Gateway Station (here is Ikspirai, walkway to Disney Ambassador Hotel, and the transfer to the main train station JR Maihama Staion that connects you back to the city), and lastly Tokyo Disneyland Station (also where Tokyo Disneyland Hotel is).
So cute!!! Map and brochure holder
Resort line pricing sign
Side note: there is a Japanese law that the monorail line, even though it’s a Disney line, has to be ticketed and passengers must buy a ticket to use it. Something about because you are transporting passengers to more than just one location (4 stops on the line) or something like that. However, when you check into Disney hotel, they give you a monorail pass per person for length of stay. But since we were coming from the Sheraton, we just had to buy a day pass to get us over to Tokyo Disneyland Hotel. I do believe you can buy a multi-day pass from the machines. 260 yen is about $3 Canadian for the single pass.
Ticket machine! Ahh, looks like you can get day passes, single tickets, 11 tickets… on machine is a Frozen pass
This machine has a cute Duffy and Shellie May one (sorry blurry photo)
This is what a single pass looks like
Standing on platform waiting for train!
(Tokyo DisneySea was celebrating its 15 year anniversary!)
The monorail is coming! AND IT’S CUTE
MORE MICKEY SHAPED HAND HOLDS
Official first “ride” selfie in Japan: we’re on the monorail! (With all our luggage)
AND HERE WE ARE! TOKYO DISNEYLAND HOTEL!!!
Walking towards the entrance. Look at the ground
Here are our day passes for the monorail (they don’t make day passes longer than 3 days, so our 3 night 4 day stay was split into two 2-day passes each)
We had our park passes in our email, but they needed a physical printed out copy for us to redeem them. The hotel staff literally went around and asked everyone who could be asked if there was a wireless printer around anymore. Literally it was like the entire staff were helping us by going to find us a wireless printer. AND THEY CAME BACK WITH ONE!
Here are our tickets getting printed
Because the parks get really busy really fast, there isn’t really such a thing as park hopper. When you buy multi-day passes, for the first couple days of your trip you have to pick which park you want to visit and you can’t park hop to the other park after you enter the gates of the one park. After the two days your ticket becomes open and you can visit either park. It sounds weird at first but you’d understand when you visit and the crowds are ENORMOUS.
Our rooms weren’t ready yet but they took our luggage and we couldn’t wait. OFF TO DISNEYSEA WE GO! (Truthfully, since we were staying at the Disneyland Hotel, it would have made more sense for us to spend the first day at Disneyland since we didn’t have to waste time on the monorail and just walk to Disneyland… but we were too excited to see something different, so we voted and DisneySea won.)
Back on the Monorail, and this one is decked out in Frozen walls!
They LOVE the snowgies here!
HERE WE GO!
HERE WE ARE!!! We’re IN!!!!
So much excitement! Plus the 15 year anniversary celebration was on, called Year of Wishes
Walking more into the park. That’s the Hotel MiraCosta. It’s actually IN Tokyo DisneySea
(They have their own park entrance that is right in the park itself.)
More wanderings! Tower of Terror in the background
We were super excited and a little bit overwhelmed. But mostly we were REALLY HUNGRY as we hadn’t eaten yet and it’s now entering afternoon. As much as we wanted to explore and take all the photos (notice that I hardly had any photos so far even though I was dead with excitement??) we really needed food. Our plan was to go to Vulcania for some quick service food.
I just love seeing pretend versions of real food haha
This is what I had. I can’t remember what it is, but it looks like shrimp and plain rice
And this is what Glendon got. (I don’t care what it is, it comes with a Mickey shaped carrot)
Truthfully, the food was tasty, but we all found that it was less-than-warm. It was kind of a cold day, and we wanted piping hot food. Some parts were hot, but most of it was definitely less-than-warm. But it was tasty and we still ate all of it. Plus… mostly we were extremely excited to get on with our day!!!
Up next… walking around DisneySea!
Oops, if you follow along by contents, I forgot to post my Shanghai Recap.